While the southern Britons were being driven ever further west by the steadily advancing Saxon tribes, the northern British kingdoms too were fighting for survival. In the sixth century, the land between the Forth and the Trent was divided into several Welsh-speaking Celtic lands. In south and west Yorkshire lay the ancient kingdom of Elmet, still remembered in local place-names. Further north was Rheged, which stretched from Carlisle in the west to North Yorkshire and Durham. Further north still was Gododdin, which sprawled over the Border hills from Stirling and Lothian to the Tyne. And in the far west, with its main fortified place at Dumbarton, lay the British lands of Strathclyde. The kingdoms took their names from their tribes or people. The people living in the area around Stirling, for example, were known as the Manaw Gododdin. There were probably other tribal kingdoms too, for example the lands centred on Edinburgh (Din Eidyn) and York. One Welsh poem speaks of no fewer than thirteen kings between the Trent and the Forth.
The ancient kingdom of Gododdin was unfathomably old. It evidently existed before the Romans came, for the Romans’ name for the tribe occupying this area, the Votadini, is a Latinized form of Gododdin. The kingdom had once again become an independent entity by the sixth century, possibly with its ‘capital’ on the well-defended crags of Trapain Law in East Lothian. Later the settlement seems to have moved to Din Eidyn, that is, Edinburgh Rock, where Edinburgh Castle now stands. Gododdin, like the other northern British kingdoms excepting only Strathclyde, was destined to vanish before its history was written down. Bede, who was writing in northern England almost within living memory of the British tribal kingdoms, barely mentions Rheged, Elmet or Gododdin. Were it not for the epic poetry of The Gododdin, probably composed for singing at feasts towards the end of the sixth century, to which can be added the shorter poems of the bard Taliesin, they would have vanished almost without a trace. Thanks to the poetry, we at least know that the men of Gododdin and the other British kingdoms fought a long and bitter war against the incomers.
The most honoured of the Celtic war-lords of the north was Urien of Rheged, praised by Taliesin as the ‘strong champion in battle’ and ‘the pillar of Britain’.1 A place was later found for him in Arthurian legend. Judging from the poems, Urien indulged in the endemic civil strife of post-Roman Britain, fighting his neighbours on all sides, from the Clyde to Severn. There was even praise for a raid in which Urien and his men carried off ‘eight-score cattle’. His greatest battle was at a place called Argoed Llwyfain in c.577 when he and his son Owain fought against ‘a fourfold’ army of Angles led by a man known only as Fflamddwn or ‘Firebrand’, and killed an important leader called Ulph. Though we know the fight was at a ford, and that it took place on a Saturday morning, its location is unknown. For a while after 577 the Britons seemed to have had the Angles on the run. ‘This the English know’, sang Taliesin, ‘Death was theirs, burnt are their homes’.
The Anglian kingdom in the north-east had been founded by Ida, who was remembered as the founder of the royal house of Northumbria. Ida established a ‘capital’ at Bamburgh rock, which he fortified with a timber stockade and later with a rampart of stone and earth. Ida’s successors fought against Urien and three other British kings. ‘Sometimes’, wrote Taliesin, ‘the enemy, and sometimes our countryman were victorious’. Urien’s greatest achievement was to broker a grand alliance with three British kings, Riderich of Strathclyde and two others of unknown provenance called Gaullauc and Morcant. Their joint forces pursued the Anglian leader, Hussa, and cornered him and his war-band on Holy Isle at Lindisfarne (Metcaud). Hussa was besieged for three days and nights. But just when they had him at their mercy, internal divisions resurfaced, and Urien was assassinated by one Lovan, a hireling of the ‘envious’ King Morcant.2 The British resistance continued for a while under Uwain’s son Owain, but when he too was killed, the path lay open for the Saxon Conquest of northern England.
Lindisfarne or Metcand, the site of a rare British victory against the Angles in the sixth century.
At some stage in this dimly remembered war of Briton and Angle the incident occurred that is celebrated in The Gododdin.3 It became a classic tale of heroism and sacrifice, and the names of those that had taken part were sung in smoky halls in the north and west for centuries afterwards. The poem describes a battle before the walls of a place called Catraeth, which has been identified with the Yorkshire town of Catterick.4 It takes the form of a lament for 300 warriors. It was composed by the bard Aneirin, who accompanied the 300 to war, and was apparently the only survivor. Two kings, Mynyddog Mwynfawr (meaning Mynddog the Rich) of Din Eidyn and Cynan of Gododdin, had raised a warrior army and feasted them for the space of a year; in the poem there are many backward glances to scenes of mead-drinking in torch-lit halls. Eventually the 300 set out and ride to death and glory at Catraeth, fighting against hopeless odds.
The Gododdin, therefore, commemorates a defeat. But in fighting to the death, true to the oaths they had taken, the ‘300 Gododdins’ set a splendid example to their descendants at a time when the fortunes of Celtic Britain were fading rapidly. They became the very epitome of what a war-band should be: faithful, courageous and true. Cadwallon, the last great British leader, was one of those who were inspired by The Gododdin; his own elegy refers to ‘the grief of Catraeth’.5
We can be sure that Catraeth was a real event for the poem was composed within living memory of the battle, when the names of the dead heroes were still familiar. Authorities differ as to exactly when the battle took place. Some assign it on historical grounds to the last decade of the sixth century, shortly after Urien’s death. The reason for this is that a near-contemporary poem describes Urien as ‘lord of Catraeth’ (Llyw Catraeth). However, since The Gododdin poem fails to mention him, the implication is that Urien was killed sometime before the battle took place. One of the Welsh annals, compiled centuries later, assigns the year 593 to the battle. As usual, however, the date is problematical for a different annal records a ‘great slaughter of Catraeth‘ in the year 570, when Urien was very much alive.6 Some believe also that the language and spelling of The Gododdin implies a date for the battle between 550 and 570.
