‘That Son was victory-fast in that great venture, with might and good-speed, when he with many, vast host of souls, came to God’s kingdom, One-Wielder Almighty: bliss to the angels and all the saints – those who in heaven dwelt long in glory – when their Wielder came, Almighty God, where his homeland was.’
The Dream of the Rood.1
Bede literally wrote the history books. As one of the only Anglo-Saxon voices to have remained strong and clear across the millennia, what Bede does or doesn’t say has become canonical. He was recognised as supremely gifted in his own lifetime, particularly in terms of his prodigious literary outpourings. And after his death his popularity continued. Multiple copies of his books were requested across Europe, so much so that his monastery at Wearmouth–Jarrow couldn’t keep up with the demand. He was the bestselling author of his time, and possessed one of the most respected intellects of the Anglo-Saxon period. Although he seems to have avoided direct involvement with the political intrigues of seventh- to eighth-century Northumbria, staying firmly within the walls of his monastery, he would play a more subtle and persuasive role with quill and vellum. Bede was the spin doctor of his time, and through his words he manipulated Anglo-Saxon England.
While he has never been fully canonised, and bears the title ‘Venerable’ more often than ‘Saint’, he has been remembered and treasured the world over. His significance to the English is unparalleled. He wrote the first history of the English people, and every historical text that has followed has based its information about Anglo-Saxon England upon his words. A game player at a turbulent time, he was able to harness the power of words in such a way as adviser to kings and bishops that he affected the period in which he lived. Not only that, he continues to condition how we view the Anglo-Saxon period today. He was someone who understood that history is written by the victors. In fact, by writing so much he became one of history’s greatest victors, able still to alter perceptions and challenge expectations 1,300 years after his living voice was silenced. The best way to get close to Bede is to follow in his footsteps and soak up the atmosphere of the site where he spent his whole life.
The monastery at Jarrow is now reduced to the outlines of stone buildings, rolling down towards the river on the edge of a humble parish church. Walking through fragmentary doorways out from the monastic complex, the approach to the church is overhung with trees, whose leaves dapple light into dancing patterns on the path up to the entrance. The simple exterior of St Paul’s Church belies the fact that it preserves the remains of one of the oldest stone buildings to survive from Anglo-Saxon England. Moving down the nave, under the later Norman tower, you enter a space that still resembles the chancel where Bede and Ceolfrith kept the monastery of Wearmouth–Jarrow alive. The stones of this building have resounded with monastic song for well over a millennium, and the modest pieces of seventh-century glass set high in the walls act as a reminder that this was a place of ancient luxury and pre-eminence, as well as national importance.
A short walk from the Church of St Paul’s, the busy estuary of the Tyne bristles with colossal cargo ships. Colourful haulage cranes punctuate the horizon, and the bonnets of reams of new cars, parked along the riverbank ready for export, glint in the sunlight as you gaze down from the incongruous setting of a reconstructed Anglo-Saxon town within the confines of the ‘Bede’s World’ Museum. Here, archaeologists have created replicas of halls, grubenhaus and even the ‘cuneus’ from Edwin’s palace complex at Yeavering. Alongside farm animals bred to resemble most closely their Anglo-Saxon ancestors, the buildings evoke the atmosphere of eighth-century Northumbria with great clarity. Past and present collide and, standing on a ridge next to a reconstruction of a stone high cross, the busy waterway recalls more recent history like the Jarrow March against unemployment in 1936. A dramatic place in both medieval and modern history, Jarrow remains full of contrasts and ancient echoes.
Bede is eternally etched on this landscape. His significance in terms of documenting the Anglo-Saxon period cannot be overemphasised, and the fact that his voice has resonated throughout this study on saints testifies that he is almost solely responsible for making the Dark Ages feel slightly less dark. Holed up in his glazed, plastered dormitory, or in his well-equipped scriptorium, Bede would have been well aware of the changes taking place around him. As he dipped his feathered quill into a pot of iron gall ink and wrote on animal skins in Latin about a Middle Eastern world hundreds of miles away from his own homeland, the alien nature of his environment and occupation must have been apparent. This may explain why he was so reluctant to leave his monastery; he travelled out only twice to nearby Lindisfarne, and never further afield to powerfully symbolic sites like Rome or Jerusalem. It may also explain the distinctly hostile stance he took towards the pagan past of his people, and the clever ways he engineered future views in his lifetime.
The double monastery of Wearmouth–Jarrow was advanced even in terms of monasteries on the Christian continent. Bede’s own background must have meant this new Roman outpost on the banks of the river Tyne was thrillingly new to him. Born around AD 672, he seems to have come from a wealthy family due to the fact that he was given to a rich monastery by his parents – something that was the preserve of the nobility at this point. His name, which was rare at the time, appears on a king list from Lindsey, also suggesting that he was of noble stock. This would fit with other saintly figures from this period, like the founder of his monastery, Benedict Biscop. Bede’s early life would have involved exposure to the world of the Anglo-Saxon hall, with its poetry, warrior elite and pagan traditions.
