Gone Medieval - Rise of Northumbria

Episode Date: April 2, 2024

In a time of in-fighting and tribal warfare, what did it take to form the politically dominant, culturally rich and geographically vast kingdoms that led to the creation of England?This month, over four episodes of Gone Medieval, we explore the rise and fall of the key kingdoms of the Heptarchy: Northumbria, Mercia, and Wessex, and the formation of an Anglo-Saxon government, the Witan.This week Dr. Eleanor Janega is joined by historian, archaeologist and author Max Adams to delve into the story of the kingdom of Northumbria.This episode was edited and mixed by Ella Blaxill and produced by Rob Weinberg.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code MEDIEVAL - sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. I'm Dr. Eleanor Yonaga and this month on Gone Medieval from History Hit over the course of four episodes

my co-host Matt Lewis and I will be taking a closer look at the heptarchy. It was a period rich in culture, religion, diplomacy and a lot of warfare eventually leading to the creation of England. Of course, if we're going to do that It's a good idea to first explain what the heptarchy was.

The heptarchy is our name for the seven petty kingdoms of Britain, which sprung up following the Roman retreat from the island. In this case, the hept comes from the Greek hepta, meaning seven. The kingdoms in question were East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Mercia, Northumbria, Sussex, and Wessex. These all existed until the 8th century when they were amalgamated into the full. four kingdoms of Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, and Wessex. Now, that's a nice, clean-cut way of looking at things. But as we'll see over the next few episodes, the actual history of Britain in this period is usually a lot more murky, to put it mildly.

There's a reason for this. We don't have brilliant records for the early medieval period for most of Europe, let alone a rainy island far from the imperial cores of the Mediterranean. Especially when you consider that 1,500 years, years is a really, really long time to keep any receipts hanging around. In a world lit by fire, documents burn regularly. Royal courts, which are parapetetic, which means that they move around a lot to prove who's the boss, have a hard time keeping documents because, well, we're all your phone bills from the last

time you moved. This lack of sources is what led to scholars referring to the early middle period as the Dark Ages. Dark here is supposed to be occluded or difficult to see. We've largely stopped using this as a term because of the misinterpretation of it as meaning bad or backwards, which, as you're going to see over the course of this month, they were anything but. To start us off today, we'll be looking at Northumbria, to show you what a land with a powerful ruler, flourishing culture, and strong identity could achieve,

and how that identity was partially constructed by religious writers who had a lot to gain from portraying it that way. The Northumbrian kingdom at its most powerful stretched from the banks of Scotland's largest estuary, the Firth, to the River Humber. Its epicenter was the castle of Bamborough, and it was home to rulers like the legendary Oswald, the first English king to die a Christian martyr. Today I'm joined by the brilliant Max Adams, author and archaeologist, who's going to tell us how Northumbria rose to power, and more particularly how we know. Even more helpfully, Max has created a map which we will link to in the show notes that can help listeners follow along with the geography of the heptarchy more generally. Max, I suppose the first thing to do is welcome you on to Gone Medieval. Thanks so much for being here. That's your pleasure.

And now I'm really excited to have you on here. First of all, to talk about Northumbria, which I'm a huge Northumbria partisan to the point that I have difficulty saying Northumberland. I constantly refer to it as Northumbria still. That's fine. But before we get into the Northumbria details, can we talk a little bit about early medieval Britain? You know, when we're talking about this, we're sort of 200 years or so since the Roman withdrawal from the island. What does Britain, in air quotes, sort of look like at this point? I suppose the origins of the early medieval kingdoms take us back to about 550.

