Looking back over a remarkable century, Bede lingered with particular affection on moments when the presence of books unleashed, in the privileged few who handled them, a sense of breathless hurry. In his Life of Cuthbert (the saintly bishop of Lindisfarne, who died in 689), Bede recounted how, when Cuthbert was at the abbey of Melrose, in southern Scotland, in around 664, the old prior Boisil had summoned him.
“I warn you not to lose the chance of learning from me, for death is upon me. By next week my body and voice will have lost its strength.”
“Then tell me what is the best book to study. One that can be got through in a week.”
“Saint John’s Gospel … I have a commentary in seven parts. With the help of God we can read one a day and perhaps discuss it if we want.”1
When Bede himself faced death in 735 in the monastery of Saint Peter at Wearmouth, he was gripped by the same sense of urgency. Some texts still lay unfinished.
“I cannot have my children learning what is not true [he said] … Take your pen and mend it, and then write fast.” Then Wilberht [his pupil] said: “There is still one sentence …” And he said: “Write it! There now, it is written. Good.” And then [in Christ’s words]: “It is finished.”2
Only then did Bede sit back in his chair to await death. He prepared for death by reciting an Anglo-Saxon Christian poem on “that last, forced journey,” the passing of the soul.3 But he had written over 40 books in a flawless Latin. Scholarship had been his life.
I was born in the territory of this monastery. When I was seven years of age I was, by the care of my kinsmen, put into the charge of the reverend abbot … From then on I have spent all my life in this monastery, applying myself to the study of the Scriptures; and, amid the observance of the discipline of the Rule and the daily task of singing in the church, it has always been my delight to learn or to teach or to write.4
Behind Bede’s achievement lay two generations characterized by the massive transfer of goods from Gaul and Rome to northern Britain. The unusual wealth of the kings and aristocracy of the frontier kingdom of Northumbria had made this possible. Biscop Baducing (628–690) – later known as Benedict Biscop – was a wealthy Northumbrian nobleman turned monk.5 He founded the monastery of Jarrow in 674 and that of Wearmouth (where Bede lived most of his life) in 682. Wealth meant the ability to move with ease across Europe, not as a penniless pilgrim, as Columbanus and other Irishmen had done, but as a Christian aristocrat, in search of Christian goods. On six occasions, beginning in 653, Biscop travelled to Rome. Even his name, “Benedict,” came from abroad. It signalled his enthusiasm for Saint Benedict, the author of the Rule. He returned to Northumbria with a “boundless store of books of every kind.” An entire library, collected by this northern magnate as he made his Grand Tour of Christian Italy, arrived at Tyneside – along with an Italian expert on the style of chanting practiced at St. Peter’s in Rome, relics, icons, embroidered silks (one of which was so valuable that it was sold to the king in exchange for three large estates), experts in glassware from Gaul and “masons who could build a church for him according to the Roman manner which he always loved.”6 The entire church of St. Peter’s, Wearmouth (now known as Monkwearmouth) survives to this day. It was unusually high and narrow – 30 feet high, 16.5 feet wide, and 64 feet long. The basilica at Jarrow was larger – 90 feet long and 19 feet wide. At Jarrow, the church was flanked by a substantial dining hall – 91.5 feet long and 26 feet wide. These were some of the largest stone buildings to be set up in northern Britain since the abandonment of Hadrian’s Wall.7
Benedict Biscop and his successor, Ceolfrith (another aristocrat who became abbot from 688/9 to 716 – that is, when Bede was in his prime) attracted royal gifts.8 The twin monasteries housed some 600 monks. They were maintained by the services of many thousands of tenants. Bede had access to over 300 books, some of which had once belonged to Cassiodorus’ Vivarium. It was the largest library to be assembled north of the Alps at this time.
But the library of Wearmouth, though outstanding, was by no means alone. A steady drift of books into Britain ensured that fragments of a Mediterranean world, whose history we have followed in previous chapters, now came to rest at the far end of Europe. Each book opened a window down the centuries. For instance, one Gospel produced at Lindisfarne was based on a manuscript that had originally been produced in the early sixth century, at the monastery of Eugippius. The manuscript had come a long way. In chapter 5, we met Eugippius. He was the author of the Life of Severinus. He had lived through the end of Roman rule along the Danube; but he had ended his life as the neighbor of Romulus Augustulus, the last emperor of the West, living in retirement. Eugippius’ monastery overlooked the Bay of Naples. And Eugippius’ Gospel, itself, claimed to be based on a copy of the Gospels once owned by Saint Jerome! We know of all this because this information was solemnly copied out at the end of the newly produced Gospel book by a Saxon or Irish scribe.9
We must remember that the arrival of so much book learning involved a reorganization of local resources as dramatic as any that had once accompanied the establishment of Roman legions along Hadrian’s Wall. Hundreds of unmarried men had to be supplied and fed. We must remember that monks such as Bede did not labor in the fields. The monasteries needed to be supported. They received as endowments large estates, amounting to thousands of acres in all. Vast flocks of sheep and herds of cattle roamed the uplands of Northumbria, earmarked for the monks. For sheep and cattle were more than food. They provided the hides with which to make parchment (made from sheepskins) and the greatly appreciated vellum (made from the skins of calves). Thousands of sheep and calves were needed. The skins of over 500 sheep were required to make one large Bible. Altogether, by modern standards, book production involved an immense outlay of labor and resources. To write a book was the equivalent of putting up an entire building. To assemble a library was a crushing investment. If one wished to possess the works of Gregory the Great, for instance, one had to create, by patient copying, an 11-volume set made up of 2,100 parchment folios. It would have weighed almost 50 kilograms (while the modern standard edition weighs only 3!). To copy the four Gospels took up to eight months.10
And these books were not produced for local scholarship alone. Books were more than aids to learning. They were often treated as gifts. They carried messages of friendship, submission, or dominance across the widely separated Christian regions of Europe. Nothing shows this more clearly than the production and subsequent fate of a manuscript produced between 688 and 716 at Wearmouth – the Codex Amiatinus. The Codex Amiatinus is now on show in the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence, and is named from Monte Amiato, where it came to rest in the Middle Ages. It was only one of three large copies of the entire Bible, called a pandect (an “all-inclusive” volume), that were produced at this time in Wearmouth. It was based on an Italian original – the Codex Grandior, “The Larger Codex,” which had been prepared at Vivarium by Cassiodorus himself. This Grand Codex arrived at Wearmouth when Bede was a boy. It was copied out with its sentences and paragraphs marked out for easier reading, and the text was carefully brought up to date according to the Vulgate translation of Jerome. In 716, Ceolfrith, abbot of Wearmouth, set out to Rome with a retinue of no less than 80 monks. He intended to place one copy of the great new codex on the tomb of Saint Peter. Weighing over 35 kilograms, it was intended to be a spectacularly appropriate counter-gift to Saint Peter, the protector of the monastery of Wearmouth, from Peter’s loyal client, Ceolfrith, “an Abbot of the Ultimate Land.” Ceolfrith died on the way. The Codex Amiatinus finally came to rest in Italy. So perfect a copy was it that it was long taken to be, not the product of a late seventh-century Northumbrian monastery, but a bible produced in Italy at an earlier age. It was spoken of as “the Bible of Gregory the Great”!11
The transfer of so many cultural goods from Mediterranean Europe to northern Britain was a piecemeal process. We should not overlook the surprising gaps in the flow of texts and the patches of deep ignorance of the Mediterranean past which could occur in northern monasteries at this time. Bede and his colleagues did not survey the culture of Christian Europe with the effortless ease that is made possible, for us moderns, by outline histories of the period. It was only in his old age, for instance, that Bede realized that the majestically “Roman” Grand Codex with which he had, as it were, grown up in Wearmouth, had been prepared by none other than Cassiodorus. He never knew that Cassiodorus had written the Institutes. The “Christian senator” remained a distant figure for him. He had little idea when he lived and where he lived.12
The seventh century in Britain was an exciting age. But, as was only to be expected in a society suddenly saturated by exotic goods from across the seas, it was a time calculated to breed false certainties and to encourage forms of ecclesiastical “empire-building” based on competing local customs.
