In early 596, a mission headed by Augustine, the prior of Gregory’s family monastery on the Caelian Hill, set out for Britain at the behest of Gregory the Great. As we saw at the end of chapter 8, they had been invited by Ethelbert, the pagan Saxon king of Kent. Later writers stressed the fact that they went in fear:
They were paralyzed with terror. They began to contemplate returning home rather than going to a barbarous, fierce and unbelieving nation whose language they did not even understand.1
We must be careful, however, not to make too much of this reaction. The British Isles were not a “Darkest Africa,” to use a phrase coined by Victorian missionaries. In making contact with the pagan Anglo-Saxons, Christians from Europe did not come to societies which had previously known nothing of Christianity.
Indeed, it was only contemporary Christians (and scholars who are content to follow their opinion) who spoke of the unconverted pagans of the North as if they lived in a world of their own, in enclosed communities, mired in ancestral custom. We have seen that, in the rapidly changing world of the North, this was not at all the case. The pagans with whom Christians came into contact in this period were, by and large, alert entrepreneurs of the supernatural. Religion had always been an important part of their lives. They had as little prejudice against foreign religions as they had against foreign goods. These were “exotic” things, to be scanned carefully and with intelligence to see if they could be “recycled” at home, as additional sources of prestige, power, and knowledge of the other world. Though this process of scanning is usually made to appear self-interested and merely instrumental in Christian sources (and in many modern accounts of the process of Christianization) we should never underestimate the subtlety and the sheer zest for new forms of access to the supernatural that went into contact with Christianity at this time.2
We saw, in chapter 5, how the Saxons had established themselves in Britain. It was a piecemeal business. They did not drive the local inhabitants before them. Rather, they rose to the top in a time of political collapse, establishing themselves securely in certain enclaves, while leaving others relatively untouched. By the year 597, pagan groups known as “Saxons” had taken control of about a third of the island of Britain. They had been known by that name to outsiders since Roman times, and would continue to be called “Saxons” by the Welsh and Irish, who maintained a very “Roman” attitude toward them. To the Britons who still controlled the western parts of the island they remained, simply, “the Nation of the Thugs.”3 The Saxons dominated a great triangle which ran along the entire eastern seaboard of Britain, from Hadrian’s Wall to Kent. They had conquered much of the southern, Channel coast as far as the Isle of Wight and had penetrated up the Thames deep into the Midlands. By the 570s, they had reached the valley of the Severn. We met them last, in chapter 5, wondering at the Roman ruins of recently conquered Bath.
In all of western Britain, from Cornwall to Ayrshire in southern Scotland, the Saxons faced Christian Celtic kingdoms which were far more extensive than modern Wales, and which had become more consolidated since the first chaotic days that followed the withdrawal of Roman rule. The Christianity of these kingdoms had been strengthened by the monastic renewal which had done so much to establish a remarkable Christian culture on both sides of the Irish Sea.4 With the foundation of Iona, this Christianity, built by a collaboration of Irishmen and West Britons, reached as far north as the Highlands of Scotland. It was only the Saxons who called these western Britons “Welsh,” from wealh, wealisc, “foreigner.”
Nor had Christianity vanished entirely from the Saxon areas of Britain. The Saxons of eastern Britain were overtly pagan. But this did not exclude considerable “subliminal” awareness of Christianity. They had “Welsh” slaves and, in many areas, pagan Saxon lords controlled a peasantry for whom Christianity had survived, even without an organized clergy, as a “folk religion.” Such “folk Christianity,” practiced by a conquered people, was largely invisible to outsiders. Irish Christians in Iona wrote of the “whole of the land of the Saxons” as “darkened by the shadow of heathendom and ignorance.”5 The monks sent by Gregory the Great evidently felt the same. Yet, when Augustine finally arrived in Kent, in 597, he soon learned that the shrine of a local Christian martyr, called Sixtus, was visited by the Britons of Kent. The shrine dated from Roman times. The Britons themselves knew little about the martyr; but they had continued to worship at his grave. What Augustine encountered was a humbled, but recognizable, remnant of what had once been a community of Romano-British Christians. Such communities must have existed elsewhere, in other parts of “Saxon” Britain.6
Thus, the pagan kings and aristocracies of Saxon Britain with whom Augustine and his monks made contact may have been formidable and unfamiliar. But they themselves were not ill-informed about Christianity. The issue was not whether Christianity would “come” to a world that knew nothing of it. Christianity was already there and the Saxons knew it. What was at stake, rather, was not only “whether” the various Saxon groups would accept Christianity, but also, once they did, “which” Christianity it would be and “how” it would be thought as having come to them.