Between the end of Rome, say, 410 and 550 really is a dart. period in the sense that it is deeply obscure. Bede, the great historian of the early medieval, covers that period in a few lines. This is a man who loves the detail, who talks voluminously about his own period, but he has very little to say, and what he does have to say is borrowed from dodgy sources. So that's blank. We get to about 550 and a few things we can say. One is that we think possibly relatively recently there's been a population decline. We don't know how sudden. We know it's very substantial. We can possibly say that at the end of the Roman Empire, the population of Britain is maybe three and a half million. It could be more than that. Estimates as they change tend to go up

rather than down about population. But we do know that there's a great plague in the middle of the sixth century, the so-called Justinian plague. It reaches Britain. It appears to be very serious. We also know that there's a very serious plague about 130 years after that,

which Bede refers to in the 660s. So certainly by Bede's time, the population of Britain may have shrunk to a million maybe less. We now know that they're definitively, I'm glad to say, in the last two or three years that there is immigration into Britain from the near continent, Scandinavia, Friesia, Germany.

That has been going on since before the Iron Age, so it's nothing new, and it carried on after the early medieval. So there's nothing exceptional about it. It doesn't appear to involve an invasion or conquest, but a substantial proportion of people living along the East Coast by about 600 probably have genetic markers for the continent. They are moving into a landscape that is populated by people who still speak, well, maybe a bit of Latin, certainly Britonic, which is the forerunner of Welsh. The landscape is a little bit more wooded than it was at the end of the Roman Empire, but by no means reforested.

We know that's not true now. What we do know is that the land is being managed still, but much less intensively. And in fact, the word we use is extensive management rather than intensive management. By that we mean people are probably not farming animals for meat and secondary products, dairy and the surplus things you get from animals, but are grazing animals at a much less intense level over a broader period. And the best way to describe the landscape is that it's a mosaic. It's a patchwork of fields and woodlands, but primarily, I suspect, a land use that we would call wood pasture, which is, you almost don't see in this country at all anymore. You'd have to go to Spain and Portugal to see wood pasture as a proper management technique. That's to say that there are quite a lot of trees, and animals are living among those trees and grazing. That's a very fragile landscape, because you raise the numbers of livestock in that landscape and trees won't regenerate.

Wood pasture devolves to pasture with trees, devolves to pasture with no trees, which is the landscape we eventually end up with. So that's the picture, I suppose. We don't have any functioning towns that anybody would recognize. Roman London is barely occupied, and if it is, we don't really know the nature of it. The great cities, York, Lincoln, Chester, not abandoned, but we think they're becoming centres of a sort of lordship. And it used to be thought when we excavated in Roman towns in Britain, that this extraordinary layer of very dark earth that covers the late Roman deposits and piles of animal bones and bits of recycled junk scrap metal were evidence of, this is looking from the Roman period forward, evidence of failure. Now, I'm doubtful that we should

use the word failure. Those things, dark earth can be read in one sense as abandonment. In another sense, it can be read as a form of lordship in which what we might call big men, people with a bit of muscle at hand and power, may be thinking of themselves as the inheritors of, as it were, state control, are using those Roman towns as places to concentrate cattle. That dark earth is manure. It's garden soil. It's not abandonment. Soil doesn't accumulate because people have abandoned the place. It accumulates because people are busy doing things. And if you imagine a Lord setting up shop in a partially ruined city, only partially. There are plenty of standing buildings, setting up camp, as it were, and requiring the people who live within the local area to bring their

cattle in, not just as a sort of tributary form of tax, but to leave their dung in his streets so he can garden them. They understand fertility, and they know manure is good. So that explains the dark earth. The cattle bones are explained by the fact that they've got cattle and they're killing those cattle and using them to have feasts with which to reward their followers for their loyalty. The animal bone is not evidence of abandonment either, but of lordship. And the same goes for recital metalwork. All evidence of emerging lordship. And this, I think, is the absolute key to understanding how the early medieval world

comes out of the late Roman world. I think that there is this tendency. There's a kind of snobbery of the modern period to say, well, if you don't have cities, And if you aren't behaving in this particular way that involves a long-distance international trade of finished products, then somehow you failed as a society. Whereas, I'm not really sure that it's better for the average individual for, you know, some guy in Rome to be calling all the shots. You know, is there necessarily a problem with a local person running cattle instead of bringing in amphorae from Tunisia or something like that? And it's also, as you quite rightly pointed out, not proof that there is. isn't some form of interconnection with the rest of the continent because we know genetically that