Bede had one foot in the pagan past and one in the Christian present. Yet, from the age of seven, he was part of the early vanguard of Christians, brought up with promises of an eternal afterlife, the power of the written word and an idea of an autonomous yet forgiving God. Emotionally and imaginatively, he was not tied to his native people (many of whom still adhered to earlier pre-Christian traditions, ideas and attitudes), but instead linked himself to Continental Europe, and particularly to the Roman papacy.2 His very name seems to be derived from the Old English word for prayer – bed – which may suggest that from his earliest upbringing he was destined for a life of monastic sanctity.
Despite his great contributions to the fledgling Church in England, no major cult grew up around him after his death, and he was apparently content to remain a simple monk throughout the many decades of his life, rather than rise to the heights of abbot or bishop. Yet he was considered, during his lifetime and down to the present day, to have been a most saintly man. What’s more, his contributions to our understanding of Anglo-Saxon England are second to none, and his life provides a compelling lens on the imaginative world of his time – one of the most significant transformations of Britain. The north of England, where he lived and died, changed from a Germanic warrior elite – a population centred on villages with wooden halls, subsistence agriculture, a belief-system rooted in the natural environment and a pantheon of pagan gods – to honouring a new powerhouse, the Church, with stone monasteries implanted on the horizon, a new set of prized objects, including books and relics, and a world view centred on a perfect afterlife achieved through piety and purity. This was spiritual revolution.
The circumstances surrounding Bede and his fellow early Christians’ conversion were complex, involving large-scale changes within the imaginative and physical world of Anglo-Saxon England. Bede has become the eternal mouthpiece for this transitional period. Proclaimed the ‘Father of English History’, he was a cautious and deliberate writer of the history he wanted preserved. He is best known for his famous text, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People.3 The bedrock of most studies of early Anglo-Saxon England, this text also contains almost all we know about the man Bede, in an autobiography. This short account of his life gives a telling insight into how he wished to be remembered for posterity:
I was born in the territory of the said monastery [Wearmouth and Jarrow], and at the age of seven I was, by the care of my relations, given to the most reverend Abbot Benedict, and afterwards to Ceolfrid, to be educated. From that time I have spent the whole of my life within that monastery, devoting all my pains to the study of the Scriptures, and amid the observance of monastic discipline and the daily charge of singing in the Church, it has been ever my delight to learn or teach or write.4
His legacy has resonated through many different fields. To theologians, he was an erudite biblical scholar, Doctor of the Church, and author of the first full-length tracts on the Temple and the Tabernacle. For historians, he was responsible for the seminal text on the Anglo-Saxon period. For cosmologists, his scientific treatise gave rise to our modern dating system. To textual scholars, he had a significant impact on biblical and patristic literature through his influence on manuscripts like the Codex Amiatinus. To archaeologists, he has provided details that have enabled them to locate such important sites as Yeavering. To art historians, his work provides a symbolic and imaginative framework to examine artefacts from the period.
Alongside his autobiographical account, there was also a later story that grew up around Bede and helped reinforce his piety. It recounts how, nearly blind in his old age, he was fooled by some students that he was preaching to a full church. He was in fact talking to an array of stones. He finished his sermon, and to the surprise of those poking fun at the rambling, blind old man, a choir of angels chanted ‘Amen, very venerable Bede’. This account has many obvious inconsistencies, and was surely designed to secure his status as ‘most venerable’. However, it reinforces the idea that Bede and his followers were conscious to control his public image and create a cultural context that fitted with the deeply religious work to which he dedicated himself. His reputation is one of the man with near blindness dedicated to pursuing the spread of the Christian message.
Other texts support the singularly significant role Bede played in firming up the new Church in England. The Anonymous Life of Abbot Ceolfrith describes how, after the plague of AD 686, only Bede and Ceolfrith kept the monastery alive in terms of singing the offices.5 As a result Bede is partly responsible for preserving Wearmouth–Jarrow. His role in its earlier troubles no doubt earned him a special place within the monastery and in the eyes of Ceolfrith. This explains the strong relationship that emerged between the two men, as revealed in a telling emotional account by Bede of the abbot’s departure and death. In accounting for the long break he had taken between writing books three and four of his Commentary of Samuel, he states:
Having completed the third book … I thought that I would rest a while, and, after recovering in that way my delight in study and writing, proceed to take in hand the fourth. But that rest, if sudden anguish of mind can be called rest, has turned out much longer than I had intended owing to the sudden change of circumstances brought about by the departure of my beloved most revered abbot; who, after long devotion to the care of his monastery, suddenly determined to go to Rome, and to breathe his last breath amid the localities sanctified by the bodies of the blessed apostles and martyrs of Christ, thus causing no little consternation to those committed to his charge, the greater because it was unexpected.6
The tone of this extract, and its emphasis on the suddenness of Ceolfrith’s departure, attest to a strong bond between Bede and the abbot, and also provide a uniquely human glimpse into the personal sufferings and emotional frailty of the dedicated scholar.