From Ireland to Kent, each area in the British Isles had developed, as it were, its own, distinctive “micro-Christendom.” These had been built up through the skilled deployment of resources (often slender resources) that usually had come to each region from abroad. Each region was convinced that its own local variant of a common Christian culture was the “true” one. Each believed that it mirrored, with satisfactory exactitude, the wider macrocosm of worldwide Christian belief and practice. The religious leaders of every region claimed to possess at home a set of customs and doctrines which were ultimately derived from “true” centers of Christian learning and practice in a wider world. Seldom have so many appeals been made as in the seventh century to membership of a universal Christian community; and never before had they been made with such insistence, so as to build, from the ground up, as it were, so many vibrant and idiosyncratic versions of “true” Christianity.
The kingdom of Northumbria was one area where the creation of conflicting “micro-Christendoms” led to dramatic moments of conflict. For Northumbria stretched far to the north, into a world dominated, through the monastery of Iona, by the Christianity of Ireland. Yet Northumbrian supremacy also reached as far south as the Thames. It had absorbed areas that were exposed to Continental, “Roman” influence. The kings of Northumbria were givers on a heroic scale. But they (and other Saxon kings) needed to know which were the correct building blocks for setting up their own “micro-Christendom” – a local Christendom, that is, which mirrored the majestic certainty of a “true” Christianity, preserved somewhere in distant lands.
Such a need explains the meteoric career of a man such as Wilfrid (634–709). Wilfrid was the first native Saxon to become archbishop of York. He held that office only from 669 to 678. In 678, he was unceremoniously exiled by the king of Northumbria, who resented the power of an over-mighty bishop. Wilfrid’s ecclesiastical empire was dismembered by his episcopal colleagues. But what Wilfrid achieved at that time, as a young man in his late thirties, was sufficient to polarize the Northumbrian churches for the remainder of the century.13 For Wilfrid and his supporters remained convinced that he and he alone was the first bishop of English race “to introduce the Catholic way of life to the churches of the English.”14
Like Benedict Biscop, Wilfrid was a Northumbrian nobleman. More a courtier than a warrior, he made his way through service in the retinue of queen Eanfled, the wife of king Oswy (642–670). Wilfrid used his royal contacts to travel to Gaul and Rome. On the first occasion he even accompanied Benedict Biscop. But he sought out more than books in Rome. He found, in the shadow of the great shrine of Saint Peter, a guaranteed source of personal superiority.
In the oratory dedicated to Saint Andrew, he humbly knelt before the altar over which the four Gospels are placed, and prayed the Apostle … to obtain for him keenness of mind to learn and teach the nations.
Then he placed himself in the hands of a Roman archdeacon. The archdeacon
made him word-perfect in the four Gospels, and taught him the rule [of how to calculate the date] of Easter, of which the Irish and Britons, being schismatics, were ignorant.15
He returned to Northumbria through Gaul, where he added a further touch of “Roman” authenticity. This was the round tonsure on the crown of the head, which was said to have been worn by Saint Peter himself. Such a tonsure would distinguish Wilfrid and his eventual followers from the Irish monks of Iona, who, at that time (as we have seen) dominated the Christianity of Wilfrid’s native Northumbria. For the “tonsure of Peter” was a very Mediterranean affair – a “crown” placed on the head by cutting the hair at its top. The “Celtic” tonsure, by contrast, involved the vertical mutilation of one’s long-flowing hair – a cutting away of the hair above the forehead, as dramatic as a scalping – which signalled the Irish monk’s abandonment of his warrior status.16
When Wilfrid arrived back home, in around 660, sheathed in inflexible certainty, he could not have picked more explosive topics for debate than the issue of the correct date of Easter and the correct form of the tonsure. Nor could he have picked a more opportune moment in which to push forward his views. Under king Oswy, the Northumbrian kingdom had to face the consequences of its triumphant expansion. It risked falling apart. Through the island-monastery of Lindisfarne, the northern regions of Northumbria were tenaciously loyal to the memory of Saint Columba. What “his” monks did and had always done was “true” Christianity. But, looking south, Oswy faced a southern Britain closely linked to the Continent of Europe through Kent and increasingly overshadowed, from across the Channel, by the Frankish Church.