there's people coming and going all the time. So it's just a different way of living on the island that isn't necessarily worse in any way, shape or form. Yeah, I mean, the interaction continues. Certainly in the West, communities are still trading with the Far Empire, with Byzantium, Constantinople and with Alexandria. We've got plenty of evidence of that now all the way along the Irish Sea and the Bristol Channel. What I think we do have, to understand is that there is something of a major political crisis in the fifth century. We know vanishingly little about it, but I'm beginning to feel confident to say this, that there is a pro-Roman party, and ironically, these are some of the people in the west half of

Britain who were very anti-Roman rule, and in the east, the area that was very much Romanized, there seems to be some sort of anti-Roman sentiment, such that. that people decide to stop speaking Latin as a political act. We know language is used as political agency. It is in the 21st century and it was in the 5th. I think also a rejection of Roman Christianity happens at the same time in the East, whilst those things are reinforced in the West. In other words, the people of what we would now call Wales and the Southwest,

who had been very, very anti-the-Roman experiment, suddenly become what Dark Age archaeologists call ultra-Roman. They're terrifically enthusiastic about Latin and about Christianity, and we find evidence of that in their monuments. Whereas in the East, there seems to be an anti-Roman sentiment. And part of that may be, and this is a major ongoing debating area, it may be that people are adopting the lingua franca of the North Sea, which is a Germanic language,

not just because they're being dominated by incomers who speak it, but because they make a conscious choice to identify with something that is very much not Roman. Now, that's a background to the question about whether Roman Britain has failed or how we want to characterize it. I think those of us who study the early medieval now try not to couch it in terms of failure, but as you quite rightly say, in terms of a different character of power and society. and for me the real key here is to take the one thread that runs continuously from the late Roman period into the early medieval. And that's this concept of territorial lordship.

How is the power of lordship expressed on the land? And when we start looking at the evolution of the early medieval world in those terms, we find something really extraordinary happening, which is that territorial control of the big people, the powerful people, seems to shrink spatially, and yet the structures through which power has been exercised, which is, how do you know where something ends and something else starts, doesn't seem to change very much. So we suspect more and more that the places that you can point to, the areas you can point to and say, this is a unit of land, and in the Roman period it would have been called one name and in the early medieval another, but essentially it's the same piece of land. You can name it,

And that piece of land seems to be coherent, probably from the late Bronze Age, so well, well before the Roman period, right through into the time when we actually begin to see those edges and boundaries and names of places emerge. As it happens, one of the absolutely key places we see that process is early medieval Northumbria because some of those names and descriptions of those places survive into the period of written history. and we strongly suspect that they have not just pre-Anglo-Saxon, but pre-Roman origins in a landscape of territorial lordship. And that's an amazing revelation for the last, well, 20 years it's coming into sharp focus, but it has been suspected certainly in Northumbria for a long time. So from there, what are the sources that we're looking at? Because you repeatedly mentioned, of course, the fact that this is here, we know what we sometimes call the Dark Ages or the early medieval period. And of course, we use the term dark here to mean occluded or we don't have sources.

We can't see it. It doesn't mean bad. It's not that we lack sources because everyone was stupid. You know, we lack sources because it's a very long time ago and you have a lot of changes and shifts in power. So what are the sources that you're working with to uncover this? You know, you've already mentioned archaeological sources, like analyzing even the soil in towns. How else do you find out about Northumbria during this period?

Well, I suppose let me start by saying that the sources that we used to rely on, purely historical sources, have now been hugely enhanced by a whole raft of new sources. Some of the materials, some of them really sources of analysis. So starting at the easy stuff, we have a culture in this country that grudgingly accepts that people go around the countryside with metal detectors looking for bits of metal and hoping to find something A, interesting and B, valuable. That system was a source of great conflict with archaeologists for a long time, and then a scheme called the Portable Antiquities Scheme was introduced, I think very enlightened. I mean, all archaeologists are very uncomfortable about this, but the fact is that responsible metal detectorists who are in the vast majority report their finds. And over the last 20 or 30 years, they have been turning up things that were lost accidentally. That's a real key because historical sources are not. accidental except in their survival.