Yet, despite displaying moments of humanity and vulnerability in his works, Bede’s public image as a stoic, driven, focused scholar has survived the test of time, and he has continued to be perceived as a cornerstone of a strong and self-assured early Anglo-Saxon Church. In a time when the previous generation had been orally literate, but did not widely employ writing, he had the historical foresight to see that his version of the period could become canonical, shaping not just his own time, but how that time would come to be perceived elsewhere in the literate world and in the future.
His texts were so influential that the monastery of Wearmouth–Jarrow was akin to a famous publishing house, creating multiple copies of their bestselling author’s work. He records having written about sixty texts and, remarkably for this period, copies of almost all of them survive, standing as testament to his popularity. He was a master of rhetoric, and seems to have manipulated his material to suit his ends – the glorification of the Church and papacy, and the erasure of heresy and paganism from his nation. He was greatly concerned that the newly emerging eighth-century English Church should not be associated with heretical practices (such as the Pelagian heresy which dogged Britain in the fifth century) or paganism, which Gregory the Great sought to excise.
His work is almost too thorough in removing the saintly Christian figures and Church events from a context that would connect them with non-orthodox or pre-Christian connections – the very world outside his monastery’s doors. Unlike objects like the Franks Casket, which weave past and present belief systems together, Bede was a master of propaganda, who consistently applied a filter on all pagan beliefs and practices throughout his works. At times, however, he let the occasional detail slip through which paints a different picture of both him and the period in which he wrote. This is certainly the case with regards to his story of the poet Caedmon, which he alone records in detail.
In order to set up the miraculous gift that Caedmon receives directly from God, he has to contrast it with the shepherd’s life prior to his revelation. As a result, he gives an account of a pagan Anglo-Saxon hall: its feasting, recitation of heroic poetry and celebration of ‘comitatus’. Furthermore, after condemning the songs of the hall as ‘lying or idle’, he then records (possibly creates) the so-called ‘Caedmon’s Hymn’. This poem – apparently the oldest Old English poem to survive in manuscript form – occurs only in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History. While it is clear that it preserves a poetic tradition and set of techniques stretching back beyond Bede, it is intriguing that it is only he who records it, and it is possible that he adapted an existing poem himself.
Purely the fact that it is recorded in the vernacular suggests that Bede had an understanding and, indeed, an appreciation of pre-Christian poetic traditions.7 In describing his Latin translation of the text he states ‘it is impossible to make a literal translation, no matter how well written, of poetry into another language without losing some of the beauty and dignity’. So, in the account of Caedmon, Bede gives us a glimpse into the world around him; a world where the life of the hall was central, poetry was alliterative and enigmatic, and where the ‘guardian of mankind’ is shifting from heroic war-leader to a plethora of Christian saints, martyrs and godheads.
Bede gives us some of the few remaining insights into pagan Anglo-Saxon religion. Indeed, it is in his work that a clue to the worship of Odinn (Woden in Old English) is given, for he records how a local priest converted to Christianity and turned his back on his temple to Woden, deconsecrating it by casting a spear into its midst. The connection between Woden and spears is clear from other objects like the Finglesham buckle, but this is the only surviving textual evidence of this pagan ritual. Bede has acted as a reticent mouthpiece for this world.
While he gives us these tantalising glimpses, Bede was also, like a true spin doctor, able to do subtle things to influence his readers. This is clear in his treatment of one of the most potent symbols of the pagan Germanic religion – the raven, which was the sacred bird of Woden. This bird seems to have acted as a shorthand reference to Woden in the same way that a crucifix could denote a wearer as Christian. For example, a seventh-century gold and garnet pendant, found in Faversham, shows a triple spiral of ravens and would have been worn round the neck as a pendant. As Paulinus ordered the shooting down of a crow, Bede did something similar in terms of redefining the symbol of the raven. It has had a profound effect on Christian attitudes to this bird, right down to the present day. Indeed, we still tend to think of ravens as birds associated with death and evil, in contrast to their purer Christian siblings, doves. The clues to Bede’s intentions lie in the famous Codex Amiatinus.8
This gold and garnet pendant would have been strung together with others on a necklace. Fine gold filigree work gives texture to the background, while a triskele of three ravens radiates out from the centre. The eyes of the birds are picked out as cabochon gems, while the rest of the garnets are cloisonné.
Abbot Ceolfrith took this colossal manuscript with him as he departed for Rome from Wearmouth–Jarrow. He intended for it to be a present to the papacy from a devoutly orthodox scriptorium on the edges of the Christian world, and Bede seems to have been employed to ensure this gift was absolutely scrupulous throughout. Bede’s handwriting appears at crucial moments throughout the book, editing parts of the biblical text with the skill of an accomplished theologian and scholar.9 Manuscript additions and excisions can provide tantalising links with the minds of many centuries ago, and in the case of the Codex Amiatinus, Bede’s scribblings were of particular significance. This manuscript has continued to be copied verbatim as the earliest and best Vulgate text up to the present day. This means that his additions have made their way into the canonical text of the Bible. Bede didn’t just write history; he had a hand in rewriting the Bible.