Oswy was a shrewd survivor. He had already ruled for over 20 years. He wished to retain his grip on the south, even if it meant weakening the links between the Northumbrian kingdom and Iona. Bishops of his own choosing – and not Irishmen of royal blood, whose claim to rule sprang from their kinship to the O’Neill High Kings of Ireland – would be given the chance to create their own ecclesiastical “empire” under the shadow of his kingdom. At the age of 30, Wilfrid was the sort of man he needed.17
The two issues – the Roman against the non-Roman tonsure and the correct annual dating of Easter – were designed to engage the passions of lay persons and clergymen alike. In an almost totally illiterate society, the precise nature of visible gestures and the precise timing of festivals spoke volumes. Conflicts over fully visible practices counted for more than any conflict of ideas. Styles of hair had never been neutral. All over Europe, and not only in the British Isles, each hairstyle made a clear declaration of identity, distinguishing laity from clergy, warrior from farmer, “Roman” from barbarian.18 As for Easter, differences in the method of calculating on which day Easter would fall in a given year led to situations where, in certain years, the followers of different traditions would celebrate Easter as much as a month apart. In an area where the two customs met, such as Northumbria, uncertainty on the correct date of Easter affected the timing of mass baptisms of the newly converted (which usually took place at the high festival of Easter) and upset the rhythms of the royal court, where (as we saw in the case of king Oswald) a warrior-king was expected to show his most exuberantly Christian face at the Easter feast.19
Altogether, the debate took place in a world where externals were everything. Honor was a matter of the “face”; and loyalty, the most precious commodity of all in a warrior society, demanded that one wear one’s heart on one’s sleeve. To treat external matters, such as the cutting of one’s hair and the day of one’s principal festival, as if they were matters of indifference was to remove from the entire fabric of profane and ecclesiastical society the vital bond of demonstrative loyalty. Hence, to challenge the customs of the great monastery of Iona was to do nothing less than to pit loyalty to Saint Columba against loyalty to Saint Peter, and to render Oswy, as king of Northumbria, the arbiter between the two.20
At a council summoned by Oswy at the royal monastery of Streanaeshalch/Whitby, in 664, Wilfrid was allowed by the king to tell bishops and abbots, who had been loyal members of the great monastic confederacy of Iona, that their founder, Saint Columba, may have been holy, but he had been out of touch with the rest of Europe. On the date of Easter, he had been misled “by a rustic lack of sophistication.” Only the despised Britons and the monks of Iona, now identified by Wilfrid with the rude nations of the distant north, were isolated. “Few as they were, and placed on the extreme boundaries of the world,” they should join the larger unity which young Wilfrid represented.21
In some ways, Wilfrid had pushed triumphantly against an open door. His claim that the Irish were isolated was a caricature. The Irish churches had kept in touch with Europe. Ever since the days of Columbanus (who had now been dead for half a century), the conflicting systems of Easter dating had been discussed. The southern Irish had already opted for a “Roman” Easter. Iona, the bastion of Christianity in the far north, was already in danger of being pushed to one side by its southern Irish rivals. As early as 630, Cummian (Cumméne the Tall), a formidable sapiens from southern Ireland, spent a year in seclusion (so he claimed) studying this urgent and arcane matter. He wrote to warn the great abbot of Iona that he and his community were out of step. They should remember that they were no more than a “pimple on the chin of the earth.”22 Thus, when they listened to Wilfrid’s denunciations at Whitby, many Irish and Saxon supporters of the customs of Iona must have thought that they had heard it all before, and from fellow-Irishmen.
As archbishop of York, from 669 to 678, Wilfrid claimed to be an out-and-out “Roman.” But his actions made clear that, in reality, he wished to out-Irish the Irish. He was a prince of the Church, and an ecclesiastical empire-builder in a mold to which the British Isles (Irish and Saxon alike) had grown accustomed. Wilfrid was unlike his fellow lover of things Roman, Benedict Biscop, the self-effacing monk. He knew how to be larger than life. He was notorious for “the number of his monastic foundations, the vastness of his buildings, his countless followers arrayed and armed like a king’s retinue.”23 He regularly travelled with a retinue of 120 (twice that of a Visigothic, Spanish bishop and ten times that of a minor Irish king!). For all his unpopularity at certain periods in his career, Wilfrid was remembered with zest if not with affection. He brought to the kingdom of Northumbria a touch of “style,” such as had long been admired in the episcopal magnates of Gaul and which the great abbots of the north, such as Adomnán of Iona, displayed with little inhibition when they trod the Irish scene.24
Saxon society, we should remember, did not have a learned class like the lawyers and poets of Ireland. Wilfrid’s learning was that much more of his own making, and, for that reason, that much less inhibited. But he gave the Saxons of Britain the sense of making contact with a font of learned tradition. He radiated knowledge of the correct, “Roman” forms of Christendom. He carried relics of Roman saints with him at all times. Every day he bathed his body in ice-cold holy water.
Wilfrid, indeed, was an awe-inspiring figure. He had a gift for remaining sober at royal banquets. He was “endowed with a wonderful memory for texts.” Yet Wilfrid also retained a Saxon aristocrat’s gift for establishing intense friendships. As far apart as Britain, Gaul, Frisia, and Italy, Wilfrid moved as a distinguished foreigner from court to court, bearing with him the mystique of a noble exile, his heart filled with arcane lore. Magnetically omniscient, Wilfrid was sought out as a foster-father for their sons by members of the Northumbrian nobility. He forwarded their careers even when they did not become monks. (One suspects that Wilfrid’s ability to draw followers from the ranks of the lower aristocracy was one of the reasons for his downfall in 678: he threatened to replace the king as a source of protection and bounty.) Beyond Northumbria, he attracted enthusiastic patronage from royal dynasties and local chieftains as far south as the Channel coast.25
Above all, Wilfrid knew how to use wealth. His monastery at Ripon was placed between York and the wild mountain spine of northern Yorkshire. It was endowed with the wealth of newly conquered British churches in the area. It stood on a frontier, as a veritable fortress of “Roman”-ness. The church was dedicated to Saint Peter.
The altar was … covered with purple woven with gold … Wilfrid stood in front of the altar, facing the people, and in the presence of kings read out in a clear voice the lands which previous monarchs and now they themselves had given him for the salvation of their souls … [And] he had written, for his soul’s sake, a book of the Gospels, done in letters of purest gold on parchment dyed in purple.26
Across a page of imperial purple, unmistakably “Roman” letters were written in gold – in a solemn rounded script known as “uncial.” This script, with its majestic layout, brought an unmistakable touch of Roman grandeur to the edge of the Yorkshire Dales.27
Later in his career, Wilfrid founded an even larger church at Hexham. To do so, he cannibalized the stones of Hadrian’s Wall. This was a basilica church of Continental proportions. It was 100 feet long and 65 feet wide. It had room for a congregation of over 2,000. As his biographer wrote: “We have never heard of its like north of the Alps.” At Hexham, “the crypts of beautifully dressed stone [on which it is still possible to read Roman military inscriptions taken from the Wall itself!] … and the many winding passages and spiral staircases” were designed to echo exactly, in miniature, the haunting catacombs of Rome and, especially, the galleries which led down beneath the floor of St. Peter’s at Rome to the tomb of the Apostle.28 Silver squares showing the heads of Apostles (votive plaques whose style reaches back to the pagan temples of Britain) and a hoard of reproductions of the keys of Saint Peter, discovered at Hexham and at other sites associated with Wilfrid, showed that Wilfrid intended his churches to be centers of pilgrimage. The great church at Hexham was to be a “Rome” of its own, placed within reach of the Christian populations of northern Britain.29
Bede appears to have looked back to Wilfrid with a certain disquiet. Despite his own, strict views in favor of the “Roman” Easter, he never disguised his respect for the sanctity of the monks of Iona and the bishops whom they had sent to Northumbria after 635. In describing them, “as a truthful historian should,” he drew an implied contrast between an ascetic bishop such as Aidan and the lordly Wilfrid. In so doing, Bede may have made the Irish missionaries of the north appear, in retrospect, to be more open to the masses and, generally, more sympathetic (altogether more like Bede himself) than they had been in reality. The Irishmen had been somewhat awesome figures – proud sons of kings, wandering with the somewhat uncanny detachment of royal strangers among the “harsh and uncultivated” Saxons.30 But, despite their misgivings over his style of churchmanship, Bede and his generation knew that Wilfrid, with his strident, entrepreneurial “Roman”-ness, had been the pace-setter for their own more secure enjoyment of the cultural riches of the Mediterranean.
