Wilfrid’s frith stool is in the east end, within the choir, of the church at Hexham. It is most probably carved from reused Roman stone, and has been worn smooth by centuries of use.
‘And then we should all strive
that we might go there
to the eternal
blessedness
that is a belonging life
in the love of the Lord,
joy in the heavens.’
The Seafarer.1
Wilfrid was difficult during his life, and he continues to prove difficult after his death. He was the first Anglo-Saxon saint to truly appreciate and exploit the political, cultural and spiritual connections that the conversion brought with it. Born to wealthy noble parents, he was destined for a life of privilege, but the Church allowed him to soar to the heights of power, whereby he had the ear of the Pope and sway over kings and queens. He stood firm for what the Gregorian mission endorsed, often in opposition to Irish Churchmen whom he had grown up and trained with. But his dogmatic stance gave him security on the Continent, and he became a well-travelled, cosmopolitan European. Even into his old age he continued to fight his corner, constantly seeking greater power and influence. He enraged and enchanted people during his lifetime, and his legacy in the north of England survives today in the two abbeys he founded at Ripon and Hexham.
Deep within Hexham Abbey there is a place where you can stand completely inside a true, authentic Anglo-Saxon space. Down steep, irregular steps beneath the solid stone floor of the Romanesque abbey church lies a dark, unsettling crypt hewn out of the earth and supported by ancient Roman stones. Originally, the space would have been plastered and decorated, with relics and lamps placed in niches. But now the walls are bare, displaying the grooves on the surface of the stones made by the chisels of Roman masons who first carved them nearly two millennia ago. The crypt was designed to underpin the lavish church building of one of Anglo-Saxon England’s first home-grown saints: Wilfrid. His ambitious building projects at Hexham and nearby Ripon were celebrated at the time as ‘the finest buildings north of the Alps’.2 But inside the cramped and dimly lit crypts at Hexham the hyperbole seems irrelevant. This powerfully evocative place offers a unique insight into the fascinating Wilfrid and the nature of the very earliest Anglo-Saxon saints.
Hexham lies twenty-five miles to the west of Newcastle, in the county of Northumberland. It is a ruddy yet picturesque town, which has seen the passage of history played out on its streets. At the heart of the town springs the crenellated, darkened stone of the church spire. It is a modest-sized building, which displays its age and historical significance through the variety of Anglo-Saxon carved stones arranged around the walls either side of the nave inside. At the east end of the church, behind the altar screen, sits a potent reminder of the powerful man who was the first bishop at Hexham.
Wilfrid’s episcopal throne, known as the frith stool, is in more or less the same place it has occupied since he became abbot of Hexham on receiving a land donation from Queen Aethelthryth in AD 674. The frith stool remained a place of sanctuary for those in danger or accused, right up to the reign of Henry VIII. It acts as a potent reminder of what made Wilfrid unique: his power rivalled that of the Anglo-Saxon kings; his support of the Roman Church took inspiration from Gaul, the papacy and the Romano-British past (the throne was probably made from reused Roman stone pillaged from the nearby site of Corbridge); and, finally, he and the Roman Church he represented were to leave a lasting impression, a permanent imprint, on the Church in England.
The uneven, roughly hewn passages in Wilfrid’s crypt at Hexham also carry deep symbolism. True, the architectural naivety of the reused Roman stone may indicate that the building was made at a time when worked stone was difficult to access. Wilfrid had to import masons from Gaul to build his churches, as there were no native Anglo-Saxons trained to work with stone. However, by reusing stones from the nearby ruins along Hadrian’s Wall, the echoes of the Roman-Christian past in England would be recalled.
The church buildings of Wilfrid and his contemporaries were the first substantial structures built in stone for some 300 years. By tying the new church buildings at Hexham and Ripon with the power and legacy of the Roman Empire, Wilfrid was declaring his edifices permanent fixtures on the landscape, designed to withstand time and the elements as part of a new religious climate. This was cutting-edge architecture that would have made a massive impression on the rest of the population, who continued the age-long tradition of building in timber. If a building like the Pompidou Centre made an impact in 1970s Paris, then it is hard to imagine the sort of effect Wilfrid’s stone basilicas would have had in seventh-century England. This was unfamiliar, otherworldly design, inspired by far-off lands with which the majority of Anglo-Saxons were unfamiliar. Wilfrid wanted his stone churches, his crypts and his own position within Anglo-Saxon society to be noticed.
Wilfrid’s frith stool is in the east end, within the choir, of the church at Hexham. It is most probably carved from reused Roman stone, and has been worn smooth by centuries of use.