Coins, particularly early medieval coins, are incredibly valuable sources of information about power, about trade, about settlement, about movement, about silver content, about the state of the economy. So, for example, in Northumbria, and by Northumbria, I mean anywhere from the river forth in Scotland down to really even beyond the Humber in Lincolnshire, There is a Northumberian king named Aldfrith, interesting man, half Irish, highly literate, highly intellectual, and he is a king during the time when Beed is alive. Beed is not a particular fan, and so we don't know much about Aldfrith, except he doesn't fight wars, really. But we do now have 34 coins, known as Shatters, bearing his portrait and name, distributed from Northumbrian.

right down to the south coast. Well, there's one on the south coast. There are a couple in the London area, a couple in Kent, a few in Lincolnshire. The vast majority of them are from East Yorkshire. And we do, of course, have to bear in mind that distributions of fines are also distributions of the people looking for them. Nevertheless, there is a concentration of these coins in Eastern Yorkshire. Now, 34 coins is not many coins to make big statements about anything, really, except that. Numismatists are really clever people. Each coin has two sides. If all the coins of a king have the same two sides, or two dyes per coin, you place a blank in between them and you hammer them together very hard, and dyes wear out. So a very large coinage in quantity will get through a lot of

dyes. A tiny coinage, let's say only 34 coins ever minted, both sides are going to be the same design. Newmismuses have worked out from these 34 coins that during the reign of King Aldfrith, which is 685 to 705, more than 2 million of these coins are minted. Okay, so 34 coins give us a staggering amount of information about what's going on. So, Aldrith, this non-king, as far as Bede is concerned, is controlling a really substantial economy. That's 2 million silver coin, and these are high-quality silver, very important. So going back to sources, we have to start with Bede, who was the overwhelmingly greatest scholar of the early medieval period, not just in Britain and Europe, widely respected across Europe.

He wrote many, many works of great interest to us. His knowledge of the world was profound. For example, here's an early medieval monk who never stirs far from his monastery in Jarrow on the muddy banks of the River Time, but he knows the earth. is a sphere. He knows how the tides are caused by the moon. He knows all sorts of interesting stuff. And he writes this great history of the English church and people, which is a providential history. It is not designed as dispassionate history. It's designed to show how, through accepting God's will, the good people came to this promised land. By good people, he means the Anglo-Saxons, came to this promised land where the perfidious Britons had cast away the church.

and don't deserve God's favor, but the Anglo-Saxon kings, the good Anglo-Saxon kings, found favor with God and expanded their kingdom accordingly. He's able to explain the rise of Northumbria as the greatest kingdom because it has good kings. And who's to doubt, Bede? Bid dies in 735. His history is complete in 731. So for the hundred and odd years before that time, we have quite a good knowledge through Bede of the politics, especially church politics. of Northumbria. So Bede is paramount. He tells us bits about other kingdoms, very little about Mercia, quite a lot about Kent, because he has correspondence there. He has copies of letters

that are written by popes to English kings. So he's a well-informed man, and he's such a good historian that he does tell us what his sources are and when he's using anecdote or hearsay or eyewitness. From that point of view, he's a brilliant historian, partisan and biased as he is. So, Bede is one source, and from Bede, we learn all sorts of things about the landscape. We learn that Bede, for example, knows the British names of things. So we suspect Bede is bilingual, or trilingual, because he has Anglo-Saxon and Latin as well. Oh, probably a bit of Greek. He's a serious scholar.