Catraeth is almost certainly the ancient British spelling of Catterick in North Yorkshire. The town occupies what was then a strategic position on the Roman road of Dere Street, the main north road, where it crosses the River Swale. Catterick became a first-century Roman camp, and later a thriving small Roman town, Cataractonium, by the River Swale, just to the north of the present village. Though nothing of it remains above ground (and part of the site has been destroyed for ever by road widening), excavation has shown that ancient Catterick was a bustling place with smithies, leather workshops and even baths within the ramparts of the old camp.7 It was still an important place during the Dark Ages. Catraeth was the site of Urien’s caer or fortified hall, and a few decades later it had become an Anglian royal vill. According to Bede, King Edwin chose Catterick as the site of the most significant event in his reign: his baptism. A pagan Anglo-Saxon cemetery was excavated at Catterick close to the bypass and may well date from around the time of the battle.
By the late sixth century, Catterick had become a key town in the war of Britons and Angles. It lay close to both of the early Anglian kingdoms, Bernicia in the north, and Deira to the south, and was also on the boundary between the coastal lowlands and the Pennines. Clearly the place was a threat to the expansionist plans of the Angles. It seems that by the time of The Gododdin they had succeeded in capturing it – perhaps this event and not that of the poem was the ‘great slaughter’ mentioned in the annal. As Professor Alfred Smyth has pointed out, the ‘control of Catterick secured the Yorkshire lowlands and consigned the Britons henceforth to an exclusively “highland’’ role’.8 The battle celebrated in The Gododdin represented the last forlorn attempt to retake Catterick and so contain the Anglian advance.
Their names indicate that Mynyddog’s warriors came from many lands. Nearly all were young men. The core of the army was Mynyddog’s own bodyguard, his household men. But there were also fighting men from Gwynedd, and from south Wales, like Isag, Gwyddno’s son. More famous fighters came from far and wide, including a man from ‘green Uffn’ and Pictish warriors from beyond the Forth, if that is meant by ‘from beyond the Bannog’. The tribes spoke related Celtic languages remarkably similar to modern Welsh, and would probably have understood one another. The poem individualizes each warrior. Bradwen was so strong he could hold a wild wolf by the mane. Hyfaidd was a veteran killer who had notched up the corpses of ‘five fifties’ (or so he no doubt boasted). Blaen was a dandy: ‘beautiful he burned in gold and purple, riding his well-fed horses’. Caradog was a Schwarzenegger-like character who was wont to ‘rush into battle, a wild boar, an armed bull, killer of three kings, he fed wolves by hand’. They were led by three kings, Cynri, Cynon and Cynrhain. Mynyddog the Rich evidently preferred to remain in his hall on Edinburgh rock.
The 300 fighters were all freemen, even aristocrats. No fewer than eighty are named by the poet. Presumably men of such high status would have been attended by a retinue; at one point the poet refers to ‘servants carrying their shields’. If so, the army of Gododdin would have numbered considerably more than 300. The weapons of choice for these mounted warriors were swords and broad-bladed spears, with a knife on their belt. They carried light round shields, some decorated with ‘devices’ or gold filigree-work. The Celtic warrior went to battle looking at his best. They wore helmets with cheek and neck-guards, and some had ‘steel-blue’ mail. The warrior Owain, for example, wore ‘a coat of mail over his crimson undershirt’, and is described elsewhere as wearing multi-coloured (painted?) armour. According to the poet, all the 300 wore golden torques around their necks: ‘Men who went to Catraeth/ famous in gold collars’, he writes. Over their mail the warriors had slung colourful cloaks of red and purple. The lines at the start of The Gododdin convey how the young, high-born Celtic warrior would like to have been remembered:
Man’s nature, youth’s years,
is bravery in battle:
swift thick-maned stallions
under the thigh of bright youth,
a broad light shield on
a light fast horse’s crupper,
blue, shining swords and
gold and ermine tapestry.
Did the Gododdin army fight on horseback? ‘It was usual for powerful men to defend Gododdin in battle riding quick horses’, says the poet, and in several places he describes how the ‘great wave of our army’ broke against the Saxon wall, splintering their shields with their ‘dark-collared swords’. Thus Cydywal ‘rushed to the attack . . . wherever he fought he left splinters of smashed shields. In battle he felled a forest of stiff spears; he shattered the front line of whole armies.’
But in other places Aneirin seems to be describing an infantry battle. ‘They loved attacking with their wild shields and their spears’, he writes, conjuring up a scene of close-ranked foot-soldiers advancing with spears levelled behind larger shields, one of which is described as being ‘like a cattle-pen’. Elsewhere he describes a ‘battle of spears’, and there are passing references to the army forming up in ranks or squares and presenting a ‘fortress’ or a wall of shields. One hero attacked at the head of a battering-ram of shields, evidently a tried-and-tested tactic, ‘crashing like thunder. . . he tore and ran through with spears above the place he rent with swords . . . Erthgi made armies howl.’ The lord of Gododdin, the poet tells us, placed his best men in the front line. In defence they were a human palisade, but they were equally skilful in attack when swords were used to smash through the enemy line of shields.
In the poem the ‘Saxons’ appear only as an amorphous mass (‘England’s jumbled host’), armed mainly with shields and spears. They prevailed only because of their overwhelming numbers: 100,000 claims the poet at one point; another text of the poem says 54,000 (possibly a poetic construction from ‘nine score around each one’). Evidently the Britons were outnumbered. Who led the Saxons? If the battle was fought around 590–600, the leader is likely to have been Aethelfrith of Bernicia (592–617), of whom more later. If earlier, it could have been Aethelfrith’s father, Aethelric, or Adda ‘Thick-knee’, the Bernician leader who took York c.580, or even Theodoric, Urien’s arch-enemy. To assemble a large enough force to defend Catterick and beat off the elite horsemen of Gododdin, the various tribes must have been united under some charismatic figure. King Aethelfrith, whose vigorous smiting of his neighbours Bede compared with King Saul, would have fitted the bill.