Augustine arrived at the far south of the Saxon settlements, at a time when Saxon society all over the island was still in a state of flux. Like other northern societies, from Ireland to southern Sweden, aggressive dynasties, with more effective military retinues and greater control of local resources, had begun to turn societies that had known little or no state system into “kingdoms.” Though fragile as spiders’ webs compared with the post-imperial solidity of the Frankish and Visigothic kingdoms, these new political units represented a decisive change. After 560, the O’Neill dynasty in Ireland came to cast a more grandiose, harsher shadow of “empire” over the land: hard-dealing warrior kings, they fought to create ever larger pyramids of client kings, who would provide them with yet more goods and services. In the areas of Britain controlled by the Saxons, similar hegemonies emerged. As in Ireland, the locus of such power shifted frequently. But the outlines of power had become firmer and more irrevocable over the years.
Prestige and links with the past counted greatly for such rulers. There were still many pasts from which they could choose. Rome survived as a memory. Established within the walls of Roman forts along the North Sea, the kings of East Anglia claimed to be descended both from the war-god, Woden, and from “Caesar.” A large bracteate medal discovered in a Saxon grave at Undley, Suffolk, combines the image of a northern war-god with a scene of Romulus and Remus suckled by the wolf!7 In Britain, the Saxons had long held the eastern coastline. This meant that they could draw their traditions from at least two worlds. There was the North Sea world, which reached northward as far as Scandinavia. As we have seen, from the excavations at Gudme in Denmark, this world was marked by a confident, experimental paganism, such as may be echoed in the ship burial at Sutton Hoo. But, to the south, where the North Sea flowed into the English Channel, Christian Europe was close. The estuary of the Rhine, the Channel coast of Neustria, and a Seine valley increasingly dominated by great monasteries, were as close to the Saxons of Britain, by ship, as was the hinterland of their own country.
Though Kent might seem infinitely distant to monks who came from Rome, Saxon Britain, in fact, was the close neighbor of the most self-confident Christian region in northern Europe. Saxon kings appreciated, though from a safe distance, the solid success represented, throughout northern Europe, by the Christian Frankish kings. They exchanged slaves gained in their internecine wars for the wealth of the Frankish Rhineland. Frankish sources spoke of the markets of Gaul flooded with Saxon slaves, “more numerous than flocks of sheep.”8
The Saxon “kingdoms” were made up of agglomerations of dependent chieftaincies, bullied into submission and tribute. To be a successful over-king required both charisma and an ability to make one’s presence felt over wide areas. Above all, to be an over-king meant that one must be able to control the “exotic” goods which were entering the land in increasing amounts as a result of contact with the North Sea, with Continental Europe, and with the Celtic West. Along with the spoils of war, it was from their monopoly of exotic goods that strong kings were able to reward their followers. They strove to create around them, in their palaces, a warrior elite dependent on royal generosity alone.