We also know that Bede must have access to a huge library of books. That tells you something about the interconnectedness of Northumbria and of the economy. Well, that speaks to the coins, and the coins speak to the. that. Archaeology, very difficult for early medieval Northumbra. If we think of a landscape of what we might call a squirearchy, think of those sort of Lords of the Manor type people inhabiting the countryside, dependent on all the farms around them to bring food and services to them. Cattle on the hoof, haulage services, waiting at their table, all that kind of stuff. For Northumbria, we've only ever got one archaeological site where this squirearchy can be seen working.

as it were. So we don't find the people we want. We don't find as many burials as we think there must be people. We don't really know what they're living in. And yet, occasionally, we find a piece of archaeology that blows everybody away. And for Northumbria, that's a place called Yevering, which is way up near the Scottish border, way beyond Hadrian's wall, which for some unaccountable reason people think is the Scottish border, way up near the Scottish border or just beyond the Cheviot Hills, sitting on a sort of raised platform above a small obscure river below an great Iron Age hill fort called Yevring Bell. And this palace was discovered from the air by Crockmark photography in the 40s, 50s, excavated brilliantly in the 1950s and 60s by a really superb excavator called Brian Hope Taylor

and produced what he immediately identified as the Palace of King Edwin of Northumbret. So history and archaeology, our uneasy bedfellows, Brian Hope Taylor, nailed the two together and said, here is King Edwin's Palace, which Beed had written about. The famous conversion speech in Beed happens in somewhere like Yevrig. So these are substantial halls. There's this extraordinary grandstand feature, looking like a bit of a Roman theatre. There are feasting kitchens. There's nothing like anywhere else. So we've got setpiece archaeology. We've got some hagiographies of early saints. particularly Cuthbert and Wilfred, two sides of a religious coin, if you like. And then we've got lots of other bits and pieces, some of them purporting to be British sources from the Arthurian period,

about which we're a bit sceptical. And then for me, one of the most fascinating sources is a much more obscure thing called the Historia de Sancto Cuthberto, which claims to be a list of the possessions of the community of St. Cuthbert from the time when that community, had moved from Linders Farm, the great centre of North East spirituality, to Durham. That's a whole other story, how that happens. But it purports to be a list of the possessions given to them over the centuries by the good kings of Northumbria, and once or twice when they had lost possessions to kings of Northumbria. When you give land to the church, and the first land is given to the church after the year 635, when Irish bishop from the island of Iona comes to Linders Farn to found an Iona

in the East because the Anglo-Saxon king of Northumbria, Oswald, has been trained in that sort of milieu as an exile, and he is a Christian zealot and brings bishops, probably technologists and farmers as well, back to Northumbria, sets them up on Linda's farm and gives them that land in perpetuity. The reason being that the community will pray for him for his everlasting salvation. In other words, they're offering him freehold in heaven. He must therefore reciproclicate. and Anglo-Saxon society is all about reciprocal gift. He must reciprocate and give them a place on which to found their community in perpetuity. It's the first freehold.

And the first freehold creates the beginning of the revolution, the capitalist, as it were, a revolution that sets early medieval England on the way to wealth and power. Before it was united into the kingdom of Northumbria, the north of England was divided into two smaller kingdoms. Dera, which stretched from the Humber to the River Tees, and Bernicia, which laid claim to the area from the T's to the fourth. Northumbria begins to emerge as a political entity when the two smaller kingdoms are united in the early to mid-seventh century. But that's not a smooth process.

We as historians often begin to talk about a concept of Northumbria. If you can see the air quotes I'm doing around that. But is that how the people who were being ruled under this new name saw themselves? Early medieval kings don't do a lot of conquering, that is to say they don't often annex a whole people and a whole kingdom. It does happen, but that's not the main modus operandi. There's a British kingdom called Elmitt, which is roughly West Yorkshire, which King Edwin definitely does conquer and absorb, and uses all the tricks of colonialisation, othering hearts and minds, putting people on the ground. And Anglo-Saxon kings use the church as a colonising imperial tool.