The crypts recall other structures too, like the ring crypt around St Peter’s tomb at the Vatican, and the dimensions have been shown to mirror those of Christ’s tomb.3 The ways in which the passages twist and turn, surprising visitors with areas of light and darkness, and unsettling the feet with irregular steps, brings to mind the catacombs of Rome. These underground chambers and passages were the burial places of the earliest saints and martyrs, and were visited by pilgrims to Rome, like Wilfrid himself. He undertook the first recorded pilgrimage of an Englishman to the papacy around AD 653. During this, and later visits, he would have wound his way beneath the city in search of relics of earlier saints. Recreating this experience in the north of England would enable pilgrims to fulfil a miniature version of a journey through Rome’s most sacred spaces, and to come into contact with saints that would connect them to both the papacy and the blessed in heaven.
Wilfrid brought relics back from Rome and had them displayed in his crypts. The niches carved into the walls may have contained reliquaries or lamps designed to illuminate the treasures within. There are certainly records to suggest that saints’ relics were displayed in lavish containers. For example, Cuthbert’s hair, taken from him during his elevation in AD 698, was kept in a casket described as a ‘theca reliquiarum’ – a reliquary vessel.4 Wilfrid was also reported as owning a reliquary, a ‘chrismarium’, filled with relics that Queen Eormenburg wore as ornaments.5 Relics were big business, and a materially minded man like Wilfrid wanted to invest in a finer collection than any of his contemporaries.
Wilfrid is one of the most complicated saints of the Anglo-Saxon period, probably because of the complexity of the time in which he lived. He, more than most saints, embodies the compromising pull between spiritual and secular matters. He was a born fighter, a provocative diplomat, headstrong, wilful, powerful, wealthy and controversial. Far from being a pious monk or victim martyr, Wilfrid fought a hard battle to forcibly instil the Roman Church into Anglo-Saxon England. He lived a long life, but much of it was spent in exile, traversing the roads between his foundations in England and the papacy.
He reflects a time when the pagan Anglo-Saxon nobility were embracing Christianity and all it offered. Born a pagan nobleman, and most probably related to the aristocratic families of the Northumbrian region of Deira, his upbringing was firmly rooted in the warrior society of the period. He provides a perfect point of connection with the power and politics of seventh-century Anglo-Saxon England, but because of his ceaseless wanderings, his training at the Celtic monastery of Lindisfarne and in Canterbury, Gaul and Rome, his life also opens a window onto the Celtic West and the rest of Christian Europe.
He crossed vast distances in his lifetime, sometimes with an entourage of over a hundred people, moving between the monasteries he had founded in northern England, the Midlands and Sussex, and across the Continent, to Italy. Travel was laborious, difficult and dangerous, but Wilfrid serves as a reminder that many people could traverse great distances in the early medieval period. Far from living and dying within a few miles of where they were born, Wilfrid and his contemporaries embraced travel with a passion.
During his forty-six years as Bishop, he spent more than half – twenty-six years – in exile due to his constant disagreements with rulers and nobles. He was not afraid to court controversy, and he made many powerful friends and enemies over his long life. One particular friend and patron was Queen Eanflaed, wife of Oswui of Northumbria. She did much to develop his education and early career, personally writing to her cousin, the King of Kent, for Wilfrid to be accepted into the monastery at Canterbury. She was something of a patron to him, endorsing his application to study at one of the best schools in the country. But she wasn’t his only high-profile supporter. He would receive the land and monks for his monastery at Ripon directly from Alhfrith, heir to the Northumbrian throne, and the land for Hexham abbey from a later queen of Northumbria, Aethelthryth. He gained the support of powerful Gaulish bishops and even the Pope. But he made influential enemies as easily as he made friends.
His life is recorded in two main sources: one, a piece of commissioned hagiography by his follower, Stephen of Ripon; another, the writings of Bede. Wilfrid was still alive during Bede’s early years, and the two reputedly met. In fact, Bede had the opportunity to question the then bishop, and the subject he chose was a controversial one. He asked Wilfrid whether Queen Aethelthryth had indeed been a virgin; a serious topic that had ultimately led to Wilfrid losing his bishopric.6 It seems Bede was not afraid to probe the powerful bishop on some uncomfortable topics.
Wilfrid should have been an entirely fitting rallying point for Bede, as the paragon of Roman Christianity, trained under Continental bishops in Gaul and Rome. He reflected many aspects of the Church in Anglo-Saxon England that Bede supported, especially regarding the dating of Easter and the introduction of the Benedictine Rule. However, when compared with the lavish compliments he bestows upon Cuthbert, Wilfrid is handled with greater reticence. Bede does present him as the major representative of the Roman party of the Synod of Whitby in AD 664, and celebrates the fact that he took a strong orthodox line, despite having close connections with the Celtic Church. Yet Bede is often as telling in what he doesn’t say as what he does. His treatment of Wilfrid may not be openly hostile, but it lacks warmth and is distinctly subdued in comparison with his celebration of other Anglo-Saxon Christians.