The vividness of figures such as Wilfrid tends to make us forget that Wilfrid and those around him were only playing out (on a stage peculiarly well lit by contemporary sources) a situation which affected the entire extent of Christendom, from Europe to the Middle East. The seventh century was characterized throughout western Europe by a massive “involution” of the economy. Entire regions fell in upon themselves, drawing little from the outside world. The decline of trading networks in the western Mediterranean coincided with the disruption caused by the Arab invasions, and with the consequent hardening of political and confessional boundaries all over the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. The movements of a few distinguished travellers, such as Benedict Biscop and Wilfrid, gained their significance precisely from the fact that they had rarity value. Such figures stood out as the bearers of exotic goods and of foreign knowledge to regions locked in the cultural and religious equivalent of a “subsistence economy.” Throughout the Christian world, Christian churches had become profoundly regionalized. Christianity was a patchwork of adjacent, but separate, “micro-Christendoms.” Each region needed to feel that it possessed, if in diminished form, the essence of an entire Christian culture. Such a need was sharply felt in the British Isles, but it was by no means limited to it.
Hence the emergence, at this time, all over Christendom, of “encyclopedic” works, which organized all previous knowledge in easily accessible form. These were not seen by contemporaries as mere bloodless digests of a once-rich past (as modern scholars tend to view them). Far from it. They were greatly valued. Like high-energy vitamin capsules, they reassured contemporaries that the total nourishment of Christian truth was still available. What had once been scattered with insouciant abundance through so many great, long books, not all of which were now available at any one time in any one region of Europe or the Middle East, could be absorbed in compressed form. Knowledge encapsulated in lists of extracts, in sentences of gnomic brevity, and in neat abridgments would be “activated” and set to work in the urgent and deeply existential task of building up a local Christendom.
The phenomenon can be seen to happen in Christian regions as far apart as Spain, Armenia, and Persia. Already in around 600, the writings of Theodore of Mopsuestia (the great scholar of the school of Antioch who died in 428) were presented, by the Nestorian teachers of Nisibis (Nusaybin, on the southeastern frontier of Turkey), as if they contained the sum total of human knowledge. Theodore was said to have assembled the “scattered limbs” of wisdom, and to have made of them “a single, perfect statue.”31 The omniscience ascribed to one great teacher guaranteed the cultural integrity of the Christian Church in Persia. It enabled the “Church of the East” to stand out as a cultural region of its own, resistant to penetration by rival Christian theologians.
A little later, in 665, the Armenian savant, Ananias of Shirak, in his K’nnikon, claimed to have brought back from his travels in the Greek world a complete summary of cosmology and chronological computation. Significantly, his encyclopedic work included the rules for calculating the date of Easter. It was his gift to “this country, the heritage of Saint Grigor, the land that loves Christ.”32 Equipped, in this way, with a comprehensive guide with which to avoid “false Easters” based on incorrect calculations, Armenia could henceforth do without the Greeks.
The example of this encyclopedic tendency which is best known to western Europeans came from the Visigothic kingdom of Spain. Bishop Isidore of Seville (ca.560–636) was the younger brother of Leander of Seville, the friend of Gregory the Great. Immediately after Isidore’s death, his Etymologies were published by his disciples. This was a 20-book summation of all knowledge. It took the form of separate entries on the “origin,” and hence the meaning, of significant terms used in all the pagan and Christian books that were available to Isidore. The Etymologies promised to introduce the reader to the riches of all past generations of Latin wisdom.33 Isidore’s tour de force confirmed the hopes of an entire local elite. He gave them all they would ever need to know. He enabled them
to view, in his own person, the full tableau of ancient wisdom … After Spain had suffered so many blows, God raised him up to restore the monumental fabric of the Ancients, lest, through senile loss of memory, we slip back into rustic ways.34
In the case of Spain, as in the case of other conflicting Christian regions, there was a competitive edge to such collections of knowledge. The Visigothic kings of Spain and their episcopal advisers, of whom Isidore was among the most enthusiastic, wished to create their own version of a “true” Christian commonwealth in thinly disguised competition with the “kingdom of the Greeks” – the self-styled “Holy Commonwealth” of East Rome.
As we saw in chapter 8, when dealing with the distinctly cool relations between Gregory the Great and the Visigothic kingdom of Spain, the competition between Spain and the East Romans was very real. The Visigoths had reason to be edgy. The Visigothic monarchy was elective and, as a result, was prone to civil war. Justinian had taken advantage of just this weakness to invade southern Spain at the time of a disputed succession. Even after “imperial” garrisons had been dislodged from the southern coast of Spain, in the 620s, the eastern empire remained a threatening presence in Carthage, Sicily, and Rome. East Roman ships might yet return to dabble in Spanish politics.
Having established a firm alliance with the Catholic bishops through their conversion from Arianism in 589, the Visigothic kings of Spain succeeded in holding together for over a century the largest undivided political unit in seventh-century Europe.35 It was a remarkable achievement, maintained, in part, by intermittent bursts of solemn words. Like the imperial codes of East Rome, the royal laws of the Visigothic kings covered all subjects and claimed to solve all problems. They ranged from occasional, grandiose mandates for the forcible baptism of Jews throughout the kingdom36 to lists of compensations for injuries caused to villagers by local bulls.37
On 17 occasions, between 589 and 694, the entire Catholic episcopate of Spain was summoned to councils which were held at the new royal capital of Toledo. Perched on a defensible spur above a bend of the river Tajo, Toledo lay on the edge of the plateau of Castile in such a way as to command, without being absorbed by, the rich but vulnerable provinces of the Mediterranean south. Toledo was spoken of as a “new Jerusalem.” Its hilltop crowned with palaces and shrines, it was a solemn urban theater where bishops and kings together acted out the great hope of a self-sufficient “micro-Christendom.”38
It is interesting to see, in the light of the prominence which such issues took on also in the British Isles, the importance attached to the uniform observance of “correct” Catholic rituals in Spain. The councils of the Spanish Church laid down that major festivals were not to be celebrated on dates determined solely by local custom. Each must be observed on the same day throughout the kingdom, “as it is celebrated throughout the entire world.”39 The “entire world,” in fact, amounted to the territories controlled by the Visigothic kings.