How does this affect the raven? Well, there is one addition of particular significance: a small ‘non’ added into the Genesis account of Noah’s ark. It sounds like a minor point, but it has transformed the way the raven has been perceived by Christians. There were two main versions of the Bible that early Christians used – the Vulgate and the Old Latin.10 One was translated by Jerome from the original Hebrew, while the other relied on Greek translations. They diverge at points, and one such place is in Genesis 8:7:
VULGATE: (Noe … dimisit corvum) qui egrediebatur et revertebatur donec siccarentur aquae super terram.
(Noah … sent forth the raven) who was going out and was returning until the waters over the earth dried up.
OLD LATIN: (Noe … emisit corvum) ut videret utrum cessasset aqua et exiens non est reversus donec siccaret aqua a terra.
(Noah sent out the raven) in order that it might see whether the water had ceased and departing, it did not return until the waters over the earth had dried up.
It is clear that, in the Vulgate version, the raven went back and forth, unlike the Old Latin, where it simply failed to return. What happened with the Codex Amiatinus, however, is very revealing. Despite the fact that it was intended to be the definite Vulgate version of the Bible, Bede has added a small ‘non’ before ‘revertebatur’. It flies in the face of the Vulgate translation, but instead creates a negative action for the raven – he goes away and does not come back.
This little addition could be more loaded than at first appears. By making the raven a bird that did not return to the ark and help Noah, Bede has given it a new symbolic life. To so consciously and cleverly redefine this bird’s role in the Genesis story allowed Bede to cast a dark light on it, and align it with a new, negative set of connections.11 Bede was doing something deliberate to rework the imaginative world of the Anglo-Saxons, and he built on this in his patristic texts, where he casts the raven in ever more dark and dismal ways – it symbolised the heretic, those who betrayed their baptism, and those who would not achieve salvation.
Despite the fact that he was effectively rewriting the Bible to his own ends, Bede was playing a clever marketing game in taking a symbol of central importance to the pre-Christian world of Anglo-Saxon England and realigning its meaning. This casts his work in a different light and gives the impression that he was deliberately seeking to erase the pagan world of his people from the record. With this sort of intellectual religious cleansing in mind, Bede appears a very different character to the one painted by him and his followers. He wanted to be remembered as a saintly scholar, toiling away in a well-established monastery, with his mind and heart focused firmly on the papacy. He appears here, however, as a clever manipulator of the written text for his own religion’s ends.
Bede’s monastery was an oasis on the landscape, built in stone, boasting glazed windows and a thriving scriptorium. But it was that – an oasis. The surrounding environment was a far more complex and evolving place than even Bede’s dense and detailed writings seem to allow. He is largely responsible for creating this oasis, raising the profile of his unusual monastic environment and giving it a greater presence in the historical record than it perhaps enjoyed at the time. That is the power of the written word, and Bede knew it. He could create his own version of reality and pass it down through the centuries. He was a profound wordsmith, manipulator of facts and supreme weaver of new symbolic and imaginative worlds.
There is a particularly enigmatic object that now stands within a church in Dumfries, almost directly parallel with Wearmouth–Jarrow, on the western coast of the country, which highlights the way disparate worlds could be drawn together by eighth-century Northumbrian monks. Despite the fact that the object was made on the other side of the kingdom, the intellectual sophistication it displays recalls the work of Bede and the Wearmouth–Jarrow monks. The Ruthwell Cross is an eighth-century Anglo-Saxon high cross, now reconstructed from fragments discovered around the church site.12 Parts of the original are still missing, including the crossbeam, but it has been carefully reconstructed so that it now stands 5.5 metres high in a sunken section of Ruthwell Church.
The Ruthwell Cross is, of course, made of stone.13 The medium is directly associated with the Church, given Christ’s statements regarding Peter as his cornerstone and the apostles as pillars. What’s more, the papacy continued the artistic and architectural heritage of the Roman Empire, and as a result continued to build in stone, which in turn created statements of permanence and power on the landscape.
But it is important to note that what we see today in terms of the bare stone is merely the skeleton of the original piece. These crosses would have been plastered and painted, sometimes inlaid with gemstones or glass to add to the luxurious appearance. They were colourful and, some might say, garish objects. Using colour for highlights would, however, have made the imagery on the crosses much clearer to interpret. For example, a scene showing Cain and Abel could be coloured with red paint to emphasise that Cain had struck his brother. The bright colours would also have made them even more noticeable on the landscape, and enhanced their role as educational tools for spreading Christian imagery and narratives to the populace.