The Battle of Catraeth seems to have begun at dawn, perhaps in an attempt to take the town by surprise. Catterick was well-defended behind earth walls with the River Swale to the north. Dere Street still crosses the river by an ancient bridge which must have had a Roman predecessor since the river is unfordable. Assuming the ‘Gododdins’ had taken the only direct road from the north they would have encountered fierce resistance at the bridge, yet the poem mentions neither a river nor a walled settlement. Perhaps instead the battle took place north of the river on open land suitable for cavalry. Morris suggested a location at the pre-Roman earth-works of Stanwick in the angle of an ancient road fork at Scots Corner9 – though, if so,it would suggest that the men who ‘went to Catraeth’ never actually got there, for Scots Corner lies ten miles further north. Or they might have used their knowledge of the Pennine hill-country to bypass the town and attack from the moors to the west, where the army garrison of Catterick lies today. Given the poem’s lack of detail one could speculate endlessly about where the battlefield might have been. All we know is that the result was complete annihilation. We are led to believe that they all fought to the death, in some cases slaying seven or nine times their number before being slain in turn amid images of iron, blood and wooden splinters. With their blood, says Aneirin, they bitterly repaid the ‘ensnaring mead’ they had drunk:
Though they were slain, they slew,
none to his home returned . . .
Short their lives,
long the grief
among their kin . . .
They were slain, they never grew grey . . .
From the army of Mynyddog, grief abounded,
Of the three hundred, only one returned.
The enemy dead were normally left as food for crows, but, as the bodies of some warriors were returned to their homelands to be buried under ‘green mounds’, perhaps they were recovered by retainers under a flag of truce. The defeat was the beginning of the end for the Gododdin. Din Eidyn fell to the English in 638. But the final days of Gododdin echoed not to blood and thunder but wedding bells. Around 640, Urien’s great-grand-daughter married Aethelfrith’s son Oswy. The old kingdom of the Gododdin was carved up between Northumbrian England, British Strathclyde, the Picts of Fortriu and the Scots of Dal Riata. Aneirin had sung its swan-song.
Aethelfrith was the first of the great kings of northern England. He was the son of Aethelric, killed in battle by the Britons of Rheged, and father of seven warrior sons, including the mighty kings Oswald and Oswy. Aethelfrith was also one of the last of the pagan English kings. He was as ruthless with priests as he was with enemy warriors. Bede describes him as a powerful and ambitious man and one who ‘ravaged the Britons with more cruelty than all other English leaders’.10 Evidently he was also cunning: Nennius refers to him as ‘Aethelfrith the Artful’. During his reign of twenty-five years, Aethelfrith over-ran much of the north from the Borders to Chester and the Trent, exterminating or enslaving the inhabitants and opening the area to English settlement. It is largely thanks to him that the villages of Lancashire and Cumbria from the Solway to the Mersey have English, not Welsh names. Bede applied to Aethelfrith the chilling words of blessing that the biblical patriarch Jacob addressed to his youngest son, Benjamin: ‘Benjamin shall ravin as a wolf; in the morning he shall devour the prey, and at night he shall divide the spoil’.
The advance of the English under Aethelfrith alarmed Aedan, king of the Scots of Dal Riata. Aedan mac Gabhrain was a descendant of Irish warrior-settlers who had established a kingdom in the west in what is now Argyll. He was a Christian of the Celtic Church and a friend of St Columba, the famous Irish saint and founder of the monastic settlement on Iona. He was on good terms with the neighbouring Britons of Strathclyde and, like them, must have been grieved by the debacle at Catraeth. Aedan had suffcient force of character and sense of direction to make him the natural leader in the fight against the English. To defeat Aethelfrith he raised in the year 603 a coalition army, uniting his own following from Dal Riata with men from what was left of the British kingdoms and Irishmen from Tara in modern Ulster.
This united Celtic army, all sources agree, was of exceptional size. We are given some impression of the size of the Dal Riatan levy in a contemporary document which shows that Aedan’s homeland could levy 1,200 fighting men at any one time.11 Adomnan’s Life of Columba mentions a battle in which the Dal Riatan Scots suffered 303 casualties, amounting to perhaps a third of their number. However among Aedan’s allies was the brother of the high-king of Ireland, Mael Umai (Maeluma), Baetan’s son, who led a substantial army of his own. Hence Aedan’s army might have numbered upwards of 2,000 men, which made it an exceptionally powerful force for the time.
The Anglian or English host was led by Aethelfrith’s brother, Theodbald, and by Hering, son of the Hussa besieged at Lindisfarne by Urien. Both men were accompanied by their hearth-troops, and evidently fought in separate divisions. With these elite troops we might imagine some less well-armed levies, but it is likely that the English army was smaller than Aedan’s. The hearth-troops were experienced in war, and rode to battle, though most of the fighting was probably on foot. Was Aethelfrith himself present? Both Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle imply that he was, but the latter also states that ‘Hering, son of Hussa, led the army thither’. Perhaps Hering was a battle commander, a dux bellorum, much as the original non-royal Arthur was said to be.