Wilfrid’s Life was written down as an official hagiographical text by one of his followers, Stephen of Ripon, as part of a concerted effort to have him declared a saint after his death. The text was accompanied by other investments in art, particularly the creation of an empurpled gospel book. This manuscript is now lost, but its rich appearance is described by Stephen:
For he had ordered, for the good of his soul, the four gospels to be written out in letters of purest gold on purpled parchment and illuminated. He also ordered jewellers to construct for the books a case all made of purest gold and set with most precious gems; all these things and others besides are preserved in our church until these times as a witness to his blessed memory.7
The Cathach of Columba highlighted the important connection between specific manuscripts and saints. But the respective manuscripts associated with Columba and Wilfrid were markedly different. The Cathach reflects the Celtic Church in terms of its decoration, and the way in which it was venerated by being encased like a relic. Wilfrid’s, although lost, conforms with descriptions of Continental books of the highest status. To stain vellum purple and write purely in gold was the most costly and ostentatious way of displaying power.8 The colour purple has imperial associations, so by creating an empurpled manuscript Wilfrid’s scriptorium was developing an object that would display his power during life, and act as a rallying point for his cult after his death.
That the manuscript has been lost is to be expected, since such a lavish religious book was likely to have been targeted by Reformers and destroyed. Sadly, now it can only be imagined from the very briefest description in Wilfrid’s Life. A similar empurpled Anglo-Saxon manuscript may, however, survive in the Stockholm Codex Aureus, now in the National Library of Sweden. It is a mid-eighth-century Anglo-Saxon manuscript, probably originally written in Canterbury. Every other double page is empurpled, and the manuscript gets its name ‘Aureus’ from the fact that many of the pages are written in gold. It was such a valued object that, when it was looted by Viking raiders in the ninth century, the Ealdorman of Surrey paid a huge ransom to get it back. Like many millionaires today, Wilfrid understood the importance of patronising the finest and most impressive art. He was a man with expensive taste, and the cult manuscript he had designed to commemorate him after death would have been an incredibly exclusive and rare object.
There is another high-status object, however, that may have been made at one of Wilfrid’s monasteries during his lifetime and does survive. We can gain a clearer understanding of the complex environment Wilfrid inhabited by examining one fortunate survival: the Franks Casket.
Made in Northumbria around the year AD 700, so towards the end of Wilfrid’s lifetime, it is a whalebone casket.9 Its many sides are carved with low-relief figures and runes, and form a complex sequence of images that have to be interpreted alongside one another. Its linked meanings work over each side, rather like an early medieval Rubik’s Cube. The handwriting and Old English dialect of the inscriptions on the casket suggest that it could have been made in one of Wilfrid’s ecclesiastical organisations at Hexham or Ripon.10 Indeed, the scope of historical, religious and mythical scenes, combined with the level of literacy displayed, indicates that it could only have emerged from the minds and hands of well-read northern monks.
It is a very rare survival. The Franks Casket is one of those powerful objects that seems poised at a transitional moment in history. It looks back to the pagan Germanic past, and projects forward to the Christian world of the Continent. It encompasses a mass of information about the time in which it was made and the individual with which it is most closely associated. This is important when considering how eclectic the subject matter is, as pagan gods jostle with Roman kings. It seems to undermine our modern conceptions of what was acceptable within this climate of extreme Christian fervour. Yet it can help us understand what Wilfrid’s objectives were, particularly in terms of reinforcing the fledgling Church in Anglo-Saxon England and modifying the pre-Christian beliefs of his nation.
For many years it had served as a sewing box for a family in Auzon. How it came to France is unknown, but its presence there supports the theory that it changed hands as a diplomatic gift. It eventually found its way to an antiques shop in France, where the ever-vigilant eye of the British Museum Keeper, Sir Augustus Wollaston Franks, recognised its worth and brought it back to England. Its size means it cannot have contained any large objects, but the metal lock (now lost – melted down to make a ring during the French Revolution) and detailed carvings on almost every surface suggest that it was designed to hold something precious, and to be seen by powerful, informed, influential viewers. It possibly contained relics or, most plausibly, diplomatic documents, designed to relate information about the newly converted, globally minded Anglo-Saxons in the north of England.
In a similar manner to the reuse of Roman stones in the creation of Wilfrid’s crypts at Hexham, the format of the Franks Casket recycles an earlier form. The object itself has clear parallels in the Christian world. Late Antique examples like the fourth-century Brescia Casket clearly use the sides to present images and iconography connected with Christianity and the imperial past, all executed in the highest status of mediums – ivory. This is not the case with the Franks Casket – in fact, it is an utterly unique object and has no known parallels. Entering via the lock, the front immediately transports the viewer to a different world, as runes run along the sides.