A foreign religion was simply one such exotic good. It was essential that the king should not allow religious novelties brought from overseas to penetrate society in such a way as to strengthen any group other than himself and his followers. Traditional scholarship has tended to stress the privileged religious position of kings in the Germanic world. Unlike the kings of Ireland (who were largely men of violence, watched over by a self-confident learned class) the kings of the Saxons have been treated as “sacral” experts. Forms of “sacral kingship” are ascribed to them. They are said to have been held responsible for the well-being of their subjects and for the religious rituals which achieved this well-being. At the time, however, Saxon kings may not have enjoyed a religious role based on immemorial tradition. In a fast-changing world, they acted, in matters of religion as with everything else, so as to pre-empt competition. They, and they alone, would be responsible for missionaries, and for distributing the rare goods of a new religion, which had come to Britain from across the sea.9
Thus, in marked contrast with sixth- and seventh-century Ireland, where an entire learned elite was implicated in the adoption of Christianity, in the Saxon kingdoms the kings and their court went out of their way to hold the center of attention. The spread of Christianity among the Saxons was remembered very much as the “coming” of a new religion from a distant and prestigious source. It took place at royal courts. Its establishment was seen in terms of memorable gift-exchanges between Saxon kings, Christian missionaries, and the outside world which they represented.
This, at least, was the official story. It was a story which deliberately overlooked the nuances of what must have been a complex process of adaptation, not invariably linked to high politics. It was also a story which rendered the Christian Britons invisible. To adopt Christianity from outside (indeed, from Rome itself) was to give the fragile Saxon kingdoms, the “Nation of the Thugs,” a triumphal new charter for their occupation of Britain. Yet, in parts of western Britain, Saxon kings and magnates may well have received their Christianity from neighboring British princes, whose courts they often frequented, as exiles and temporary allies.10 But no glory was attached to remembering gifts received from the “Welsh,” the wealh, the “foreigners” par excellence. Up to the 630s, at least, the Celtic kingdoms of western Britain remained formidable. They were not always in retreat. Any debt incurred to them for the “gift” of Christianity was best left forgotten.
This was the situation which Augustine found when he arrived in Kent. It was a situation which imposed its own, indigenous rules on the actions of his mission. With a party of 40 monks, accompanied by Frankish interpreters, Augustine headed an impressive retinue. He met, in Ethelbert of Kent (580–616), a Saxon king determined to use every asset – including the new religion – to maintain his own distinctive, local style of hegemonial overlordship.11
Ethelbert knew how to control foreigners, lest the world they represented should undermine his own prestige. He had been married for 15 years to a Christian Frankish princess, Bertha. Bertha had been free to practice her own religion, with a Frankish chaplain-bishop. They had been allowed to use a Romano-British church that lay a little outside the Roman walls of Canterbury, on the Roman road which led to the coast. But Ethelbert was in no mood to receive baptism from the Franks, nor, apparently, were they eager to insist on it. They did not want a Christian equal, and Ethelbert had no intention of becoming the spiritual “sub-king” of rulers with hegemonial ambitions that were quite as marked as were his own. To receive baptism from Rome was a different matter. By accepting baptism from a representative of pope Gregory, Ethelbert could hope to make contact with the safely distant, imagined center of the Latin Christian world. Beyond Rome, he would gain recognition from the Roman emperor himself, the greatest ruler in the world, whose subject the pope was known to be.