The Irish examples of high crosses are much better preserved than their English counterparts, as far fewer were systematically destroyed in the Reformation. Indeed, the ring-headed stone crosses of Ireland are so familiar that it has been traditional to think of them as emerging out of a Celtic context. It seems, however, that the Irish crosses evolved out of the earlier experiments in Anglo-Saxon England following the Synod of Whitby. The ring head that has become so closely tied with Celtic Christianity was an Irish development, designed to stop the cross arms collapsing. Earlier Anglo-Saxon examples were weak at the point where the heavy stone arms met the narrowing crosshead. By adding the ring, Irish sculptors were able to prop up the arms more effectively. So, rather than having great symbolic resonance, the ring head was designed as a technological development, intended to preserve the integrity of the cross head.
The arrival of Christianity within Anglo-Saxon England instigated new kinds of iconographically and stylistically complex art. From its inception, Christianity was founded upon the written word and stories from the Bible – Christ is even described as ‘the Word’ in John’s Gospel. Therefore, the newly converted Anglo-Saxons had to learn many new skills in order to become Christians. They had to learn Latin, the language of the Church; they had to learn to write and produce books; and they had to learn to build in stone. After the Synod of Whitby there was an explosion of artistic creativity, especially in the monasteries of the north, where there was a form of Northumbrian renaissance. One of its most exceptional products is the Ruthwell Cross.
The history of this cross is complex. It has been destroyed and buried – and then pieced back together in the nineteenth century.14 It consciously and cleverly combines the styles and runes of the pre-Christian artistic tradition with biblical inscriptions and figural imagery that were in tune with art being produced on the Christian Continent. The scenes on the Ruthwell Cross are both uniquely Anglo-Saxon and completely orthodox in their adherence to Christian iconography. Like the Franks Casket and Cuthbert’s coffin, it needs to be thought of as a three-dimensional object in the round, with each of the sides interacting with one another.
To understand the cross, it is essential to imagine it within its original setting. The cross was most likely designed to stand at the head of the nave in an Anglo-Saxon church, perhaps in the place where later rood screens stood.15 Were it positioned as such, then the east and west sides would face different audiences. To the west the cross would be visible to the congregation, while to the east the monastic and priestly men conducting the ceremony at the altar would be the intended audience.
The difference in the intended audience becomes clearer by examining the subject matter of the two sides.16 The face that would have been visible to the monks and priest contains two mysterious scenes. The first shows Christ, haloed, standing on two beasts which cross their front paws in adoration beneath his feet. And above this scene is an image of John the Baptist holding and pointing to a lamb. So what is the relevance of these scenes? The image of Christ seems to combine a passage from Psalm 90:13, where Christ treads on the asp and basilisk, lion and dragon, with the Canticle of Habakkuk, where the beasts of the desert bow down to him. This is a unique image within Christian art, but it coincides with the introduction in Rome of the Canticle of Habakkuk as part of the liturgy. The monks that gazed on this image could see it as a memo from the papacy, keeping them up to date with the latest liturgical developments.
And the scene of John the Baptist with the Lamb of God? The Ruthwell Cross is thought to date to the second half of the eighth century, when the papacy introduced the Agnus Dei – Lamb of God – chant to the liturgy, and images of the lamb proliferated throughout Christian Europe. Together, these two scenes indicate that the monks of Ruthwell wanted to remain orthodox in terms of creating Christian imagery that accorded with papal laws and canons. They show that the monks at the edge of the world were in tune with developments taking place at the Christian heart. The fact that these scenes faced the monks indicate that this sense of orthodox Christianity was important to them. Only the literate and educated monks could interpret such esoteric symbolism and understand the Latin inscriptions that run around each panel. At the base is a final image that has great monastic resonance: Paul and Anthony breaking bread. This refers to the account of the two desert fathers coming together for the Eucharist. It was a central premise of monasticism that monks came together to be alone, and this image at the foot of the Ruthwell Cross exemplified this ideal. These were not frequently depicted scenes, and only monks could make sense of them.
On the other face, in contrast, are scenes and inscriptions taken from the Gospels. At the base is an image of the Annunciation, with Mary greeted by the Angel Gabriel, while above Christ heals the blind man and has his feet washed by Mary Magdalene. Below the cross head, Mary and Martha come together. If this face of the cross is imagined as facing towards a lay population of recently converted Anglo-Saxons then their relevance becomes clearer. Rather than complex and esoteric images loaded with theological significance, this face shows scenes that would have been relevant to the people. They are important stories at the heart of the Gospels, and scenes that introduce the fundamental principles of Christianity. Christ performs miracles, forgives a sinner and is shown as being born human through his handmaid Mary.