unashamedly. They send ecclesiastics in there to take over the church and those people are the king's people on the ground. As far as Benicia and Deir ago, Beed's fiction, because Beed sees a universal kingdom of a universal people for a universal church. The gensanglorum. He doesn't talk about we the Saxons. He calls his people the gensanglorum. And the idea of Northumbria, the peoples north of the Humber, is also a beaded invention. Beed wants there to be one kingdom, one people, one church. It's part of his providential history. I suspect that Bernicia and Deira thought of themselves as very separate right the way through into the Viking period and beyond. I don't think they ever were one people except in the minds of the kings who were

able to exercise control over both of them. Mostly what early medieval kings want to do is render other kingdoms subordinate so that those kings have to be. to attend the king's court, i.e. when King Edwards is in charge, the Bernician elite come to his court in Deira and bring tribute, cattle, treasure, scrap metal, those sorts of things. And that's really what they try and do. Even King Alfred, who's often credited with being an English king, he's only really interested in controlling other kingdoms and taking tribute from them. That's what they're into. There's no one who thinks of themselves really as king of a United England. until way into the 10th century.

I'm not sure Benissia and Deira were ever anything like a single kingdom. I think the unification is a bit of a fiction, maintained by both them and Bede. That's really interesting because, you know, the point here being that just because you rule something doesn't mean it's, you know, an amalgamation. Power is one thing.

But you're not necessarily going to convince any of the people underneath that shield of power that they're the same. No, the Mercian kings are much more successful at that. Ostensibly, Mercia isn't really anything. Mercia is defined by not being all the bits that surround it. Mercia means the border people, we don't really know, but they are highly successful in creating a kingdom which does self-identify as Mercia, even though at a smaller scale, people may think of themselves as the Huicester around the Seventh Valley.

They might be middle angles. They might be people of the Peak District, the Peck Seton, but essentially they end up all being Merchians. Northumbrians, not so convinced that the Bernicians and Dayans ever really get on that well. long after Bede, I think that you can just about identify which kings are really Deir and kings with power over Bernicia and which ones are Bernishing kings with power over Deira. Just for example, King Aldrith, whom I mentioned earlier, nearly all his coins are in Deira. Now, despite the fact he's the son and grandson of great Bernician kings, I think he thinks

of himself as a Deirin, really. That's where the politics are happening. Okay, so I suppose that we'd be a bit remiss if I didn't ask you a little bit about probably the most famous Northumbrian King, whom you have already named checked already, which is King Oswald. The one everybody always asks about, it's sort of like Beed in Oswald, isn't it? He comes into the spotlight, though, and does control this nebulous idea of Northumbria. And a lot of the time, we say that he is responsible for smushing Bernice and Deerea together and making a Northumbria. Who is this guy?

In some respects, he's an obscure Northumbrian king. Even by early medieval standards, he's not around that long. He becomes king in 634, 635, he's killed in 642. That's short, by any standards, to do much like Unifier Kingdom. Oswald's uniqueness is in two aspects. One is that he's one of Beed's triumvirate of Key Kings. So Beed makes much of Oswald. In fact, there's a suspicion that Beed is quite late on in writing his history before he decides to make Oswald the great hero figure. And that's partly because Oswald fits a certain mould, which of course Tolkien was tapping into when he used Oswald as the model for his, the once and future king, that sort of model, Arragorn in the Lord of the Rings.

Oswald fits that beautifully. So, Oswald is born about 604 AD. He's the son of a king called Avalphryth, who is definitely Bernician. His manor, as it were, is Bamberra, his great rocky fortress on the coast, from which you can see Lindisfarne, just off the coast very easily. It's close to this ancient British power centre in the Cheviots. The origins of this political core are very obscure, be it hints at them. So Oswald is the son of Avelfrith, who is so powerful that he is overlord, certainly way beyond Benicia, of much of what we would call southern Scotland, most of Northern England. He's the most powerful warrior with the biggest army, and nobody beats him until they do.

while Athelphrith is king of Bernicia, there is one spanner in the works of his power, and that is that there's a Deyran prince called Edwin, whom we have also mentioned, who is in exile. The relationship is, shall we say, uncomfortable, because Athelphrith is married to Edwin's sister, Atcha. So Athelphrith has made a political marriage in the hopes of uniting the kingdoms, as it were, not as a single kingdom, but as in being able to legitimise his offspring as the king of both kingdoms. That's one of the games in play. You marry the opposition's daughter, your children are eligible to rule over both kingdoms. The flip side of that coin is that those children may have other ideas about that.