Gregory’s letters to Ethelbert were welcome in Kent. They were accompanied “by numerous gifts of every kind.” These showed that the pope intended “to glorify the king with temporal honors.” Bertha was told that her piety was well spoken of in the imperial palace of Constantinople. Ethelbert was told that he could imitate Constantine, a ruler who had
converted the Roman State from the false worship of idols … together with the nations under his rule [so that he] surpassed his predecessors in fame.12
Yet, when they arrived, Augustine and his party found themselves confined to an offshore island. Ethelbert would meet them only in the open air. He would not enter a building, lest, as sorcerers, they swayed his judgment. It was a gesture to his more conservative followers. Ethelbert showed that he would not allow himself to be “bewitched” by the religion of these foreigners, in such a way as to forsake traditional rites without due consultation with his own nobility.13
We do not know when Ethelbert was baptized. But even when Augustine found himself free to preach in Kent, his monastic community at Canterbury resembled a cordoned-off residence of privileged foreigners – valuable but potentially disruptive persons, best kept under surveillance close to the royal court. Only in 601, when Ethelbert seemed for a time to be sure of his control of the Thames estuary, through dominating Essex and the large emporium established at the former Roman city of London, did more ambitious ecclesiastical schemes emerge. It was only then (and perhaps as a result of information from Augustine on the successes of Ethelbert) that Gregory set out his plan to revive the entire ecclesiastical structure of the former Roman province of Britain, with a metropolitan bishop at London and York, each with 12 colleagues under his supervision. To be patron of such a structure would have given Ethelbert the Britain-wide “presence” for which he strove.14
Even then the missionaries could not move fast. As befitted a Christian ruler, Ethelbert had been urged to “suppress the worship of idols, to overthrow their buildings and shrines.”15 In fact, no dramatic burst of temple-breaking (such as had characterized the heroic days of Saint Martin of Tours and the reign of Theodosius I) accompanied the arrival of the new religion. Gregory wrote that pagan shrines were not to be destroyed. Rather, they were to be reconsecrated with holy water. The solemn sacrificial feasts that had challenged the gods, through the reckless gift of so much food, to grant the counter-gift of fertility to the crops and livestock, were to be replaced by Christian banquets on the feasts of martyrs. These banquets would take place in wooden booths set up outside the new churches; but they would continue to carry the same associations of divine good cheer.16
We should not mistake this famous letter as evidence for tolerance of paganism. Gregory wrote it as a good subject of the supremely self-confident eastern empire. From Italy to Upper Egypt, temples had been taken over. Crosses were carved on their doors and lintels. Churches were built in them. As we saw in chapter 6, this gesture made plain that, within the territories of the “Holy Commonwealth,” all temples had been superseded by a triumphant Christian dispensation. Yet Gregory did not simply follow East Roman practice. He justified the measure with a characteristic sense of what was best for the “care of souls.”
It is doubtless impossible to cut out everything at once from their stubborn minds: just as the man who is attempting to climb to the highest place rises by steps and slow stages, not by leaps.17
It was a ruling which left room for flexibility. The evolution of Christian language in Saxon Britain also betrayed a similar process of enforced adaptation to local conditions. Pascha, the Latin version of the Jewish feast of Passover, the Pesah, was still the word used in all Romance languages. It was adopted, unchanged, in Old Irish. But in England, as in all other Germanic-speaking lands, Pascha became “Easter.” The name was frankly derived from Eostre, the pagan goddess from whom the month was named. The joy of a pagan spring festival was allowed, by Christian writers, to pass its name on to the principal festivity of the Christian year. It became the joy of “Easter.”18
Of greater long-range importance even than the fate of temples was the fact that Augustine provided Ethelbert with a skill with which he could shine as a new Clovis to his people. He issued “with the advice of his counsellors a code of law after the Roman manner.” Clovis’ Salic Law had recently been reissued by the Frankish kings. It was very much a token of the special status of the Franks in northern Europe. But while the Salic Law was written in Latin, Ethelbert’s Laws were issued in what we now call Anglo-Saxon. It is a remarkable indication of firm purpose and adaptability. Within a decade, unknown Roman or Frankish scribes, working with a Saxon king, had turned a Germanic dialect into a written language.
They did so in order to create documents which would protect their Church. The Laws made plain that the new foreigners enjoyed the personal protection of the king. They began by stating that theft of “the property of God and the Church” required twelve-fold compensation. Even the honor of a Christian priest was proclaimed – and in the vernacular – to be as sensitive as that of the king himself, and to be worth nine-fold compensation.19
Ethelbert had been a hegemonial ruler in the intensely personal style of his Saxon peers. When the power of Ethelbert waned, and the old king eventually died in 616, the Christianity based on Kent suffered from the change. Ethelbert’s son, Eanbald, was determined to maintain his position by marrying Ethelbert’s second wife. The clergy disapproved of such a marriage. So Eanbald returned, for a time, to pagan sacrifices. Elsewhere in southern Britain, the Christian hegemony associated with Ethelbert quickly unravelled. In Essex, the pagan sons of a king who had been a client of Ethelbert reminded their bishop that Christianity, also, was subject to Saxon codes of gift-exchange. It was only fair that they, who had given so much to the bishop, should be given his “gift” in return. Though pagans, they demanded the Eucharist.