These scenes humanise Christ and make Christianity relevant to the viewers. They too can benefit from miraculous cures, eternal forgiveness and the love of an empathetic God who took human form. What’s more, while the east face shows scenes of relevance to a monastic audience, the west face features women in all the scenes, and focuses on central human concerns like childbirth. The makers of the Ruthwell Cross were able to conceive of the viewers looking upon their work, and crafted their imagery to carry the most potent messages. This is incredibly sophisticated art, and the visual imagery is accompanied by inscriptions, as text and image weave together.17
Yet there are two more sides to this three-dimensional object, and the artists have not wasted the opportunity to make use of them. Facing south and north, the thin sides of the cross present a very different set of images. Instead of figural scenes separated by inscribed borders, these sides feature interlacing vine scrolls inhabited by birds and beasts who feed on the fruits of the vine. Not only do these sides reveal once again the Anglo-Saxon propensity for featuring animals and birds in their art, but they also show an attempt to understand a basic Christian premise by making use of native motifs. The idea of Christ as the True Vine, who nourishes and protects his followers, has been depicted here, with the vine actually surrounding and feeding the faithful, represented as birds and beasts. Just as the imagery seems drawn from a native context, so the text presents a surprise. Instead of Latin, the inscription that runs up and down both sides is in Old English and presented in runes. In fact, this is the longest-surviving piece of runic text from Anglo-Saxon England.
The runes are an extract from a longer poem, preserved in a later eleventh-century manuscript and known as The Dream of the Rood. This is part of the section included on the cross:
Then the young warrior, Almighty God, mounted the
Cross, in the sight of many.
I held the King, Heaven’s lord, I dared not bow.
They mocked us together. I was wet with blood
Christ was on the Cross.
But there quickly came from afar, many to the Prince.
I was sorely smitten with sorrow
wounded with shafts. Limb-weary they laid him down.
They stood at his head. They looked on him there.18
This is a truly unique version of the Crucifixion, written from the point of view of the Cross and casting Christ not as a victim, but as a hero in the guise of a Germanic warrior. The use of prosopopoeia allows the Cross to speak for itself, and to take on Christ’s suffering so that he is able to die a valiant death. This aspect of the Ruthwell Cross is intimately connected with the literary tradition of the Anglo-Saxon people. By combining this runic poem with interlacing animals, the artists of the Ruthwell Cross are making a powerful statement about the cultural identity of Anglo-Saxon Christians: they are orthodox and accord with the practices and teachings of the papacy; but they are also proud of their heritage, and see a role for their pre-Christian tradition in the service of the new Church. Furthermore, they are aware that they are poised between two worlds – that of their pagan Germanic past, and of the Christian future.
These complex high crosses, full of interlace, geometric panels and runic inscriptions, became regular statements on the landscape of the new Church’s power. Examples like the Bewcastle Cross carry over all these features verbatim, and indicate how much energy the Anglo-Saxons invested in their new art form. While Bede cannot be connected directly with these advertising billboards that the Church was erecting across the landscape, he would have endorsed their efforts in presenting Christian ideas to the populace to guide them away from the ignorance of their pagan ways. He used the written word to bend the minds of the English people towards a new world view, while the high crosses used visual messages in accordance with Gregory the Great’s instructions. But the intentions were the same: to bring an ideological change throughout the English populace, not just to those members of society targeted by the initial missions.
Bede is a central character within the world of Anglo-Saxon saints, and his connections with the other individuals covered by this volume are profound and telling. He shared a death day with St Augustine of Canterbury; he had met Wilfrid and Hilda; he trained under Biscop and Ceolfrith; and his body was taken from Jarrow to lie in the same grave as St Cuthbert in Durham. His works provide essential evidence for all aspects of life in Anglo-Saxon times, and have coloured many interpretations of the period. It remains of vital importance, therefore, to understand him and his motives clearly, for he has become the conduit through which so much of our understanding of Anglo-Saxon England flows. It is thanks to a later Northumbrian saint, however, that his importance was recognised and his legacy preserved. He was supported by Alcuin of York, who distributed his works across the Continent.
In the year that Bede died, AD 735, a new Northumbrian scholar saint entered the stage. Alcuin was probably born near York, where he subsequently received his education. Like Bede, he was dedicated to the church as a young child, and grew up within the family of clergy that served the cathedral. Also like Bede, Gregory’s mission to the English loomed heavy in his thoughts, and he owed his loyalty to the See of St Peter’s in Rome.19 He never lost his connection with his home town, and some touching correspondence with his old brothers of York survives, testifying to the nostalgic affection he held for this place throughout his life. Growing up within a bustling urban environment such as the city of York coloured his perceptions of the role of the Church. To him, Christians had to take the knowledge and guidance from civilised centres of learning out to the people. The heart of the Church lay within cities, not on hostile outcrops of rock or disconnected islands, and widespread urban renewal was a necessary part of spreading its messages.