The Franks Casket displays some of the longest and earliest stretches of runic text to survive in the West. The multi-layered ways in which runes functioned made them the perfect mode of expression for an object, and an audience, imbued with a passion for riddling. Indeed, it opens with a riddle:
The fish beat up the sea(s) on to the mountainous cliff The king of terror became sad when he swam onto the grit. Whale’s bone.11
This short riddle provides its own answer – the casket is made of ‘whale’s bone’ – but the intention is to challenge the viewer regarding the origins of the object and its earlier life as part of the ‘king of terror’ – a whale. It recreates the dramatic moment when a whale was beached on the sands, its bones ultimately reincarnated as a casket. Once again the imaginative world of the Anglo-Saxons comes starkly into view, as here the casket employs prosopopoeia (a rhetorical device where objects speak for themselves) to give this inanimate artefact a voice. This is something we encounter repeatedly in Old English riddles, where manuscripts, weaponry and creatures challenge the reader to ‘say what I am’.
This desire to give a voice to supposedly inanimate objects suggests a different way of engaging with the world – a world in which nature was powerful and vocal, populated with spirits and sounds outside the realm of man. Rivers, glens, woods and mounds all contained the potential to act as meeting points between the worldly and the otherworldly. In the pagan spiritual framework, gods could metamorphose into animals, and stones could tell their ancient stories. This was a mindset not easily put aside, and the legacy of this tradition lived on for many centuries.
With the riddle on the front of the Franks Casket answered, the images present the next challenge. On the front, two very distinct scenes are paired alongside one another. On the right are three men dressed as soldiers, approaching a woman and child enveloped one inside the other within an enclosure.12 Other strange symbols include a sunburst, a bird and a range of objects held by the men. Four runes float above the figures, helping to decipher just this scene alone. They read MAGI, which means this must represent the account of the three wise men visiting Jesus after his birth. But there are no other depictions from across the Christian world that mirror this portrayal of the event. It is utterly unique.
To the right, a bearded man with one bent leg presents a woman with a cup. Another figure lies beneath him, and in front is an array of tools.13 Further along, another woman holds a purse, while another character appears to be plucking birds. Already a visual link has been established with the other scene, as a bird seems to have escaped from one and run through to the next. But the connections apparently stop there. This scene depicts the pagan Germanic legend of Weland the Smith, in which he was kept hostage by King Niðhad, and hamstrung to stop him escaping. To exact his revenge, he lured first the king’s son, whom he beheaded before fashioning a goblet from his skull. Then the king’s daughter visited him, during which he drugged, raped and impregnated her. The skill with which this myth is reduced to small set pieces suggests that this story was well known, needing only the basic details.
What might Christian figures like Wilfrid have made of this juxtaposition of such opposing images? The two scenes come from very different cultural contexts and seem to celebrate very different things: on the one hand, the importance of revenge, in this case on a king; and on the other, the birth and acknowledgement by kings of a peace-loving, child king-of-kings. Yet, there are parallels between the two that require some mental acrobatics to unravel. Weland was said to have escaped on a flying machine made from bird feathers (presumably those being plucked to the right). His ascension was later employed on Viking sculptures as a pagan equivalent to the ascension of Christ into heaven. Both main figures are shown in a heroic guise, and it is surely their super-human characteristics that are being celebrated. What these scenes show us is that the Christian world Wilfrid lived in was part of a transition from a previous worldview that still consumed contemporary minds. This object means we must question whether the pious and righteously Christian presentation of Wilfrid accords with the real world he inhabited.
These two scenes and the surrounding riddle are sufficient to illustrate the many problems the Franks Casket poses, and the complex transitional period that gave rise to its creation. The other sides present an equally problematic sequence of images, with unique versions of the wolf suckling Romulus and Remus (shown prostrate and adult),14 and Titus’s sacking of the temple in Jerusalem during the Jewish-Roman wars of AD 70. These episodes from Roman and Jewish history are testament to the far-reaching and cosmopolitan place that eight-century Northumbria was, and work with the front in terms of reinforcing questions of divine and human rulers.
What’s more, the Titus scene includes an incredible bit of linguistic play – at the top-right of the scene the inscription switches from runic to Latin script. This is not an accident, as it’s impossible to think of a skilled carver not realising he has changed language and script halfway through a sentence. Instead, it appears to be a deliberate comment on the changes of the time, shown symbolically through this shift from Old English to the language of the new Church.
The last side, which is separate from the others and held in the Bargello Museum in Florence, is in many ways the most enigmatic. Its runes are encoded, with some symbols standing in for letters and some for words, which means they are extremely difficult to interpret clearly. Despite defying convincing interpretation, the images suggest that it represents ideas of a warrior’s journey after death, complete with the trappings of the hall – goblet, horse and weaponry. The right-hand side of the casket and the lid, which appears to show an episode from the legend of Egil, seem firmly rooted in the pre-Christian, Germanic pagan tradition. The combination of images reflects the turbulent time in which it was made.