So Edwin is in exile because he knows that Alvath will kill him if he can. He travels in the British kingdoms of Wales. He travels in Mercia, marries a Mercia princess, ends up at the court of King Radwald in East Anglia. He of, we believe, the Sutton Who burial. that one. And at some point, Radwolf is challenged by his wife to fulfil a promise to Edwin and go and fight Avalfrith so that Edwin can win back the Northumbrian kingdom. This is in the year 616-617. And the queen mesophorically lays a sword in her husband's lap and said, are you a man or are you not a man? Go and fight. Anyway, they go and fight. The idea is predicated that

Edwin is in exile at Radwold's court. If Radwold wins the battle, with Edwin's help. Edwin gets to be king of Northumbria, but he is tributary to the king of East Anglia, Radwald. That's how that system works. It's win-win. Anyway, they do win the battle. They have a fight in the sort of low-lying areas of North Lincolnshire, and extraordinarily Aval Frith and all his warband are cut down and killed. And now, Edwin is now king of Deira and Benicia, with the powerful supporter Radwold, and it's now Avalphrith's children, several boys, a daughter, who have to run like hell and his wife. So I always think of this extraordinary moment when Queen Atcher, Athelfrith's wife, realizes that her brother has just killed her husband

and has to make a choice. Does she drop him a line saying, dear Edwin, haven't seen you for simply yonks? The boys would love to meet their uncle, will be in Bambra, come and see us. Or B, does she pick up her boys and her girls and her treasure chest and run like hell for the hills? She runs like hell because her brother is going to kill her children. No question about it. And the place they run to is the kingdom of Dal Reiter, which is the Irish-speaking kingdom of In Argyllshire. And Dalreita is a Christian kingdom with very strong Irish affinities. Its church is an Irish church. Dalriotas' principal holy man has been the greatest early medieval monastic entrepreneur of them all, St. Columba, Column Kill. Young Prince Oswald is converted to Christianity. His father was a pagan, un-reconstructed.

Oswald and his brothers are converted to Christianity by the monks of Iona and sort of fostered there as protegees in a particular sort of Irish Christian kingship, tribal Christianity, very potent, very personal, quite unlike Roman Orthodox Christianity. Eventually Edwin's luck runs out after a reign of 16, 17 years and he's taken out by an old antagonist of his, who's a British king called Cadwallon from Gwyneth, North Wales. These two have history. I suspect they were foster brothers at one point. There's history there.

So Cadwallon comes to Northumbria and kills Edwin. There is then a sort of state of chaos for a year. And then sponsored by the Dalreotin King and by the monks of Iona, who rather handily send a party of armed monks with him to ensure his safety, send Oswald back to Northumbria to claim the kingdom

and to try and kill this usurping British king, which they duly doly. do at a great battle in the year 633, commemorated at a place called Heavenfield. Bede makes a big play on how Heavenfield was named in ancient times in anticipation of this great event. Before this battle, Oswald raises across la Emperor Constantine before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. And the vision of St. Columba before him tells his men that they will go out and make a victory. And they duly do. Very small army. Some of Oswald's father's old fighting men, I have no doubt, personal family retainers, a small band of warriors,

these Irish club-wielding monks, I dare say, and a few Dalryartan heavies as well, all out looking for glory, because if they lose the battle, they all die, they win the battle, Oswald owes them big time. Oswald's first debt is to Colomber. His conversion to Christianity is genuine. That's why he sends to Iona for a mission. First mission fails. Second mission is much more politically heavyweight, led by a man,