When they saw the bishop, who was celebrating solemn mass in church, give the Eucharist to the people, they said to him “Why do you not offer us the white bread which you used to give to our father … If you will not oblige us in so trifling a matter as this, you cannot remain in our kingdom.”20
For Redwald, a king of East Anglia whose power was on the rise, Christ might be a distinguished new guest. But he had to learn to live with other, local gods: “in the same temple he had one altar for the Christian sacrifice and another small altar on which to offer victims to devils.” A descendant of Redwald, a good Christian who died in 713, remembered being shown this temple as a little boy.21
It is in this atmosphere of competing traditions, perhaps, that the Sutton Hoo burial mounds were constructed. They did not stand for an immemorial heathenism. Rather, they showed that great wealth and power were now available to Saxon kings; and that this wealth and power did not necessarily have to wear a Christian face.22
These anecdotes provide a unique glimpse of indigenous value systems at work along the northern frontiers of Europe. Christianity reached the Saxon kingdoms on sufferance and, for well over a generation, its representatives were carefully “screened” by kings and noblemen who knew exactly what they wanted from a foreign religion.
Altogether, the establishment of Christianity among the Saxons followed in the footsteps of a politics of prestige, conducted through the exchange of gifts and of women. In 625, Paulinus, an Italian disciple of Augustine, at last reached York. But he did so in the retinue of Ethelbert’s daughter, Ethelburga, who had been given as a wife to the formidable overlord of northern Britain, Edwin. Despite his marriage, Edwin took some years to decide to become a Christian. Like Clovis, he did not convert until he had won a stunning victory over his rivals. The victory put him in control of a windfall of booty and tribute. Booty would enable him to offer substantial rewards to his followers. He could form a new aristocracy, pliable to his wishes. It would be a Christian aristocracy.
When Edwin accepted baptism, in 628, he ensured that it was a thoroughly royal occasion. He summoned his followers for a public debate. Memorable sayings were exchanged. Old retainers waxed wise.
This is how the present life of man on earth, King, appears to me [said one] in comparison with the time which is unknown to us. You are sitting feasting with your ealdormen and thegns in winter time; the fire is burning on the hearth … 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 flits from your sight, out of the winter storm and back into it again. So this life of man appears but for a moment: what follows, or, indeed, 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.23
This was how Saxons liked to remember the occasion on which they had changed their minds in matters of religion.
More forcibly still, the pagan high priest Coifi, who had until then been debarred by taboo from joining the king in war, received a warhorse and a spear, with which to desecrate his own shrine. This was the principal sanctuary of the southern branch of the Northumbrian Saxons, at Goodmanham, near Hull.24 Previous Saxon ideas of the sacred had been based upon sharp ritual distinctions between male and female, war and peace. They involved all classes and all sexes in wooing the earth for her fertility. The priest’s gesture showed that these distinctions could be brushed aside. Wealth and prosperity were not to be found at a shrine hedged by taboos. They now lay with the warhorse and the spear. Both were gifts of the king. They were only to be found at the king’s hall and among the young men of the king’s war-band. Because it was less tied to the land and its cults, many of which concerned women and simple farmers, Christianity emerged as an entirely appropriate religion for the all-male (and frequently unmarried) war-band of a warrior king, which lived a prestigious life a little to one side of settled society.