The two armies clashed and fought at a place called Degsastan (or Daegsan Stane), ‘that is, “Degsa’s Stone”’. Bede described it as a famous battle, and one of the largest in the history of England up to that point. Its location is not known for certain, but Degsastan has been plausibly identified with Dawston Rigg at the head of Lidderdale in the Scottish borders. It has been argued that the Old English Degsastan would have become Daystone, not Dawston, but such similar-sounding words are easily corrupted. The battle is said to have taken place in the narrow valley where the Dawston Burn joins Liddel Water at Saughtree. There are nearby place-names like ‘Bloody Bush’ and Cat Cairn (Cat is early Welsh for ‘battle’), which suggest a persistent memory of ancient strife.12
Of the battle itself, we know only that it was very bloody and that the English won after a hard-fought struggle. Aedan’s army was all but annihilated, and the Dal Riatan king fled the field with a small following. One source claims that the Irish leader Mael Umai was killed, but probably in error, since in another annal he reappears in Ireland some years later.13 It is possible that Aedan’s son Domingart was slain at Degsastan, since Adomnan’s Life of Columba states that he was killed ‘in a rout in battle with the Saxons’. The English losses were also heavy. Theodbald and his household men were cut off and slain to a man, suggesting that his division fought separately from Hering’s. Degsastan was a decisive victory. ‘From that day until the present [c.730)’, wrote Bede, ‘no king of the Scots in Britain has dared to do battle with the English’.
In the magazine Miniature Wargames,14 Guy Halsall had a heroic try at reconstructing the Battle of Degsastan. In his interpretation the English occupied a strong defensive position on rising ground along the south side of the Dawston Burn, with a reserve on the flattish hill-top above. Aedan’s army, consisting of units of British, Irish, Scottish and Pictish warriors fighting on foot attacked across the stream. Aedan’s army is guesstimated at 5,100 to Hering’s 3,200, but the game assumes that the English are better motivated and better armed. When it is played out in this way, the battle is always close-fought and either side can win. The last time Halsall played it, attempted outflanking movements by the Celtic allies were defeated while in the centre the English smashed through the weakened line giving the victory to Aethelfrith. It might have happened like that, and there again of course it might not! Dark Age alliance-armies have a poor record against presumably smaller but more tight-knit, better-led forces. A similarly ‘immense’ but disunited northern alliance came to grief at Brunanburh, 300 years later, as did the unlikely Welsh–Saxon alliance at Winwaed (see below), defeated by a smaller but tighter force led by Oswy, Aethelfrith’s son.
Had Aedan won, the history of northern England might well have taken a different course. The English would have been contained in the lowlands and Britain could have developed as an island of roughly equal halves with Anglo-Saxon lowlands and broadly Celtic uplands. Degsastan was a milepost in the development of Saxon England, and paved the way for Northumbrian power over the next century.
Despite his victory at Degsastan, Aethelfrith’s ambitions lay in the south. He had effectively subjugated the Anglian kingdom of Deira (broadly modern Yorkshire) and his conquests brought him to the Humber and the Trent. Between 613 and 616 he led an army to Chester, then known as Carlegion, the great Roman ‘city of the legions’, a still-mighty city behind its high walls on the north bank of the Dee. Chester was a British/Welsh city, whose defence was in the hands of one Solomon (Selyf) ap Cynan, son of the king of Powys (a Welsh kingdom between the Dee and the upper Severn). There are cryptic hints in early Welsh poetry that the whole power of north Wales had come to the aid of Chester.15 Bede’s reference to the conduct of the ‘faithless Britons’ could suggest that they had paid tribute to Aethelfrith and generally appeased him, but subsequently repudiated him. More likely Bede was referring to the Celtic Church’s rejection of Roman authority (see below). To him the Celts were heretics.
Degastan as imagined by Guy Halsall
However it came about, the Battle of Chester is remembered mainly for the massacre of the British priests that took place there; the Welsh annalist recalled it as ‘the massacre of the saints’.16 Evidently the British forces marched out of the city to confront Aethelfrith in the fields outside the city walls. Before battle was joined, Aethelfrith noticed a large number of monks gathered there to pray for a British victory under a military guard led by one Brocmail. The monks were from the monastery of Bangor-on-Dee near Wrexham, and they had fasted for three days in preparation. According to Bede, the ‘prayer-army’ of monks was divided into seven groups, each under its own head, ‘and none of them contained less than three hundred monks’.17 More plausibly, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says there were 200 monks, although that is still rather a lot for a single monastery. Possibly among them was Iago ap Beli, a member of the royal house of Gwynedd, who had turned monk, as royal children and even retired kings often did in the seventh century.
Told who they were, the pagan Aethelfrith retorted that ‘If they are crying to their God against us, they are fighting even if they do not bear arms’. He thereupon directed his first onslaught against the monks, who were promptly deserted by Brocmail and his men. The monks were slaughtered to a man. This, Bede tells us with uncharacteristic spite, was the fulfilment of St Augustine’s prophecy that ‘if the Welsh will not have peace with us (i.e. the Roman church), they shall perish at the hands of the Saxons’.
There are few other details about the battle, and the battlefield probably lies under the northern suburbs of the modern city. All we know is that Aethelfrith ‘destroyed the rest of the accursed army, not without heavy losses to his own forces’.18 As a result, Chester became an English city, and Cheshire an English county. It seems to have represented the culminating point of Aethelfrith’s campaign of conquest to settle the north-west England with warrior-farmers.
Just as Aethelfrith’s earlier successes alarmed his northern neighbours, so his excursions into the English Midlands brought him into conflict with the Saxon king of East Anglia, Raedwald. Scarcely noticed in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Raedwald was immortalized in death by the riches of his probable burial chamber at Sutton Hoo. Thanks to the Sutton Hoo treasures we can picture him in his elaborate, embellished helmet, his pattern-welded sword worn on a decorated belt with its huge, solid-gold belt-buckle, and his great cloak with its gorgeous clasps worn over a tunic of mail. He was a man of the new age, half-Christian, half-pagan, sanctified in his kingship but adhering to the old ways and surrounded by the trappings of wealth and prestige.
The immediate cause of conflict between the two English kings was the presence at Raedwald’s court of Edwin (Eadwine), heir to the kingdom of Deira. Aethelfrith at first tried to bribe his fellow king to have Edwin assassinated. When that failed, he demanded that Edwin be handed over. Instead, Raedwald decided it would serve his interests better if he reinstated Edwin in his kingdom and got rid of the troublesome Aethelfrith at the same time. Secretly and speedily, Raedwald used his wide-ranging power as a bretwalda to gather together a large army from his extensive imperium in southern and eastern England. With Edwin in tow, he set out towards York in the summer or early autumn of 616.