Let one norm of praying and singing the Psalms be preserved throughout all Spain and [the Visigothic parts of] Gaul … nor should there be any further variation among us in ecclesiastical custom, seeing that we are held within the same faith and within a single kingdom.40
Like fissures opening in a heavy building, cultic anomalies were treated seriously as the first, troubling symptoms of a wider potential for disorder. The Spanish bishops condemned incorrect tonsures on monks and clergymen and the use of incorrect forms of chant in the liturgy.41 In a vast country, which took months to traverse, the symbolic unity produced by insistence on a single set of ecclesiastical practices was crucial. Divergences in such small but highly charged matters were as much a cause for alarm as was desertion from the royal army, rebellion, or the constant hemorrhage of the labor force caused by the escape of slaves and by the movement of vagrants across the threatening immensity of the plains of Castile. One could never be too careful, “for it is in such a way that divine wrath has caused many kingdoms of the earth to pass away.”42
In 711 the worst happened, and precisely from the direction which the Visigothic kings had always feared. Predictably, it also happened at a time of civil war, when the authority of the newly established king Roderich (Rodrigo) had been eroded by aristocratic dissension. On this occasion, however, it was not the East Romans who entered Spain from their tiny outposts along the coast of Africa, but the more determined Arabs and their numerous Berber allies. The Visigothic kingdom, though “established with ancient solidity,” was the only western Christian state to fall, with ominous speed, to the armies of the “unspeakable Saracens.”43
Far away in Northumbria, Bede noted the fact, as he read the story of Abraham, Ishmael, and Hagar in the Old Testament. The present-day Saracens fulfilled the prediction first spoken about their ancestor, Ishmael:
For he shall be a wild man and his hand will be against every man (Genesis 16.12). For now their hand is against all to such an extent that they have rendered the entire length of Africa subject to their rule and the greatest part of Asia, and even a part of Europe, hostile and opposed as they are to all other nations.44
Before this disaster, the most characteristic product of the Spanish “micro-Christendom,” the encyclopedic work of Isidore of Seville, had already been enthusiastically received all over northern Europe. Irish clerical scholars fastened on the Etymologies. It was just what they needed. They called it the Culmen, “the summit of all learning.” Such a book gave members of the Christian clergy, a caste defined by their arcane learning, the means to master the entire exotic world which had been opened up to them by their mastery of the Latin tongue. Through the Culmen of Isidore, all Latin wisdom might come to their native land. It could be believed, in subsequent centuries, that the learned men of Ulster had given away their knowledge of the epic cycle of their tribe – the Táin, the story of the Cattle Raid of Cooley – in exchange for a single copy of the invaluable Culmen!45
The Northumbria in which Bede grew up faced the same problem of creating an ordered and self-sufficient Christian culture as did other Christian regions, most notably the Visigothic kingdom of Spain. But Bede’s Britain was a more open world. The inhabitants of the island had an almost embarrassing range of traditions from which to choose so as to build up their own “micro-Christendom.” Nothing shows this more clearly than the extraordinary figure of Theodore of Tarsus, the great archbishop of Canterbury whose activities, from 668 to 690, coincided with the youth of Bede.46
Theodore was born in 602, that is, when Gregory the Great was still alive. He came to Britain in his late sixties, from a world that owed nothing to the Latin West. He had grown up in Tarsus, in Cilicia (on the easternmost end of the Mediterranean coast of modern Turkey) near Antioch. As a boy, he would have seen the Persians sweep past Tarsus into Asia Minor. As a young man (had he not already fled the area) he would have witnessed the fall of Antioch to the Arabs, in 637. He eventually came to Rome as a refugee.
Theodore of Tarsus belonged to a generation of extraordinary Greek scholars on the run. Many sought to flee the advance of the Arabs by settling in the extreme western end of the East Roman empire, at Rome and Carthage. They were men of ascetic vocation, used to being “strangers.” They moved all over the East Roman world from one monastery to another. They were the nearest equivalents, in the Mediterranean world, to their contemporaries in the British Isles – the great Irish “pilgrims” and sapientes, men of wisdom, such as Columbanus.47
They could be as cantankerous as Columbanus had been. From the safety of their western retreats, they instantly engaged in bitter controversy with the emperor of Constantinople and his ecclesiastical advisers. Since 633, the imperial government at Constantinople had attempted, once again (as we saw Justinian to have done, in chapter 7), to find a formula of agreement with the Monophysites of Syria and Egypt. It was part of a desperate attempt to form a united front of all Christians against the Arab invaders. But to the embittered refugees in Rome and Carthage, it seemed as if this compromise went too far to placate their ancient enemies, the Monophysites.
The emperor had wished to proclaim that Christ was truly human and truly divine, but that the core of his being, his will, was unique and utterly undivided. Christ never suffered the normal human agony of indecision. He had a “Single Will” – hence the term Monothelite, from monos, “single” and theléma, “will.” To the opponents of this “Monothelite” formula, it appeared that such a view robbed Christ of his full humanity, and made him that much less accessible to human beings. They thought that the “Monothelite” formula implied that Christ had not truly wept, and that, when faced with the prospect of crucifixion, Christ had not felt, for a moment, the full weight of human indecision and of human horror at the approach of death, before deciding freely to go forward to his fate. Such feelings were possible only in a being which possessed free will, and who could feel the terrible pull of alternatives like any other human being. Christ, for them, was not a divinely serene automaton, his human will engulfed in the will of God.48
The full working out of this theological issue need not concern us here. But it did concern those around Theodore at Rome. A few years before Theodore was chosen to go Canterbury, the imperial government had reached out to crush opposition with the extraordinary brutality of a regime reduced, by the Arab invasions, to a state of perpetual emergency. In 655 one pope (Martin I) and in 662 one leading Greek refugee theologian (Maximus the Confessor) were arrested, mutilated, and left to die in exile. The pope who chose to send Theodore as archbishop to a distant land, Vitalian (657–672), wanted to maintain good relations with the emperor by avoiding controversy. Theodore, a learned Greek refugee in his prime, was a potential trouble-maker. He was better out of Rome. He was unexpectedly nominated as archbishop of Canterbury in “Great Britain” – by which East Romans meant “Outer, Faraway” Britain. Theodore set out for the far north, accompanied by an experienced Latin adviser, the abbot Hadrian. Roman sources spoke of him henceforth as “Theodore the philosopher, archbishop of Great Britain.”49
It was precisely his learning and his long experience, as a refugee, of divergent customs which ensured that Theodore was a spectacular success in Britain. Entering his seventies, he travelled everywhere. Within a few years, this man, a native of what is now southeastern Turkey, who remembered the city of Edessa and the great churches and monuments of Constantinople, found himself at Lindisfarne, blessing a church made of carved oak, thatched with reeds “in the Irish manner.”50 Faced by the saintly bishop Chad, who still insisted, in the manner of a monk of Iona, on touring his diocese on foot, the elderly Greek picked up the saint and set him on top of a horse. He told Chad that it was his duty, as a bishop, to travel in the most efficient way possible, if he was to look after the faithful as he should.51 Used to the small cities of Asia Minor and Italy, where the bishop was expected to act as a “father” to the faithful in a small region, the vast ecclesiastical “empire” of Wilfrid shocked him. He colluded in Wilfrid’s deposition and in the dismemberment of his overblown diocese. Up to his death, at the age of 88, Theodore ruled all the churches of Saxon Britain from the see of Canterbury.52
But it was as a “philosophus,” a man of diverse and exceedingly exotic learning, that Theodore took the learned classes of the British Isles by storm. The success of his “school” at Canterbury shows that Ireland and Britain were joined in a single “sound-chamber,” where every word spoken in one island resonated in the other.