In northern Britain, Christianity may well have survived from Roman times in large areas, among recently conquered British populations. But Edwin made sure that his new Christianity was to be found only where the king was. Moving north along the spine provided by the surviving Roman road which linked York to Hadrian’s Wall (now known as the Devil’s Causeway), Edwin was preceded by a royal banner that may well have been borrowed from memories of Roman practice. He also made his presence felt at the northern end of his extensive hegemony. A royal center had been recently created at Yeavering. Yeavering stood on a landscape made solemn by the presence of prehistoric earthworks. Excavations have revealed large wooden halls, built for prolonged feasting and supplied by livestock from the neighboring hills.25
It was at Yeavering, in around 630, that mass baptisms and preaching took place. On one occasion they lasted for 36 days on end. Edwin had ensured that the “coming” of Christianity to the Saxons of northern Britain was a royal moment. Such moments were long remembered in the kingdom of Northumbria. An elderly priest told the historian Bede, in around 730, that he had been told by an old man of how
he had been baptized at noon by bishop Paulinus in the presence of king Edwin with a great crowd of people … [Paulinus, he remembered] was tall, with a slight stoop, black hair, a thin face, a slender and aquiline nose … at once impressive and terrifying.26
Yet Edwin had only a few more years to live. His death in battle in 633, when fighting a formidable alliance between Celtic Christian kings and a major pagan Saxon warlord from the Midlands – both equally anxious to cut Edwin’s “empire” down to size – was followed by the collapse of Christianity in his kingdom. Paulinus and Ethelburga fled by sea back to Kent. They had little to show for their stay in the north other than a great golden cross and chalice, Christianized remnants of the once-famous “treasure” of Edwin.
It was the Irish Christianity of Iona which saved Christianity in the north of Britain. The successor to Edwin, Oswald, had been baptized at Iona when an exile, fleeing from Edwin himself. For what later became known as the kingdom of Northumbria (the kingdom of the Saxons north of the Humber) had consisted of two separate regions, each with its own royal family. Edwin represented the more southerly, York-centered group in the Saxon confederacy (Deira) while Oswald came from the northern group (Bernicia), which had settled both to the south and to the north of Hadrian’s Wall. Since the days of the Roman legions, this area, which stretched as far north as the Grampian mountains of southern Scotland, had attracted warriors, and may have nursed memories of “imperial” grandeur. Oswald died in 642, but he was succeeded by Oswy, from 642 to 670 (the first Saxon king to have been born a Christian and one of the few to die in his own bed), and Ecgfrith, from 670 to 687.
Oswald’s “northern” option proved decisive. For it brought the northern Saxons, through Iona, into the orbit of the Christianity of Scotland and northern Ireland. We have to abandon modern nationalistic prejudices (which tend to draw firm lines of division between the English, Scots, and Irish) in order to appreciate the significance of the new cultural zone that was created by the conversion of Northumbria. For the rest of the seventh century, a Christianity formed in Iona stretched in a great arch joining what is now northern England, Scotland, and Ireland. Iona stood at the northern apex of this arch. One side of it stretched southeastward, from southern Scotland to the Midlands of England; the other reached southwestward from Iona into the Midlands of Ireland. A constant traffic of Christian religious experts linked the various parts of this new zone. Many leading Northumbrians (Oswald among them) were bilingual in Irish and Saxon. Christian Saxons studied in Ireland. Irishmen (including the visionary Fursa, of whom we heard in chapter 11) and the pupils of Irishmen were known all over Saxon Britain as far south as the river Thames.