The flying bird that goes around the casket and across the bottom of the right-hand scene is an important motif. It is perhaps symbolic of the soul’s flight from life to death, something Bede explores in his famous account of a sparrow flying through a hall. Wilfrid inhabited the complex, transitional world of the Franks Casket. Examining the casket as a multi-faceted object, and exploring the historical, cultural and religious context in which it was made, all help to shed light on the imaginative world of early eighth-century Northumbria – the world of Wilfrid. It certainly puts more traditional approaches towards this pious Christian against a much more ambiguous backdrop, and enables a different set of insights into this saintly man and his monastic community.
Through his elaborate stone buildings, lavish manuscripts and high-status luxury objects, Wilfrid was surrounding himself in the aura of Romanitas (Roman-ness).15 He gains further potency by harnessing the trappings of the Anglo-Saxon warrior culture in which he was brought up; for example, tying his monastery of Hexham to the saint-king Oswald. Rather than endorsing the cult of King Edwin (connected to him through the Deiran nobility), Wilfrid instead developed the idea of the Bernician Oswald as holy warrior. He could act as a bridge between the pagan warrior elite of the Anglo-Saxons and the promise of both earthly and heavenly rewards offered by the Church. At Hexham, sponsoring the cult of Oswald was a canny move, since it took a cult figure popular with the people of Northumbria and dressed him in the finery of Wilfrid’s elaborate Romanised Christianity. Wilfrid worked hard at his public image, but his strength of character and bullishness meant he struggled to keep the most influential people in Anglo-Saxon England onside. This is nowhere more true than in his relationship with Archbishop Theodore.
Theodore was the eighth Archbishop of Canterbury, who inherited the legacy of Augustine before him in terms of enforcing the presence of Rome in Anglo-Saxon England. He was from Tarsus, a Greek-speaking area within Byzantium, and along with his native tongue he could speak Latin and Syrian. He most probably trained at the School of Antioch, and later in Constantinople, where he learnt astrology, medicine, rhetoric and law. He was a highly educated man from a turbulent world; following wars between the Byzantines, Muslims and Persians, he eventually travelled to Rome, where he joined a monastery and embraced the teachings of the Western Church. It was from the peace of his Roman monastery that he was plucked by Pope Vitalian in AD 667, and sent to fill the vacant see of Canterbury.
He had been volunteered for the position by his friend, the North African Hadrian, who was settled in a monastery near Naples. He had been offered the Archbishopric of Canterbury himself twice, but put Theodore forward instead as he felt he was too old to take the post. The Pope sent Theodore on the condition that Hadrian accompanied him, since he had been to Gaul before and knew the journey. Together, these new leaders of the Anglo-Saxon Church made a formidable, worldly, experienced and exotic team. Hadrian was made abbot of the monastery of Saints Peter and Paul in Canterbury, and together with Theodore he developed a school at the monastery, which drew the new and enthusiastic Christian Anglo-Saxon minds of the seventh century.
From the manuscripts connected with the school of Theodore and Hadrian it is possible to glean nuggets of insight into long-dead readers through the annotations and emendations they made as they read. Glosses and commentaries on medieval manuscripts are equivalent to notes in the margins of our own books. They provide a very real connection with the person who was sitting in front of and interacting with that manuscript centuries earlier – what they were thinking as they read, how their mind could make connections and ask questions of the text. When you see a glossed manuscript, you get close to reading over the shoulder of an Anglo-Saxon. In these early manuscripts it’s possible to see the minds of the northern Germanic students struggling to comprehend biblical references by contextualising them. Not only were Theodore and Hadrian themselves exotic, but the world of the Bible and the Middle East that they exposed their first-generation Christian Anglo-Saxons to was full of esoteric and alien terms, ideas and settings. This can be seen throughout the commentaries from their school in Canterbury, where students grappled with unfamiliar concepts, like the ways of determining weights, measures and coinage referenced in the Bible:
‘The last farthing [V.26]: the last thought’. A farthing (quadrans) has two mites. There are twelve mites in one tremiss. In one solidus there are three tremissis. An argeneus and a solidus are the same thing. There are thirty-six mites in one solidus; there are twenty siliquae in one penny.16
The work of Theodore and Hadrian in Canterbury cannot be underestimated. In the churches of the city it is clear to see that the example of Rome was never far from their minds. The major basilical church, which was to become the burial place of Anglo-Saxon monarchs, was dedicated to the two major patron saints of Rome – Peter and Paul.17 The foundations they laid in terms of educating the enthusiastic new converts in many practically expedient areas of Christian scholarship meant that the Anglo-Saxon conversion was founded upon the firmest and most intellectually vigorous bedrock. Bede, writing sixty years later, states that they soon ‘attracted a crowd of students into whose minds they daily poured the streams of wholesome learning’. Bede also states that some of their students who survived to his own day were as fluent in Greek and Latin as in their native language.18
Theodore was responsible for making Wilfrid bishop of the enlarged diocese of Northumbria, which heralded the start of nine years of power and autonomy within the north. Wilfrid lived an ostentatious lifestyle, possibly because of his noble upbringing, and this reinforces for us that modern-day distinctions between the spiritual life and the secular were largely redundant in the Anglo-Saxon period. He spent nine years delegating his episcopal duties, spending more time founding monasteries, building extremely grand churches and improving the liturgy. The region he governed was enormous, and after these years of extravagance Theodore wanted to reduce Wilfrid’s power by carving the bishopric of Northumbria into smaller areas.