He was in luck. Aethelfrith was left with insuffcient time to summon his full strength. The Bernician king unwisely gave battle on the east bank of the River Idle, the border between the English kingdoms of Mercia and Deira. Heavily outnumbered, Aethelfrith went down fighting – but not before Raedwald’s son Raegenhere had also been killed. The Battle of the River Idle reinstated Edwin on the Deiran throne and drove Aethelfrith’s own brood of seven sons into exile. The battle probably took place where the Roman road from Lincoln to Doncaster forded the river at the Yorkshire village of Bawtry. Excavations in 1983 determined the exact site of the crossing a few hundred yards north of the present road bridge. The Roman road, which, given its importance, had probably been kept in good repair as far as possible, crossed the river floodplain on a causeway of oak timber piles on a layer of gravel. We can therefore imagine the battle taking place around the ford, with Raedwald’s men attempting to force the crossing and break through Aethelfrith’s lines on the far side.
According to Bede, Edwin became the most powerful king England had yet seen, with an ill-defined imperium or lordship stretching over a confederation of English kingdoms from Kent to the Scottish borders, and even at one point into Wales. His power rested on personal alliances but also, of course, on force. He consolidated English gains in the north by expelling the last British king of Elmet, made war on the Welsh in Gwynedd and Anglesey, and even took possession of the Isle of Man. But as well as making war, Edwin also upheld the peace. A century later, said Bede, the proverb still ran that in the days of good King Edwin a woman could carry her newborn babe across Britain from end to end without fear, unlikely as it may seem. On his horseback perambulations across Britain surrounded by his thegns, Edwin was preceded by a standard similar to those carried at the head of Roman legions and featuring a globe mounted on a spear.19 As a baptized Christian, Edwin received the approval of clerical writers like Bede. Even so, he comes across not only as the first king of the English but as the first all-round ‘Mr Anglo-Saxon nice guy’!
Of course some parts of Britain did not see Edwin in that light at all. To the Welsh, for example, he was ‘Edwin the Deceiver’. The bitterest of his enemies was Cadwallon ap Cadfan of Gwynedd, whom Edwin had at one point driven from his kingdom to cower on the tiny island of Priestholm (Puffin Island) off the east coast of Anglesey. Cadwallon demonstrated the latent power that still remained in the British kingdoms by moving across the Pennines to strike at the English settlements while Edwin was preoccupied in Gwynedd.
In 632, in a mighty alliance with Penda, the ambitious new king of Mercia, Cadwallon’s army marched on York, very probably along the same route that Raedwald had used seventeen years before. This time it was Edwin who was caught off guard. On 12 October, the two armies clashed at the Battle of Haethfelth, whose name in modern English is Hatfield. In the Welsh annals, where the battle is called Meigen (Gueith Meicen), its date is moved backwards rather improbably to the Kalends of January, that is, to New Year’s Day.
Saxon Haethfelth was both a settlement and also the name given to a sub-province of low-lying land between the Don and the Humber. It was a desolate no-man’s-land, the boundary between what Bede called ‘the southern and northern English’. Like Aethelfrith before him, Edwin had probably rushed to these borderlands to defend his homeland with whatever forces he could muster. It was not enough to prevent an annihilating defeat. We can imagine Cadwallon, as his bard remembered him, ‘riding in the front rank enclosed in gleaming iron’.20 The battle was hard fought but at the end of it Edwin and his son Osfrith (the Welsh annals say two sons) both lay dead. Edwin’s hearth-troops, who had shared his exile, also shared his fate, and his entire army was scattered and destroyed. Much later accounts of the battle imagined Edwin fighting over the corpse of his son with his retainers lying dead around him until at dusk he too was cut down, the westering sky turning blood-red behind him.21 Also killed in the battle was Penda’s brother, Eobba. Edwin’s wife and family escaped by sea to Kent, with the aid of his bishop, Paulinus. The dead Edwin’s head was cut off and carried north in triumph to York.
Where was the battle fought? Haethfelth covered a large area south of the upper Humber, of which the modern Hatfield Chase is but a part. Much of it is still heath and bog, though notoriously reduced to a sterile blackboard of bare peat by modern peat-cutting machines. The exact site of battle is uncertain, but it may have taken place on or near the Roman road, perhaps just east of Doncaster where the Roman road crosses the River Thorne, in an area now covered by suburbs and the M18 motorway. Local tradition, recorded in the diary of the seventeenth-century Hatfield antiquary, Abraham de la Prynne, placed it at The Lings near Hatfield, where a supposed burial mound called the Slay-Pits stood at the confluence of Lings Lane and the A18.
However it is more likely that Bede’s Haethfelth lay well to the south near the Nottinghamshire village of Edwinstowe on the edge of Sherwood Forest. Edwinstowe is an ancient settlement recorded in the Domesday Book as Edenstou, and seems to be connected with King Edwin. Edwinstowe has a fine church, but there was also a chapel at nearby Cuckney, now incorporated into Cuckney church, which has stood there since at least the thirteenth century, when a hermit was given a stipend to live and pray there by King John himself.22 Nearby farms called Hatfield Grange and High Hatfield provide another link with Bede’s Haethfelth. Furthermore there is a defensible position for Edwin’s army at Cuckney Hill which is crossed by Leeming Lane, the old Mansfield–Doncaster road. Finally, the chance discovery of some 200 adult skeletons at Cuckney Church in 1950 suggests some catastrophic event in the distant past, such as a battle. The convergence of possibilities makes Cuckney the most likely site of Edwin’s last stand.23 Could this be the expected battlefield church, where the headless body of the king was hidden from his enemies after the battle?