Irish collections of canon law cited the “judgments” of Theodore on matters of ecclesiastical practice. Irish scholars surrounded him at Canterbury, harrying the old Greek with questions, “like a pack of hounds baying at a wild boar run to earth.” And Theodore answered them courteously, sharing with them a store of information gathered from distant Christian regions. He discussed their Penitentials with them. He approved of most of their rulings, with a few reservations. To eat horseflesh was taboo in Ireland. But among the Greeks and Romans, he pointed out, eating horses was not so charged an issue. It was simply “not the custom” to do so. Questioned on matters of “tariffed penance,” Theodore approved. His own experience among eastern Christians led him to applaud the system of meticulous confession and penance developed by “doctors of the soul throughout Britain.”53
We can now listen to Theodore at work through a recently published manuscript of a commentary on the Bible.54 This commentary reflects his teaching at Canterbury. It shows that, in Britain, his eccentricity, as a Greek from the region of Antioch, turned out to his advantage. For the school of Antioch had always stressed the “literal” meaning of the Bible. The Bible, for them, was not simply an aid to meditation. In this they differed markedly from the traditions which had stressed an “allegorical” approach to the sacred text.
As we saw in chapter 8, Gregory was an outstanding representative of the allegorical method. For him, the Bible was a great encoded message, sent by God to cast fire into the heart. It echoed with the mighty whisper of God. It was for this “whisper” that the devout Christian should listen, reading the Bible, as it were, “between the lines” – paying less attention to the text itself than to a message from God which lay beyond the text. The school of Antioch, by contrast, saw the Bible first and foremost as a challenging text. Its different books had been written at specific times, by specific authors. One had first to discover exactly what these authors meant before one could go on to draw upon the Bible to nourish higher flights of contemplation. It is a view which modern scholars take for granted to such an extent that we forget that it was Gregory’s meditative approach which dominated an early medieval West preoccupied with the building up of souls, and the scholarly Theodore who was the rarity.55
For Theodore, therefore, the Bible required explanation at the most basic level. The reader had to be told what a given word actually meant, what the immediate concern of the author of a given book had been, to what precise historical context and to what customs he referred. This was a basically “encyclopedic” approach. And the scholars of Britain loved it. It provided them with just what they needed – an introduction that gave them a purchase on the unimaginably distant, Middle Eastern world in which the Bible was set.
On this subject, Theodore was a fountain of recondite information. He explained the meaning of Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac words. He described the entire ancient Near East – its habits of dress, its food, its forms of social relationships, its festivals – so as to provide a setting for the Old Testament. He described with almost archaeological exactitude the journeys of Saint Paul. Through Theodore’s eyes, students from Ireland, Northumbria and southern Britain were able to see the landscapes of the Middle East. It was as near as they could come to the distant world with which we began our account of the rise and spread of Christianity. Theodore even told them about Edessa, the city of Bardaisan (modern Urfa in eastern Turkey). In Edessa, he said, watermelons grow to so great a size that a camel is required to carry two of them, slung in baskets on either side of its hump.56 It was the last “close-up” of the Middle East, from the mouth of a native of the region, which western Europeans would enjoy until the time of the Crusades.
What is truly remarkable about the Northumbria in which Bede grew up was the continued diversity of its local ecclesiastical cultures. Although the “Roman” Easter became dominant in the north, so that even the monks of Iona accepted it in 716, no “Roman” uniformity settled over the province. Culturally not all roads ran to Rome. Many roads still ran to Iona, and from Iona to northern Scotland and Ireland. As the production of the Codex Amiatinus for abbot Ceolfrith made plain, Bede’s own monastery of Wearmouth was fiercely committed to a “Roman” style, based on Roman manuscripts. But only 50 miles to the north, in Lindisfarne, the challenge of “Roman” grandeur posed by Wilfrid was met by vigorous competition. Hence an extraordinary flowering of manuscript production took place in a “native” style. This flowering was the answer of the north to Wilfrid. It produced some of the greatest artistic achievements ever to come out of the “Celtic” world.57
In a Christian region where books of any kind were rare objects, the Christian mystique of copying the Scriptures was yet further tinged with the magical awe that had always surrounded the áes dana, the “people of skill,” the master-craftsmen whose legendary cunning provided secular rulers with the ornaments and jewelry appropriate to their status. We need only look at Irish jewelry of this time (such as the great Tara Brooch which would have held the cloak of a king around his shoulder) to see how men of skill could work magic with small quantities of raw gold and fragments of semi-precious stones. They turned these raw materials into objects of haunting subtlety. Looking at such a brooch, the eye was pulled inward into a charmed world of interlaced patterns and writhing beasts. Such jewelry made concrete the “face,” the honor, of its wearer.
In the same way, the craftsmen of the great monasteries covered the vellum pages of Gospel books with exquisite illuminations. These craftsmen were the áes dana of the “High King of Heaven.” They caused the honor of God to blaze from the page. They were not simply copying a text. They were turning parts of the holy text into the equivalent of jewelry. We have a description of an Irish craftsman, the monk Ultán, as he set to work somewhere in Northumbria to produce a Gospel book:
he could ornament books with fair markings, and by this art he made the shape of letters so beautiful, one by one … For the Holy Ghost ruled his very fingers.58
The most spectacular example of this art may well have been prepared at Iona by a successor of Adomnán. It came to rest in the shrine of Saint Brigit at Kildare, where it was called “the High Relic of the Western World.” At some time, perhaps in around 750, this remarkable Gospel had been given by the abbot of Iona as a gift from one mighty Irish shrine to another (much as Ceolfrith had brought his great book from Wearmouth to Saint Peter at Rome). It is now known, from the last place in which it rested, as the Book of Kells.59 A twelfth-century traveller to Ireland, Gerald of Wales, recorded his impression of its pages:
If you look at them carelessly … you may judge them to be mere daubs … You would see nothing subtle where everything is subtle. But if you take the trouble to look very closely and to penetrate with your eyes to the secrets of the artistry, you will notice such intricacies, so delicate, so subtle … so involved and bound together, so fresh still in their colorings, that you will not hesitate to declare that all those things must have been the work not of men but of angels.60
The flowering of a “native” style of art in northern Britain went hand in hand with the first emergence of Anglo-Saxon as a language of religious poetry. In order to understand how this could happen, we must concentrate, for a moment, on the process of Christianization in Bede’s Northumbria. Christianity had come to northern Britain (as to other parts of the Saxon world) frankly from on top. It was an exotic good, adopted by kings and their aristocracy. Monasteries were the bastions of this upper-class Christianity. A system of bishops and parishes was slowly put in place throughout Saxon Britain; but, as in Ireland, it was the monasteries which held the center of attention. We know more about them because monasteries and convents, and not the humble local clergy, were the principal recipients of lavish gifts and endowments.