called Aden, powerful, intellectual, high-level, high-ranking Irish ecclesiast. And he found Linders Farm. And from that point, there has been a continual English Christian state from the year 635. So Oswald is the man who brings the origin of the continuous British Christian state. So he's a key figure. And almost more important than Oswald is the fact that his brother, who succeed him in 642, keeps that going and starts expanding that mission by giving more bits of his land to the church. If Oswald controlled a huge swath of territory, usually not even unified, it would seem that wasn't quite enough for him, and it would lead to his undoing. Oswald had consolidated power in the north because his uncle Edward had been killed when the

Mercians had teamed up with the Welsh. Oswald had then subsequently won a decisive victory over the Welsh at Heavenfield. It would seem, however, that Oswald did not feel that his job was yet done. After all, he defeated the Welsh, but what about the Mercians? They were in existential threat, not just because it's possible that King Penda only grudgingly acknowledged Oswald as king of Northumbria, but because Mercia was still pagan and fairly hostile. Still, we aren't exactly sure why hostilities in the war broke out.

Bede, for one, would like us to believe that. it was a sort of just defensive operation. But ultimately, the Battle of Mazurfield was waged on enemy ground, meaning that Oswald was on the offensive. Still, with the Magic of Beed's narrative, Oswald managed to snatch victory from the jaws of death itself. Because the Kingdom of Mercia still hadn't largely converted to Christianity at the time, it meant that Oswald had been killed fighting a pagan army. He was therefore considered a martyr. This idea was cemented through Bede's intervention, as well as lots of hagiographies or saints' lives of Oswald himself. Bede insisted that Oswald had, quote, ended his life in prayer, which meant that he had been commending the souls of his fellow Christian soldiers to God.

Soon, Christians began to associate the site of his death with miracles, traveling to Oswald's tree to remove soil for the purposes of their own veneration. In fact, the name Oswald's tree just means Oswald's tree. hints in the name, and it corresponds to one of his supposed miracles. Oswald had been dismembered upon his death, and it was said that a bird, possibly a raven, had then taken his arm to a nearby ash tree, subsequently dropping it onto the ground. The tree and a spring which suddenly bubbled up where the arm had dropped were associated with healing miracles. These stories were then consciously spread by church members who wanted to encourage Christianity and its uptake across Britain.

Now, a sainthood is a fine personal legacy, and Oswald would have been pleased to see his brother Osweer continue to rule as a Christian. But what his brother ruled wasn't the Northumbria of Oswald. It was just Bernicia. Dara, meanwhile, was being ruled by a king Oswine. And the situation wouldn't be resolved for about seven years. And to do so, Oswe had to order the death of Oswein, which is hardly a sign of a thriving in the United Kingdom.

In contrast, the Mercy and King Penda was able to return back home victorious, and few would consider that the refractured Northumbria was the equal to its southern rival. Mercia, then, at this point, was on the ascendant. If the political reality of the kingdom was shattered, our ideas of Northumbria are remarkably intact, especially given that this is hardly an era known for giving us a lot of documents to work with. Northumbria's rise, unification, and our information about it are all tied to its Christianization and what religious people want us to understand about the kingdom. It had a huge role in building the Christian building blocks of later medieval England through its relationship to the church and in building important centers like Lindisfarne. It was a complex, messy, warlike, and incredibly interesting place

that was equally capable of throwing huge 36 days parties as it was of fighting. fighting with its neighbors, or paying to make sure that monks had places to pray and write about the greatness of their kings. Thank you so much once again to Max for joining me. And thank you all for listening. This has been Gone Medieval from History Hit, and if you like what you've heard, don't forget to rate, review, follow the podcast, and tell your friends about it. If you fancy suggesting an episode, you can drop us an email at Gone Medieval at HistoryHit.com.

My co-host, Matt Lewis, will retake the Gone Medieval Throne on Friday. And as always, I'll see you again next Tuesday. Until next time.