Theodore and Wilfrid locked horns over the size of the diocese. The Archbishop took advantage of a conflict with the then king of Northumbria, Ecgfrith, to oust Wilfrid from court and implement his changes. Wilfrid was expelled from York and went to Pope Agatho in Rome, who found in his favour. However, when he returned to Northumbria the king went against the papal decision, imprisoning then exiling Wilfrid – a sign of how difficult a character he was. It would have taken great determination on the part of King Ecgfrith to rule against the Pope, but that was the level of animosity between he and Wilfrid.
In exile in Sussex, Wilfrid converted the pagan inhabitants to Christianity. He achieved great things, working tirelessly in often dangerous and hostile circumstances. He was eventually reconciled with Theodore, who then advised the new King of Northumbria, Aldfrith, to allow him to return to his native kingdom. That he could both court and lose the backing of the most influential individuals in Christendom is a defining feature of Wilfrid. He founded a number of monasteries throughout the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. This meant he was equivalent to a powerful secular landowner, as the monasteries channelled great wealth and made him an important, influential and rich member of Anglo-Saxon society.
His power could be seen to rival that of the various kings of the English kingdoms, but his came with the additional benefits of being national and international, with the backing of powerful allies in Gaul and Rome. Wilfrid made strong links with the Continent, and modelled his style of monastery upon examples he’d seen throughout Europe. He claimed to have introduced the Benedictine Rule into England, perhaps as a way of showing his allegiance to the Roman Church. He was aware of the stain of heresy the British wore within the Church, right back to the time of Pelagius, and therefore tried to be more Roman than the Romans. But he simply could not get along with the major decision-makers of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.
He died in AD 709–10, and soon after he was venerated as a saint. There was a concerted effort made on the part of his supporters to sanctify him. This involved the production of ‘cult objects’ and the commissioning of Stephen of Ripon to write his hagiography. Stephen’s account is highly partisan, focusing in particular on his machinations within Northumbria. It may have been written as a defence of his reputation in this kingdom, where both his power and infamy were at their height. Stephen knew how to craft a hagiographical text, and Wilfrid’s Life puts the saint firmly at the centre as its hero. Individuals who opposed him, like Theodore, deliver heartfelt apologies to the wronged Wilfrid, and punishment comes the way of those who offended him. He performs a number of astonishing miracles, such as raising a boy from death, and his relics continue to perform great feats posthumously.
Stephen casts Wilfrid as an Old Testament prophet. The parallels with figures like Joseph and Moses are apt, since they were similarly cast away and went into exile. The suggestion is that Wilfrid’s controversial behaviour can be excused by the idea that he is a prophetic figure. Like Solomon, at Hexham he dedicated a temple to the Lord, and there are New Testament parallels too. He is like Andrew, his favourite saint, a fisher of souls. It is well-written hagiography, but it distils the character of Wilfrid behind a veneer of tropes and truisms. Wilfrid and his community managed to ensure all the parts of his cult were in place just a few years after his death. Powerful and influential to the end, Wilfrid, it seems, was able to call the shots even from the grave.
On his way from Rome to Canterbury, Theodore was accompanied by an Anglo-Saxon nobleman-turned-monk named Biscop Baducing. He was born around AD 629, a time when the majority of Anglo-Saxon rulers were reacting to the arrival of Christianity, and bloody battles were fought by the British king Cadwallon and the pagan ruler Penda of Mercia. A few years older than his friend Wilfrid, Biscop travelled to the Continent with him when he was twenty-five and the younger man just twenty-one years old. Wilfrid stayed in Gaul, but Biscop continued on to Rome, where, like so many young men over the centuries, he was seduced by the art and architecture of the ancient city. Both men were from the Northumbrian royal household, and they embraced the new exotic world that Christianity opened up to them. They were entranced by what they saw on the Continent, and both developed an expensive taste for relics, manuscripts and art. Yet while Wilfrid sought to rise up through the ranks of the Church and have the ears of the most influential people in Anglo-Saxon England, Biscop was more interested in the potential of founding monasteries.
While in Rome and Gaul he visited a number of different types of monasteries, spending two years at the island monastery of Lérins, off the French Riviera. Here, he went from being an enthusiastic Christian convert to taking monastic vows, and it was at this point that he chose the name Benedict, after the author of the famous monastic rule. His time at Lérins allowed him to develop his own ideas as to what sort of monastery he wanted to found in England.19 He had seen the Benedictine Rule in action, alongside the more varied rules in place throughout Gaulish communities. When he returned to England after his second trip to Rome, with Archbishop Theodore as his companion, he was given the chance to implement what he’d learnt as abbot of SS Peter and Paul in Canterbury.