The great arch based on Iona swept far to the north. It bypassed the former cultural zone created by Irish and western Britons around the Irish Sea in the sixth century. It left the Celtic kingdoms of the “Welsh” to one side. On the frontiers of Northumbria, the Britons were in retreat. They had become more isolated than in the previous century. The Northumbrian Saxons had no wish to look to them to receive the “gift” of Christianity. By contrast, to acknowledge a debt to the immensely prestigious Irish was entirely acceptable.27
And, in the gift-exchange between an “exotic” Christianity and its Saxon patrons, the Northumbrian kingdom was the greatest gift-giver of all. The victories of the Northumbrian kings against the British gave them land, booty, and slaves. The efflorescence of Christian culture in seventh-century northern Britain is known as the “Golden Age of Northumbria.” It was a “Golden Age” which rested on much real gold.28
The fact that we know so much about the fortunes of Christianity in Saxon Britain is due to one remarkable product of the “Golden Age of Northumbria.” Bede (Baeda: later known as the Venerable Bede) came from a Northumbrian family. Born in 672/3, he grew up among monks. At the age of seven (that is, at an age when warrior sons, also, were entrusted to a foster-father) he had been given by his parents to the abbot of Wearmouth. Wearmouth and its sister monastery, Jarrow, formed a pair, placed along the estuary of the river Tyne where modern Newcastle now stands, only a few miles away from the North Sea end of Hadrian’s Wall. They had been set up and equipped at great cost, between 674 and 685, by a succession of noble and royal patrons. Built in stone, “in the Roman manner,” they dominated the estuary and looked out to sea, as did the royal barrows at Sutton Hoo. Like Sutton Hoo, they spoke of the spectacular wealth of the ruler (in this case, king Ecgfrith) who had endowed them. Only a truly successful king could afford to take so much wealth, which might have circulated among his followers, and cast it, beyond recall, into an exotic institution which (like Sutton Hoo, but in a Christian idiom) was intimately connected with the glorious memory of the dead.29
It was only as an old man, after a life spent largely in writing commentaries on the Scriptures (the “hard” science of a sapiens of the seventh century), that Bede settled down to write his Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation in 731. The Ecclesiastical History came half a century after the great flowering of Irish hagiography and a decade after the appearance of the Senchas Már. But, like these, it was written to declare a definitive triumph of the Church. Saxon Britain, like Ireland, had become a Christian land.30
But while the Irish took the unity of their law and language for granted, Bede went out of his way to create a new unity. He viewed Britain as a whole, much as Gildas (whom he had read with care) had done. He endowed the Saxon kingdoms with a providential role in the island. They were not merely the scourge of the sinful Britons, as they had been for Gildas. They were a new people, united, if in nothing else, by their common adherence to Catholic Christianity. Bede was the first author to speak of the disparate groups of settlers no longer simply from the outside, as “Saxons.” He talked of them from the inside. He used a name which the tribes of Northumbria and others had used for themselves. He treated them as a single gens Anglorum, a single “nation of the English.” He did this in part because Gregory the Great, who knew no better, had used the same undifferentiated term. But he also used the term because he wished to present the gens Anglorum as a single people, like the People of Israel, newly established in their own Promised Land, the island of Britain. He dates the end of his history by the “285th year after the Coming of the English to Britain.”31
In Bede’s writings we can watch, as seldom elsewhere in Europe, the process by which Christianity came to create notions of “national” unity that would (for good or ill) look straight to the present day. Within one crucial generation, between 700 and 731, two regions of the British Isles received, from the pen of Christian, Latin writers, legends that would prove decisive for their future sense of identity: Muirchú moccu Machtheni gave the Irish a Saint Patrick who claimed to be the patron of the entire island, and Bede gave the nondescript patchwork of military adventurers who had settled in eastern Britain the common name by which they have come to be known in later ages – the “English.” Centuries later, but also under the influence of readers of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, they would come to speak of their country as “England.”32
But Bede, of course, was not a modern nationalist. He wished to make sense of the history of his own times in terms of sin and punishment. He treated the “English” – the “Angles” – as a single group so as to hold them responsible before God, as a group, for their sins, exactly as the People of Israel had once been held responsible. And, as in ancient Israel, so among the Angli, it was the behavior of the kings which tipped the balance of God’s favor toward the people as a whole.
Such a view was favored by Bede in part because it imposed a merciful simplicity on a complex process. When it came to the great sins of recurrent apostasy and frank syncretism, against which the Christian missions had to battle constantly (as Bede well knew from his own pastoral experience), it was simpler to blame it all on bad kings. This had been the case, also, in the Old Testament accounts of the People of Israel. It was easier to do this than to linger over the complex hesitations of an entire population.