While growing up in York, Alcuin would have witnessed the great impact that trade had in terms of strengthening and empowering the Church. As the major port along the River Ouse brought greater links with the Continent, it also brought the possibility of enriching the cathedral and monastery. When the church Wilfrid originally built in York burnt down in AD 741, there came an opportunity to rebuild the cathedral in a grand manner. Alcuin helped to design the new building of Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom), which he described as having glazed windows and thirty altars. No remains have been found of it, but in its description it sounds extremely lavish. It may have been round like the chapel in Aachen, the consummate architectural achievement of Alcuin’s later patron, Charlemagne, and it’s tempting to see similarities between the two. The site in York may have anticipated later Carolingian innovations, and Alcuin may have been instrumental in this.20
Northumbria had changed in the generation since Bede was writing so that, in Alcuin’s lifetime, it was firmly Christian, and the intrigues of the Church were no longer centred on converting pagans, but rather on the distribution of episcopal power. There had been much controversy over who would hold the bishop’s ‘pallium’ in the north. Lindisfarne had clung onto theirs with zeal. While the tension between the episcopal sees of Lindisfarne, Hexham and York had previously been an enduring problem, Alcuin witnessed the ascension of his home town to archiepiscopal see, rivalled in power only by Canterbury. He wrote a long and rhetorically sophisticated poem about the church, monastery and library at York. It can be read as an advert for the Church in York against the counter-claims of Hexham and Lindisfarne. Cuthbert’s role is played down, and virtually no mention is made of the Irish party. It’s pure rhetoric and a piece of clever propaganda, founded on the work of Bede, and, like Bede, what he leaves out is as interesting as what he emphasises. The idea of ‘Holy Wisdom’ seems to lie at the core of much of Alcuin’s work – he believes learning and teaching can save.
Alcuin witnessed a particularly successful relationship between Church and State that was fostered around York from the AD 730s to the AD 750s. The Archbishop – and Alcuin’s primary supporter – was Ecgberht, whose brother, Eadberht, was the King of Northumbria. Ecgberht had been a pupil of Bede, and under the joint governance of these brothers the region grew in power and reach. The school at York became highly influential, and introduced a form of university education by specialising in the seven liberal arts: grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. This was the education system developed by the Greeks, and creating a monastic school focused on such classical concerns allowed Alcuin to endorse and disseminate the work of Bede, who in his textual scholarship was the most important precursor to the Carolingian Renaissance.21 But he was also anticipating the wider changes that the renaissance would bring in terms of preserving and spreading the wisdom of the classical age.
Although Alcuin was a Northumbrian, raised in and around York, the majority of his working life was spent abroad.22 Like Wilfrid, Biscop and the Anglo-Saxon missionaries Willibrord and Boniface, who had taken Christian missions to the Continent, Alcuin travelled extensively, and made close bonds particularly with the Frankish Church. Alcuin was dedicated to both learning from and influencing the places he travelled to. He was effectively headhunted by the self-styled Holy Roman Emperor, Charlemagne, Ruler of the Carolingian Empire, and became a driving force behind his new approach to Christian learning and the arts.23 As a religious adviser to the Carolingian regime, Alcuin had the unenviable job of balancing the moral ambiguities of Charlemagne’s military career with his investment in scholarship and Christian education. It took a strong personality to forge such a lasting career within one of the most radical courts of its time, and yet Alcuin managed it.
The efforts of the Carolingian court were deliberate and politically motivated. During the seventh century, the previous powerful royal house, the Merovingians, was eroded by war and a sequence of rois fainéants (do-nothing kings) for whom power was exercised by their chief officer, the mayor of the palace. Charlemagne was descended from this line of ‘mayors’, so there is a sense in which his campaign to transform Western Europe may have been based on a desire to stress the legitimacy of his reign and that of his family. Creating a holier-than-holy imperial rule, concerned with crafting the perfect vision of a Christian emperor, was the method Charlemagne and Alcuin employed to whitewash the ruler’s legitimacy.
The greatest asset to the Carolingian family was the support of the papacy. While Charlemagne’s father, Pepin, was ruling the Frankish lands, the then pope, Zachary, decreed that he should be made a ‘true king’, despite the fact he had no legal claim to the throne. In turn, Pepin provided the weakened Vatican state with military support against the Lombards, and secured many major cities for the papacy. This gave the Carolingians legitimacy and a greater cause, since they were presented as holy leaders protecting the Church and spreading the Christian mission. It was in the name of evangelising that Charlemagne conducted one of his most bloody and controversial campaigns in Saxony, in the north-west corner of modern Germany.
Charlemagne was almost continually at war during his long reign, and while his battles against the Moors, Muslims and Lombards were bitter, one particular attack against the pagan Saxons was incredibly brutal. In AD 782 he imposed a law that all Saxons should convert to Christianity on pain of death. In response a campaign was led against him, but Charlemagne retaliated by ordering the death of 4,500 Saxon prisoners. Known as the Massacre of Verden, this was mass genocide, and provides a startling contrast to the guise of sacred Christian ruler that Alcuin and his fellow scholars had to present.
Alcuin was responsible for a good deal of the public façade of the imperial court. In some of his texts he appears to be akin to a modern-day spin doctor, who was supposed to control how the events of Charlemagne’s reign were perceived. His letters reveal that he was often homesick, confused about his goals and concerned by the almost fascistic manner in which the emperor sought to control every aspect of courtly and ecclesiastic creativity.24 Alcuin even reproached Charlemagne over his attempts to force people to convert, stating that belief can only emerge through free will. He had some success, for a few years later Charlemagne abolished the death penalty for paganism.