The bleak ‘wastes’ of Thorne Moor and Hatfield Chase may be the scene of Edwin’s defeat at the hands of Penda and Cadwallon. There is a nearby panel about the battle.
Old print of Edwinstowe church in Sherwood Forest, associated with the martyred King Edwin.
After Haethfelth, Cadwallon and Penda devastated the defenceless lands of Edwin without mercy. One of the Irish annals mentions the ‘kindling of fires in the land of Elmet’ (south Yorkshire) and adds that York itself was set on fire. Archaeological excavation found that the Roman walls of York were rebuilt later in the century, suggesting that they were either in disrepair or had been demolished by Cadwallon. Spadework has shown that Edwin’s royal hall at Yeavering was also burned. ‘A terrible slaughter took place among the Northumbrian church and nation’, wrote Bede, ‘more horrible because it was carried out by two commanders, one of whom (Penda) was a pagan and the other (Cadwallon) a barbarian more savage than any pagan.’ The latter was ‘set upon exterminating the entire English race in Britain, and spared neither women nor innocent children’. The Welsh, for their part, praised Cadwallon as a great hero, ‘a furious fiery stag’ who maintained the honour of the Welsh nation and was generous to those who served him.
This was clearly a vendetta war, carried out in revenge for the ravaging of Chester and north Wales, and in the name of the ruined Celtic nations of northern England. Bede’s condemnation of Cadwallon is the more severe because, as a member of the Celtic Church, the latter saw the Roman Church of Edwin and Paulinus as an alien institution, and persecuted it accordingly. The dead Aethelfrith’s seven sons were invited to return from their places of exile. However they soon fell foul of Cadwallon, who had no reason to love the sons of the tyrant of Chester. One, Osric, he slew in battle during the summer of 633, and for good measure he had another, Eanfrith, assassinated. Later the names of these two kings were expunged from the record: perhaps to appease Penda, they had renounced the true faith, a crime considered worse than any war or massacre. For a year, Cadwallon, ‘the last of the Britons’ ruled the north, but ‘not as a king but as a savage tyrant’.24.
The eventual deliverer of the northern English was Oswald, another of the sons of Aethelfrith, who had converted to Christianity and spent several austere years as a monk on Iona. Oswald succeeded his two older brothers as king of Bernicia. In the forthcoming battle he was probably aided by his associate and possible kinsman, Domnall Brecc of Dal Riata, with whom Oswald had spent part of his long exile. Michelle Zeigler has suggested that he was also accompanied by Irish war-bands, as well as the sons of Aethelfrith’s hearth-troops, who had, as usual, shared their lord’s exile.25 Cadwallon, who was evidently set on exterminating the entire Bernician royal line, moved north with an ‘irresistible’ force. The two clashed at a place called Hefenfelth or Heavenfield. This was an ancient place-name even at the time of the battle, known by the Romans as Caelestis campus, that is, ‘the heavenly field’. It lay, says Bede, ‘on the northern side of the wall which the Romans built from sea to sea’, that is, of course, Hadrian’s Wall. Evidently a well-known pagan holy site, it was to play a resonant part in this most supernatural of battles.
Heavenfield: the Church of St Oswald stands amid trees, probably on the site of the ‘Heavenly Field’. A wooden cross has been erected by the roadside to commemorate Oswald’s victory over Cadwallon. There is a nearby panel about the battle.
Assuming that Oswald had returned to the traditional seat of Bernician kings at Bamburgh, it is likely that he had chosen the North Tyne valley around Hexham to muster men from Bernicia. Three north–south roads converge at Hexham, which is also close to the Roman road that ran along the south side of the wall from Carlisle to Jarrow (the site of Bede’s monastery). Assuming that Cadwallon mustered his force at York, he probably used the helpfully straight Roman road of Dere Street to march north to deal with the emergency. He could reach Hexham from York in perhaps a dozen marches. Oswald was waiting for him and had time to choose his battlefield. It may be that superstition as much as military necessity governed the choice. Finding themselves close to the Heavenly Field, Oswald decided to take advantage of any latent powers it might retain by hastily making and erecting a tall wooden cross. And it was the king himself rather than, as one might expect, a priest, who took charge of the ceremony, as Bede relates:
When the hole was dug in which it was to stand, the king seized the cross himself with the ardour of his faith, placed it in the hole, and held it upright with both hands until the soldiers had heaped up the earth and fixed it in position. Thereupon he raised his voice and called out to the whole army, ‘Let us kneel together and pray to the almighty, ever-living and true God to defend us in His mercy from the proud and fierce enemy; for He knows we are fighting a just cause for the preservation of our whole race’.26
This was the story Bede and his contemporaries knew, three generations on. The battle had by then acquired strong providential overtones, but there is no reason to doubt the essential truth of the story. Oswald was appealing to both the Christians and the pagan traditionalists in his ranks by invoking the unseen powers by prayer. A wooden cross could be adapted without too much diffculty as a totemic world-tree or sacred pillar. Christianity was still new to these conservative tribes, and the English were used to seeing their king lead religious rituals. Oswald’s cross-making might have been an act of piety, but it was also an effective unifying gesture.
Another Oswald legend, from Adomnan’s Life of Columba, has the English king lying in his tent on the eve of the battle when the great Irish saint appeared before him in heavenly guise, a towering figure touching the clouds and covering the English camp with his shimmering robe. The spirit of Columba gave Oswald the same assurance that God had given Joshua: ‘Be strong and unafraid, for your foes shall be put to flight and your enemy delivered into your hands.’27 It has been suggested that the figure of Columba could just as easily have seemed to be Woden, the chief of the Germanic gods who granted victory and feasted slain warriors in Valhalla. Certainly it would be surprising if a newly converted English king, though certainly zealous in his faith, did not retain the world-view of his father and ancestors.