As we saw in chapter 11, it was through the foundation of monasteries and convents that the Frankish aristocrats of northern Gaul had sought to leave their mark on the land. The example of Gaul was close to Saxon Britain at this time. There were many such rulers and aristocrats in Saxon Britain who were glad to follow the Frankish example. Many local figures among the Saxons were the descendants of chieftains demoted by the rise of strong kingdoms. They were anxious not to be entirely forgotten. Family foundations, in which upper-class women, as abbesses, played an unusually prominent role by Continental standards, brought Christianity home to their region. Viewing Northumbria from the majesty of Wearmouth, Bede was deeply suspicious of such “family” monasteries. They often failed to endure.61
These monasteries were small affairs. The church at Escomb (in County Durham) may have belonged to one such family venture: it was only 24½ feet by 14½ (a third of the size of Wearmouth). But, in a manner similar to what happened in Ireland (as we saw in the last chapter), small centers such as these passed on their Christianity very effectively to an extended “family” of retainers, tenants, and neighbors. They created a “grassroots” Christianity in a way that splendid, royal foundations such as Wearmouth-Jarrow could not do.62
We should not be misled by the inward-looking and otherworldly self-image of an early medieval monastery. In reality, the monastery tended to be a microcosm of local society. It owed its success, in large part, to this fact. It shared the values, the limitations, and the skills of its milieu. The monastery was very often a local “noblemen’s club” for retired warriors quite as much as it was an island of Latinate book-learning. Even in a monastic settlement as unusual as Wearmouth and Jarrow, studious Latin scholars, such as Bede, were a very small minority among their fellow-monks.63
Bede did not expect otherwise. Converted warriors came to monasteries to do something more urgent than master the Latin language. As in northern Gaul, they came to save their souls, through prolonged penance under a strict rule. They saw the monastery as a powerhouse of atonement. In Britain they needed atonement. As we saw in chapter 11, the Frankish courtier, Barontus, in his monastery near Bourges, had only a checkered marital career to answer for when he faced the demons in his vision of the other world. At Much Wenlock (in Shropshire), in the warlike border country between the Welsh and the Saxons, a monk was haunted by far worse sins. He saw “a man upon whom he had inflicted a heavy wound … The bloody and open wound and even the blood itself cried out against him.”64
Sebbi, king of Essex (664–694), was typical of many former warriors who must have retired to monasteries all over Britain. They practiced a penitential asceticism in the hope of a “good death.”
Being of kingly temperament, [Sebbi] feared that, if he felt great pain in the hour of death, he might, by his words and gestures, act in a way unworthy of his character.
An angel granted the old warrior a peaceful passing.65
We must remember that, unlike Bede, most monks and members of the clergy had a tenuous grasp of Latin. To write in Anglo-Saxon (as also, to write in Old Irish) was not necessarily to address a lay audience outside the clergy. It was needed so as to educate the clergy itself. Bede urged writing down and memorizing in Anglo-Saxon the basic Christian prayers and formulae. These formulae were to be used by the clergy for their own instruction. He died engaged on an unfinished, projected translation into Anglo-Saxon of the opening chapters of the Gospel of Saint John.66
Such uses of the written vernacular, though usually designed for monks and clergymen, inevitably slipped beyond the walls of the monasteries into a purely oral world, without writing but with a lively interest in the new religion. For we must remember the extent to which (in Britain as in Ireland) Christianization often took place, on the ground, through a wide penumbra of half-participants who had gathered around the monastery. Much of this was “self-Christianization,” based on a zest for knowledge of arcane matters and on a search for new sources of supernatural power whose force we tend to overlook when we study the relations between the “barbarians” of the north and the new religion.
So strong an appetite for knowledge of the supernatural posed a problem whose outlines we can discern only along the very edges of our evidence. The determination of the upper classes to assert a monopoly over the religious life of their region, through spectacular patronage of Christianity, has inevitably led us to an overwhelmingly “top-down” view of the establishment of the Christian Church in northern Europe. There is no denying the crucial role in this process of kings and aristocrats. But Bede gives us evidence that more was at stake. The upper-class monopoly of Christianity remained fragile. Marginal figures, largely untouched by Latin and even by literacy of any kind, played a crucial role in interpreting the new religion to the majority of their fellows.
Visions came to such persons. Drythelm, a pious married layman in Cunningham, Ayrshire, in southwestern Scotland, had a vision of “awful flaming fire and freezing cold,” followed by the view of “a very broad and pleasant plain, full of the fragrance of growing flowers.” The angel who accompanied him, however, explained that these were not Hell and Heaven, “as he had often heard of them.” They were two intermediate stages of the Christian soul after death, a near-Hell and a near-Heaven, to which believers would go, depending on the degree to which they had done penance in this life.
On the strength of his vision, Drythelm set up as a hermit near Melrose. He would stand for nights on end in icy water. But Drythelm’s vision had not been as terrifying as that which abbot Fursa (whom we met in chapter 11) had experienced. Drythelm did not return scarred by searing flames. On the strength of his vision, he was able to reassure a wide clientele (which included a learned king of Northumbria) that they should believe that the common remedies for sin (penance, almsgiving, and the prayers of friends) could alter the fate of Christians in the other world. This was knowledge worth having: the Christian soul was not caught forever between two seemingly inflexible alternatives – between Heaven and Hell. There was something that ordinary lay persons could do for themselves and for their loved ones. On this all-important issue, Drythelm the lay visionary (and not a scholar such as Bede) was the theologian of his district.67
We saw, in chapter 6, that a Gallic bishop, such as Gregory of Tours, was little concerned about resistance from paganism. But he was haunted by the fear that Christianity could, as it were, “take off” as a popular movement led by figures beyond the control of himself and his episcopal colleagues. The visions of Muhammad, in Arabia, showed that an entire new religion might arise from such experiences, in a tribal world recently disturbed by the intrusion of Judaism and Christianity. In Northumbria also, a vernacular visionary culture, stirred by Christianity but unamenable to ecclesiastical control, lay dangerously close to the sacred precincts of every great monastery.