By the same token, the flashes of peace and grandeur enjoyed by the Angli under major hegemonial rulers, such as the kings of Northumbria, could be ascribed to their willingness to accept the faith and to listen to Christian bishops. Bede presented the missionaries, bishops, and great holy men of his century as worthy heirs of the Hebrew prophets. They were vivid figures, whose interventions were as drastic (and as mercifully intermittent in the day-to-day life of a warrior society) as had been those of a Samuel or an Elijah at the time of the warring kingdoms of Judah and Israel.33
Bede dedicated his Ecclesiastical History to a king – a literate man, whose piety soon forced him into exile. He made sure that good kings would be remembered even in their most spectacular reverses. Unlike the accepting but disabused account of Clovis by Gregory of Tours, a raw sacrality – the product of fiercely maintained local memories – flickers around a figure such as king Oswald of Northumbria. Oswald was Edwin’s successor. He had been baptized at Iona. Even the moss from the wooden cross which Oswald had erected when he fought his first decisive battle in 635 (at Heavenfield, under the shadow of Hadrian’s Wall) continued to heal the faithful up to Bede’s own days.34
Fluent in Irish, Oswald was very much the product of an Ionan Christianity. At Iona and its sister-monastery at Lindisfarne, the great abbots knew how to reverse the values of a warrior society in their own behavior. They would, for instance, make a point of never riding on horseback (the prerogative of a nobleman). They trudged the length and breadth of their extensive diocese on foot – a stunning gesture of humility in men of royal blood.35
As a king, Oswald also knew how to invert the codes of the war-band at moments of high Christian festival. He showed that “hack silver” could be used in unexpected ways:
the story is told that on a certain occasion, one Easter Day, when he sat down to dinner with bishop Aidan, a silver dish was placed on the table before him … They had just raised their hands to ask a blessing on the bread when there came in an officer of the king … telling him that a great multitude of poor people from every district were sitting in the precincts and asking alms of the king. He at once ordered … the dish to be broken up and the pieces divided among them. The bishop, who was sitting by … grasped him by the right hand, and said, “May this hand never decay.”36
Sure enough, the blessed hand of Oswald was cut off when he died in battle in 642. It was preserved undecayed in a chapel in the royal fort of Bamburgh, overlooking the North Sea, close to the Iona-like “Holy Island” of Lindisfarne. The earth on which Oswald had fallen, even wood from the stake on which his head had been fixed by his enemies, worked miracles. His last battle-cry, a prayer for the souls of his doomed retinue, became proverbial.37
The elaboration of the cult of Saint Oswald took place in the same decade as Muslim armies, staffed by warriors who regarded themselves as potential martyrs, swept into Syria and Iraq. Oswald became the first warrior king in Europe who, simply by the fact of having died a violent death in battle, was believed to have gained the supernatural powers usually associated with a Christian martyr or ascetic.
Oswald, however, belonged to a distant, heroic age, which Bede tended to idealize in order to castigate his more comfortable times. Oswald made a good story. But what had mattered in the period between 640 and 700 was not so easily recounted. In this period, a substantial and irrevocable change set in. Once they had tested the new religion to their satisfaction, the kings of Saxon Britain and their aristocracy (not only in Northumbria, but all over the island) emerged as givers to the Church on a heroic scale. Slowly but surely, in the course of the seventh century, Saxon Britain came to resemble northern Francia, as we have described it in the decades that followed the impact of Columbanus. It was a rich world, where kings and their courtiers sought to atone for their sins and to secure the future fame of their families.
Altogether, Britain, Francia, and parts of Ireland moved to the same rhythm at this time. Each region boasted a generous and wealthy local aristocracy determined, whether as monks or simply as the patrons of monks, to transfer to their own homeland vivid microcosms of a once-distant Christian order. They would rebuild a new cultural world from the “exotic” cultural goods that had come to them originally from across the sea. They would capture, in a way, some of the magic associated with the original source of these goods, in a distant world across the sea. They did this by “mirroring” essential features of that distant world, almost in miniature, in their homeland. It is to this remarkable process of relocation that we must now turn, in order to understand what the new Christianities of the North shared with other regions and how they differed significantly from the very ancient, Mediterranean Christendom on which they drew with such enthusiasm at this time.