After all these signs and portents, the battle itself reads as an anticlimax. Oswald’s army ‘advanced against the enemy at the first light of dawn (and) won the victory that their faith deserved’.28 We are led to assume that the result was preordained and that Oswald’s religious fervour won the battle. That being so, the actual tactical details were neither here nor there. Perhaps Cadwallon made some blunder, or his hearth-men, weary from campaigning so far from home, were not on their best form. Bede tells us that Cadwallon was slain at a place called Denisesburn which he translates as Denis’s Brook. Denisesburn has been identified with Rowley Burn, a stream that flows into the valley of Devil’s Water between Hexham and Corbridge, several miles south of the wall. If so, the great Welsh king was presumably slain during a long pursuit that followed the battle.
An extra crumb of evidence has come from chance finds, in the fields by the B6318 south of the wall, of fragments of human bones and weaponry. Putting these clues together, it would seem that Hefenfelth was a running battle, starting somewhere near the Roman wall and ending up several miles to the south of it. If Bede is right (and, as a wall-dweller himself, he was in a good position to know), Oswald’s camp was on one side of the wall and Cadwallon’s on the other. Who crossed the wall? The implication of Bede’s dawn attack is that Oswald did, and that after the first clash there was a running battle with Cadwallon’s force retreating southwards pursued by the enemy. The actual battle was fought south of the Heavenly Field, possibly nearer to Hexham. The Welsh annals call this battle Cantscaul, a name derived from the Old English name for Hexham and meaning ‘enclosure of the young warrior’.29 Perhaps the battlefield therefore lies somewhere between Hexham and the Rowley Burn.
Hadrian’s Wall, near Housesteads. Heavenfield in 634 is the only known battle to have been fought there.
Hefenfelth became a place of pilgrimage for the brothers of the church at Hexham. On the anniversary of Oswald’s death ‘they kept vigil for the welfare of his soul, recited the psalter and offered the Holy Sacrifice [i.e. said Mass] for him at dawn’. Within Bede’s own lifetime, they founded a church at the place where Oswald had raised the cross. Nothing remains of the Saxon church, but it probably occupied the same space as the present Church of St Oswald’s on its hill-top half-hidden in a clump of trees. A wooden cross was erected by the B6318 roadside nearby in the 1930s, and this is now accompanied by an information board about the battle. Unfortunately, nothing remains of Hadrian’s Wall at this point; perhaps they plundered its stones to build the church and its settlement.
King Oswald inherited Edwin’s ‘wide rule’ over England and was known in his lifetime as rex Saxonum, king of all the Saxons. Bede goes further and claims him to be lord of all the nations and provinces of Britain, whether Anglo-Saxon, Pictish, British, Welsh or Irish. Oswald has always enjoyed a good press as the king who converted the heathen and invited his associate, Aidan, to found the monastery on Lindisfarne. Much of his power rested on personal ties of kinship and obligation between rulers. Bede presents Oswald as a kindly and generous king, a man beloved of God. Yet it is unlikely that a seventh-century ‘wide ruler’ could survive long on piety alone. Oswald, like his immediate predecessors, had his enemies and his wars. The Welsh remembered him as a warrior: Lamnguin, ‘he of the bright blade’. King Oswald’s personal piety and mildness of manner need not be doubted, but his saintly reputation rests on his encouragement of church missionaries and, above all, on the circumstances of his end. Like his father Aethelfrith and brother Osric, Oswald died violently in battle.
We know at least the date of the Battle of Maserfelth: 5 August 642. It was remembered because it became the feast-day of St Oswald in the Christian calendar. The name Maserfelth or Maser-field is derived from the Welsh Maes Hir, which, funnily enough, means Field-field. The Irish knew it as Maes Cogwy or Bellum Cocboy. Contemporary sources give no clue as to where Maserfelth was, but the twelfth-century Life of St Oswald tells us it was at Oswestry (Osewaldstreu) in Shropshire, where the Maser name is preserved in two villages, Maesbury and Maesbrook. Oswestry means ‘Oswald’s Tree’, and the Welsh name, Croesoswald means essentially the same thing, ‘Oswald’s Cross’; as with Oswald’s famous cross at Heavenfield, the words ‘cross’ and ‘tree’ are interchangeable. They commemorate Oswald’s martyrdom at Maserfelth, but it is also likely that the king repeated his cross-erecting ceremony before this new battle. It expressed the same message: ‘by this sign we conquer’. But Oswald, we also learn, fought under a more conventional banner of purple and gold.30
The location of Oswestry indicates that Oswald was killed while on campaign against the Welsh of Powys. His adversary at Maserfelth was a fellow Saxon, King Penda of Mercia. Penda was a heathen, the last important Saxon king to cling to his pagan roots. Hence Oswald’s defeat at Penda’s hands made him Northumbria’s first Christian martyr. It is doubtful in fact whether religion had much to do with the conflict. The most likely background to Maserfelth is that Penda had renewed his old alliance with the Welsh princes, especially Cadwallon’s successor, Cadfael ap Cynfedw, with whom, according to documents preserved in Nennius’s Historia Brittonum, he enjoyed amicable relations. Oswald, in leading an expedition into Powys, had provoked a war on two fronts, with Cadfael in the west and Penda in the east. His expeditionary army may not have been large. At all events, Oswald was cornered into giving battle. The fighting was fierce, but by the end Oswald lay dead and his company with him. The king’s last words were reportedly: ‘God have mercy on their souls’.
Oswald’s body was mutilated. His severed head, hands and forearms were displayed on stakes. The heads of defeated Dark Age kings were commonly parted from their bodies in ceremonies that must have been full of symbolism, but the treatment of Oswald’s body was particularly savage. The gruesome display may have been done in mockery of the cross erected by the king. The head and arms remained on display on ‘Oswald’s Tree’ all winter until the following year when Oswald’s younger brother and successor, Oswiu or Oswy ‘came to the place with his army and removed them’. The bones, which ended up at Bardney in Lincolnshire, were enshrined as relics and reportedly worked miracles.