At Charlemagne’s court in Aachen, Alcuin became central to the intellectual pursuits of the scholars the emperor had drawn together. They worked to preserve ancient texts, making copies of pagan Greek and Roman literature within Christian scriptoriums. We get an insight into Alcuin as a young boy from an account he told to one of his students, Sigwulf. It tells how, when asleep beside a peasant boy, Alcuin had a nightmare that he was reproached for enjoying Vergil more than the Psalms. When he woke up he found that the peasant boy had slept through the Divine Office, and Alcuin had to protect him by singing the Psalms to ward off the devil. This shows that he had a complicated relationship with classical learning. Yet had Alcuin and those around him at Aachen not taken this potentially controversial decision to record the wisdom of non-Christians, most of the classical texts available today would have been lost. We would not have our collections of ancient texts were it not for these brave monastic scholars.
There is no doubt that under Charlemagne’s rule Christian art made radical strides. Carolingian manuscript illumination was decidedly classical in style, with figures represented in a natural manner, and drapery emphasised. For example, the Lorsch Gospels cover was made between AD 778 and AD 820, during the reign of Charlemagne. The cover panels are made of ivory, so very precious, and the imagery recalls Late Antique carvings in the naturalistic way the figures are represented. Those involved in the Carolingian Renaissance were not content simply to copy the texts of antiquity; they looked to the classical tradition for artistic inspiration too. Having amassed territories equivalent to the Western Roman Empire, the Carolingian Court were aware that they needed an artistic tradition to reflect their power. In contrast to the Byzantine Empire, which was gripped by iconoclasm in the late eighth century, the Carolingians defiantly clung to figural art, developing it to include more elaborate and realistically rendered figures for the purposes of creating narrative and devotional works.
The effects of the Carolingian Renaissance were felt close to Alcuin’s home of York, for a number of ‘Apostle shafts’ (high crosses with images of the Apostles up the front and back) appeared around the year AD 800 which bore the hallmarks of the art emerging from the powerful court of Charlemagne, Holy Roman Emperor.25 The Easby Cross, from near Richmond in North Yorkshire, shows the influence of the more naturalistic treatment of human figures and the elaborate drapery commonly found in Carolingian manuscripts. The heads of the Apostles, clustered together to prop up the shaft in a symbolic rendering of their role as pillars of the Church, display variety, and each has delicately carved hair and facial features. A similar cross shaft from nearby Otley, West Yorkshire, also shows the Apostles framed within architectural arches. The Anglo-Saxons were keen to maintain their native style too, however, as down the narrow shafts and along the back, animal interlace, knotwork and geometric designs balance the figurative images.
Alcuin stands as testament to the multicultural and international reach of the Christian Church in the early medieval period. It is tempting to think of this time like the Victorians did, as nasty, brutish and short, where people lived and died within a few miles of their shabby huts. But there are numerous exceptions to this picture. One who seems to embody the more modern notion of international business and travel is Alcuin. The Church was a binding force across continents, and the bureaucracy of supporting such an omnipresent institution meant that churchmen would travel vast distances. It is important to think of Alcuin in context. While cosmopolitan and worldly, he was born and raised in Anglo-Saxon England. The view of Christianity he had developed growing up in York left an imprint on him – that their faith had papal support and had developed strictly along orthodox lines. Charlemagne sought to propel both Church and State forward together into the ninth century, and with Alcuin’s support he was able to achieve incredible success. A remarkable achievement for an Anglo-Saxon saint.
The cross shaft at Otley, Yorkshire, is now in fragments, but it would have had busts of the apostles stretching up the sides. Each apostle is shown within an architectural frame, and they are given naturalistic details like finely carved hair and individual features.
However, the many successes of the late eighth and early ninth century in terms of developing the Church and its representatives received a damaging blow in AD 793. The event is recorded by Alcuin in a letter he sent to Aethelred, King of Northumbria:
We and our fathers have now lived in this fair land for nearly 350 years, and never before has such an atrocity been seen in Britain as we have now suffered at the hands of a pagan people … The Church of St Cuthbert is spattered with the blood of the priests of God, stripped of all its furnishings, exposed to the plunderings of pagans – a place more sacred than any in Britain.26
Vikings attacked the monastery at Lindisfarne, seizing treasure and massacring many monks. A haunting survival from the time shows Viking raiders, carved in stone, wielding axes and swords. This event marked the start of the Viking Age, and many more attacks on Anglo-Saxon monasteries were to follow. Times were changing, and the saints that had developed over the previous 200 years were no longer safe within their enriched monasteries to be preoccupied with Christian learning and prop up the royal households. The next wave of saints was very different, and their attempts to hold back the flood of pagans from across the North Sea are somewhat ironic, since this was the very direction from which the earlier Angles, Saxons and Jutes had travelled just 350 years earlier. It would take a new kind of saint, a royal saint, to stem this flood.