Biscop was extremely fortunate to secure such an important post, particularly at a time when the Church in England was about to be reinvigorated under the guidance of Theodore. He was essentially holding the role of abbot until Hadrian arrived to take up the post, but it was a high-profile position for a Northumbrian monk fresh from his novitiate. Soon after retiring from Canterbury, Biscop was granted land to build a monastery by King Ecgfrith of Northumbria in AD 674. Ecgfrith clearly saw the potential in his northern kingdom of nurturing a homegrown talent who had been trained abroad and had the ear of the new Archbishop of Canterbury. Like Northumbrian saints before him, Biscop had led an active life within the court before founding a monastery. He had served as a warrior thegn under King Oswui, and was popular with the Northumbrian nobility. Yet, while Cuthbert, Hilda and Wilfrid had all been trained in the Celtic tradition, Biscop looked to Rome on all matters.
After appealing to Rome for books, relics, masons and personnel for his new monastery, Biscop was given the added support from Pope Agatho of a papal bill exempting Wearmouth from any external control. This was pure power and autonomy for the monastery, which meant it was the papacy, not the royal house of Northumbria, to which it owed allegiance. Greatly impressed by Biscop and his model monastery, it was only a matter of a few years before, in AD 682, the king granted more land to Biscop to found a second monastery at Jarrow. Despite being seven miles apart, the two monasteries were known as one: Wearmouth–Jarrow. In keeping with Biscop’s devotion to Rome, the churches were dedicated to Peter and Paul respectively. In their very construction they recalled the stone edifices Biscop had encountered on his travels, and stood in sharp contrast with the Columban foundations that had edged across Northumbria throughout the seventh century.
The buildings at Wearmouth were designed from the beginning as startlingly new. Not content with utilising the native architectural styles or materials, Biscop followed Wilfrid’s example and appealed for masons from the Continent. The buildings that resulted were groundbreaking. Not only were they built in stone and plastered so they would have shone on the Anglo-Saxon landscape, but the monks’ dormitory was also stone and benefitted from glazed windows. This might seem like a small development from our modern perspective, but windows would transform medieval life previously. If an individual wanted light inside a building they had the option of opening shutters or doors and letting in the elements, or lighting fires or candles and coping with smoke-filled interiors. Glass windows meant that the harsh wind, rain or snow could be kept outside while precious light could be let in. The monks’ lodgings at Biscop’s monasteries would have been the finest available in the Anglo-Saxon period, and the buildings would have appeared as avant-garde and unfamiliar as the Gherkin in London.20
It was not only the stone buildings and glass windows that would have appeared new to the Northumbrian people. Biscop also brought back from Rome vestments and vessels, relics and a sequence of paintings that he had displayed within the church. These featured images of the Virgin and the Apostles at the east end, figures from the Gospels along the south and visions from St John’s Revelations on the north wall. In accordance with Gregory the Great’s instructions on the value of images for guiding the illiterate towards knowledge, these paintings were apparently included by Biscop because ‘even if ignorant of letters, they might be able to contemplate, in what direction so ever they looked, the ever gracious countenance of Christ and his saints’.21 Biscop understood the power of art, and was an avid patron and collector.
The other great addition to Biscop’s monasteries was a large collection of books. He was a wealthy man, who inherited a great deal of disposable income, and he used this to secure some of the most important books in Rome. It is highly likely that he purchased a set of manuscripts known as the Novem Codices – a complete Vulgate version of the Bible, which was a very rare possession at this time – written by the great biblical scholar Cassiodorus in the sixth century. Cassiodorus’s library at Vivarium was renowned, but was disbanded in the seventh century.
Biscop made a monk named Ceolfrith abbot to Jarrow. The anonymous Life of St Ceolfrith states that he joined a group of Benedictine monks led by Wilfrid, possibly the foundations for the monastery at Ripon.22 He also spent time training under St Botolph, ‘a man of remarkable life and learning’. While the monks and abbots of Northumbria feel three-dimensional and complex because there are sources left documenting their lives in some detail, fewer such records exist of the East Anglian Church. Botolph was clearly an influential early churchman, but he survives in fragmentary references and later legends. The hints at characters like Botolph in Northumbrian records acts as a reminder of the many saints who have been lost to time, with only their names remaining as testament to their importance.