Hence the enthusiasm which Bede showed for those visionary experiences which turned out to be amenable to control by the Church. One such was connected with Caedmon, a dependent of the great royal monastery of Whitby. Caedmon was a client-farmer on the monastery’s land. He was in a position similar to that of a manach in Ireland. He was a failed poet. His name suggests that he may even have been a Briton. He lacked the Saxon gift for extempore recitation.
Hence sometimes at a feast, when for the sake of providing entertainment, it had been decided that they should all sing in turn, when he saw the harp approaching him, he would rise up in the middle of the feasting, go out, and return home.
Suddenly, one night, he received the gift. In a dream, he was ordered to sing the story of Creation. Having been tested carefully at the monastery, Caedmon was allowed use his gift. He set to work, turning the stories of the Bible into Saxon heroic verse.68
It is significant that this should have happened at Whitby, for the monastery of Whitby (then known as Streanaeshalch) stood for all that was most self-confidently unusual in the Christianity of Northumbria.69 It was a “double monastery” in northern Frankish style. An abbess of royal blood ruled both nuns and monks. Abbess Hild (614–680) was a living reminder of a heroic, transitional world. She had been the first princess in Northumbria to be baptized, in her teens, by bishop Paulinus. By no means the sheltered product of a cloister, her life fell into two halves. She had lived in the world and been a married woman for 33 years, and she had been a nun and abbess for a further 33.
So great was her knowledge of affairs that not only ordinary people but kings and princes sought and received her advice. She compelled all those under her to devote much time to the study of the Scriptures [so that five bishops and many clergy emerged from her training at Whitby]. All who knew Hild … used to call her “Mother.”70
As we saw at the end of chapter 8, the first Life of Gregory the Great to appear in Europe was written at Whitby. Thus Caedmon claimed to have received the visionary gift to compose religious poetry in Anglo-Saxon verse on the edge of an establishment whose core was royal and highly Latinate.
There was nothing “popular” or “folkloristic,” in a modern sense, about such Anglo-Saxon verse. Versification was a noble’s skill, an intricate instrument of social memory, usually deployed in warrior epics and in the praise of royal lineages. Just as the illuminators of the Book of Kells turned pages of the Bible into jewelry, to show the status of the High King of Heaven, so Caedmon’s poetry began as a praise-poem on the deeds of God.
A visionary and royal quality clung to the most powerful example of the Anglo-Saxon religious poetry of the age. The Dream of the Rood took the form of a pious Christian’s night-time vision of the Holy Cross. It spoke of the Crucifixion of Christ as if it were the blood-soaked death of a warrior king. Death and triumph merged into each other. In a haunting juxtaposition of images, a sheet of blood is seen pouring down behind a triumphal, gold-sheathed Cross – a Cross such as sheathed the relic of the True Cross which Radegund had brought to Poitiers from Constantinople.72
Lines from the Dream of the Rood were later carved, in runic script, over the edge of a tall stone cross set up in around A.D. 700 at Ruthwell (in Dumfriesshire, Scotland). The cross itself was majestically “Roman” in its monumental carving. It was placed at the heart of a recently conquered British kingdom. It emphasized both the lordship of Christ and, in the heavy gesture of Mary Magdalene as she bent to wipe the feet of Christ with her hair, it evoked the all-important monastic call to penance. It was the product of an ostentatiously non-local style. It echoed the Roman liturgy of the Adoration of the Cross.73 It brought a wider world into Northumbria. A little further to the west, at Bewcastle, in a former Roman advance post to the north of Hadrian’s Wall, a similar cross was decorated with vine-scrolls and a twining border of exquisitely stylized flowers, which reached beyond Rome to Egypt and Iran.74
In the same way, the Dream of the Rood, though written in Anglo-Saxon and transcribed in runes, was by no means the reflection of a purely local culture. It had been called into existence by a cult of the Cross which stretched from Scotland to Armenia. The Dream spoke of the Cross, at times, as a gold-sheathed treasure, hung with jewelled banners. It was in this way that the Holy Cross was set up, in the Hagia Sophia, to be adored by the “emperor of the world” and his court. Bishop Arculf had witnessed the ceremony in 680 and described the scene to abbot Adomnán at Iona.75 The emphasis which the poem placed on the heroic willingness of Christ to face death echoed issues stirred up by the Monothelite controversy in Rome and Constantinople.76 As a victory-bringing sign, the Cross was known to warrior aristocracies throughout the Christian world. Only five years after Oswald had set up his own wooden cross to do battle with pagan rivals for the kingdom of Northumbria, an image of the True Cross was placed as a token of their victory, by the warrior aristocracy of Armenia, on the walls of the votive church at Mren, which is now perched in no man’s land on the frontier between Turkey and the former Soviet Union, some 2,300 miles away from Ruthwell.77
Seen against this wide panorama, the “micro-Christendom” of Bede’s Britain was still part of a Christian “global village.” It shared with the many “micro-Christendoms” which stretched, like so many beads on a string, from Iona across Europe and the Middle East to Iran and Central Asia, a common pool of images and attitudes inherited from ancient Christianity. Yet the position of the “micro-Christendom” of Britain and of its neighbors, in Gaul, Spain, and Italy, would change dramatically in the course of the eighth century.
In the eighth century, the balance of power in Europe shifted. As missionaries in Frisia and Germany, Anglo-Saxons (as we may now call them, for Bede had effectively given them that name) came to be swept up in the greatest political revolution to occur in western Europe since the passing of the Roman empire. The unprecedented coagulation of military power in the hands of the Frankish aristocracy who supported Charles Martel; the replacement of the Merovingian kings of Francia by a new, “Carolingian” royal dynasty; the absorption by the Franks of large areas of central and northern Europe, from modern Holland to Saxony; the Europe-wide conquests of Charlemagne: within half a century of Bede’s death, these developments engulfed the Christian populations of much of Continental Europe in a kingdom of truly “imperial” dimensions, known to us as the Carolingian empire. Regional “micro-Christendoms” survived. But at the top of a victorious society, dominated by Franks, their various representatives came together, for the very first time, to create what they considered to be the only true “Christendom” that mattered.
This happened, in part, because few rivals to the Frankish definition of Christendom had survived the political storms of the seventh century. At the western end of the Mediterranean, the magnificently self-sufficient Visigothic kingdom had ceased to exist. The East Roman empire fought for survival against unrelenting Muslim armies. Tied down by warfare on its eastern frontiers, the “empire of the Greeks” ceased to be an effective presence in the West. As a result of these strains, the East Roman empire passed through a “crisis of identity” as acute as any that had been experienced in the West. It emerged as an empire with a distinctive culture, which we now call “Byzantine.” Hence, as a result of the rise of the Frankish empire and the mutation of East Rome, two new and contrasting forms of Christendom emerged in the course of the eighth century. Eastern and Western Christendom began to look very different from each other. It is to the creation of these new Christendoms that we must turn in the four remaining chapters of this book.