Ceolfrith took with him to Jarrow just twenty monks, and also given into his care was a young boy who had been dedicated to the monastery by his parents at the age of seven, named Bede. Still set above the chancel arch is the dedicatory stone, which records the grant of land from the king and the appointment of Ceolfrith as Abbot of Jarrow in AD 684. He introduced Biscop’s ideals at this new site, and was as much a bibliophile and scholar as the monastery’s founder. Ceolfrith was dedicated to pursuing learning at Jarrow, doubling the size of the monastic libraries and embarking on a huge publishing campaign, the impact of which is still felt today. Every time a copy of the Vulgate Bible is produced for print, it is still based on a manuscript painstakingly produced under Ceolfrith’s guidance. Despite only being decoded in the 1880s, and spending most of its 1,400-year life in an Italian library, the famous Codex Amiatinus was in fact produced in the monastery of Wearmouth–Jarrow, just outside Newcastle, under the guidance of Abbot Ceolfrith.
The Codex Amiatinus is an enormous manuscript, made of over 1,000 calf skins. As an early scholar on the text so prosaically put it, the manuscript weighs the same as a Great Dane.23 Each page is poster-sized, and the ability to hold the numerous folios together in a single binding was cutting-edge technology of its time. While it is an illuminated manuscript, boasting three large-scale full-page illustrations, it is very distinct in style from Insular manuscripts like the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Durrow. Instead, the images seem to have been copied faithfully from Late Antique originals, possibly even a frontispiece from the Novem Codices of Cassiodorus that Biscop brought back on his travels. The appearance and sheer intellectual achievement of the Codex Amiatinus – the whole Bible in the Vulgate version – meant that its resting place in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence went unquestioned. Surely only Italian minds could have produced such a remarkable manuscript: the first complete pandect copy of the Vulgate Bible.
However, an insightful palaeographer named Giovanni Battista de Rossi discovered that the dedicatory page at the front of the manuscript had been tampered with. As the manuscript stands today, it states that the Codex Amiatinus was dedicated by Peter of the Langobards, who were a ruling tribe in Italy in the seventh century. This chimed with the illuminations to secure an Italian origin for this spectacular tome. But de Rossi found an identical inscription recorded in the Anonymous Lives of the Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow, and in that version the line that now reads ‘Peter of the Langobards’ read ‘Abbot Ceolfrith’. Within this account there was also a description of the remarkable copies of the Bible that Ceolfrith ordered to be made at his monasteries of Wearmouth–Jarrow, one of which he took as a gift to Rome.
The Codex Amiatinus is the oldest surviving single-volume copy of the Vulgate Bible in the world. It was made, along with two other copies, at the monastery of Wearmouth–Jarrow, and Bede the Venerable had a hand in correcting and editing the text. The style of the full-page illuminations is distinctly Italianate, with the figures painted naturalistically.
This is an example of both medieval plagiarism and graffiti. The fifth line down in this dedication page has been erased using a knife, and the name Peter of the Langobards has been inserted. The ink is slightly browner at this point, indicating the change that has taken place.
Suddenly, this most significant of biblical manuscripts was no longer a product of Italy, but instead was produced by first-generation Christian converts at the edges of the known world. While Lindisfarne invested in a Gospel book that reconciled Anglo-Saxon, Irish and Roman imagery, and Wilfrid developed an empurpled manuscript written in gold, Biscop and Ceolfrith’s monasteries produced an astounding piece of scholarship. The funds and investment in learning required to get the greatest minds and scribes of the age together in a scriptorium alongside accurate versions of the Vulgate Bible, not to mention the sheer resources in terms of calf skin, ink and time, all attest to the scale of this project. What is remarkable, however, is that Ceolfrith’s monasteries didn’t produce just one, but three complete Bible manuscripts. The one that survives was taken as a gift to Rome by Ceolfrith, who died on his way there, thus ensuring the manuscript’s stay in Italy. But one copy remained at Wearmouth, while another was kept at Jarrow. In a remarkable twist of fate, fragments of one of the lost manuscripts were later found reused as covers for the correspondence of Sir Francis Willoughby’s clerks in the late sixteenth century.24
Ceolfrith is best remembered for his role in the Codex Amiatinus project and for keeping alive the monastery of Jarrow when it was decimated by plague in AD 686. Just he and Bede, who was fourteen at the time, were able to sing the monastic hours, so preserving them for posterity. From what survives about Ceolfrith it seems that he was a driven and intelligent man, who sought out a particularly orthodox and strict form of monastic life, and relished the opportunities that scribal activity and scholarship could provide. His predecessor, Benedict Biscop, also appears to have been a rounded individual from the written sources of his life that have been preserved. He is easier to grasp than his friend and contemporary Wilfrid. Less of a political game-player, Biscop was interested in creating an intellectual powerhouse at his impressive new monasteries. He was a bibliophile, a seasoned traveller, an art connoisseur and a patron of learning, developing a creative hub that was like the Silicon Valley of its time. In the right place at the right time, and able to make strong interpersonal bonds with those he encountered, Biscop was in many ways the opposite of Wilfrid. His legacy was the twin foundations at Wearmouth–Jarrow, and the brilliant scholar who was given unparalleled resources and opportunities in his remarkable foundations: Bede the Venerable.