The battlefield was a place of pilgrimage in Bede’s day. Oswald’s spirit had the intercessionary power ‘to heal sick men and beasts’. In a remarkable example of an early souvenir trade, soil was from the place where the king fell was bartered as a relic with such success that ‘a pit was left in which a man could stand’.31 Evidently the place was marked by a monument, and later a church was built there. This might have been at Maesbury south of Oswestry. More probably the site was on or near the present Norman church in Oswestry. Local tradition has it that a raven picked up and then dropped, one of Oswald’s decaying arms. The place where it fell is marked by a natural spring near the school grounds. Local lore says the battle was fought over what are now the school playing fields. A mile north of the town is an Iron Age hill-fort, but there is no record or tradition of any connection with the battle.
An alternative site for the battle lies forty miles further north in the Makerfield district of Lancashire. The resemblance of the ancient name Makerfield, meaning ‘field by the wall’, with Bede’s Maserfelth was reinforced by the excavation of a burial mound in the neighbouring village of Croft. A mass of Christian burials, numbering up to 3,000, dating from c.600, suggested some catastrophic event, such as a battle. Winwick Church, only a mile away, has long been associated with King Oswald, and the remains of a carved figure and a stone cross found there have been dated to the eighth century. Unfortunately the graves were destroyed during the construction of the M6 motorway. Their bones had already dissolved in the acidic soil.
The year 642 was a memorable one. No fewer than five kings died during its course, among them Cynegils, the first Christian king of Wessex, and Oswald’s associate, Domnall Brecc, killed at the Battle of Strathcarron. Oswald’s fall left Penda as rex Saxonum, the over-king of all the Saxons in England. The thirty-year-old Oswy, last of the sons of Aethelfrith, found himself beleaguered. Bede describes Oswy as ‘a man of handsome appearance and lofty stature, pleasant in speech and courteous in manner’.32 He had the most of the necessary attributes for a seventh-century bretwalda, with ‘regal qualities of mind and body’ wedded to cunning and a ruthless will.
Penda regarded Oswy as his personal enemy. He twice invaded Bernicia and subjected it to ‘savage and intolerable attacks’, but Oswy was able to evade him and escape northwards. In 654, Penda, determined to make an end of the slippery northern king once and for all, made an alliance with Aethelhere, brother to the king of East Anglia, and with several Welsh princes, including Cadfael (or Catamail) of Gwynedd. He even co-opted Oswald’s son Aethelwald ‘to act as a guide to Penda’s army against his own kin and country’ (though he refused to take part in the actual fighting). Penda’s large army was said by Bede to be organized into ‘thirty battle-hardened legions under famous commanders (duces regii)’.33 Whether by legiones he meant legions in the Roman sense, organized into separate ranks of veterans and spear-carriers (hastati), or whether they were retinues gathered around the banner of their lord is uncertain. The figure of thirty is in any case suspect since it chimes rather too neatly with Bede’s other remark that Penda’s host outnumbered Oswy’s by an unlikely thirty to one. Clearly, though, this was a large army, perhaps one of unprecedented size. Its potential to plunder the north to the bone was awesome. Whether it would hold together in a hard fight was another matter.
Outnumbered, Oswy tried to buy off the invaders. Necessity compelled him to offer to Penda ‘an incalculable quantity of regalia and presents as the price of peace’. The Historia Brittonum wryly notes that Oswy was in fact offering the Welsh treasures that had been stolen from them in the first place! It adds that some payment was in fact made. Oswy, besieged in a place called Iudeu, surrendered all the valuables of that place to Penda, who distributed them to his British allies.34 But Penda refused to make peace with his mortal enemy, and ‘declared his attention of wiping out the entire nation from the highest to the humblest in the land’.35 Oswy then turned from appeasement to prayer, vowing to offer his one-year-old daughter Aelflaed to the service of God, together with twelve estates to build monasteries, in thanksgiving for a victory. Such a gesture would not have been a ‘private’ matter between Oswy and his God. It was a ‘done deal’ between the king and his bishops in which a significant part of the royal demesne and wealth would be handed over to the Church as the price of heavenly aid. And so, if the forthcoming battle had no other outcome, it did ensure the foundation of Whitby and eleven other abbeys, and created the circumstances for a short-lived but glorious Christian culture. Among the fruits of the battle were Bede’s History of the English Church and Peoples and the Lindisfarne Gospels.
The great battle was fought unusually late in the season, on 15 November 655, near a river Bede calls Winwaed. Welsh accounts refer to it as Maes Gai, that is, ‘the slaughter of the field of Gai’.36 The name possibly means ‘the ford across the stream’. In a rare and useful clue to its whereabouts Bede adds that the river was in regionis Loidis. The ‘county of Leeds’ had replaced the old British kingdom of Elmet (the modern city of Leeds was named after the ‘county’, not the other way around). Was Penda intending to restore Elmet to the British in exchange for their aid once the victory was won and the Saxons ‘ethnically cleansed’ from the territory? If so, it was, from his perspective, an unfortunate choice of battlefield. It had been a wet autumn and the river, swollen by heavy rain, had flooded far beyond its banks to create a formidable watery obstacle that Oswy was able to turn to his advantage.
Greatly outnumbered, the divisions of Oswy and his eldest son Alchfrith occupied the higher, drier ground above the river, forcing Penda’s war-bands to struggle through the mud to reach them. Slithering and sliding about, they were forced back onto the floodland, where more of Penda’s men ‘were drowned while trying to escape than perished by the sword’. The battle turned into a sauve qui peut. All thirty of the legionary leaders, claims Bede, were killed or drowned. As was Aethelhere, of the royal house of East Anglia, and so too were most of the Welsh princes. Finally Penda himself was overtaken and killed, slain, in Churchill’s phrase, ‘by the sword he had drawn too often’.37 No mercy would have been shown to the slayer of Oswald. The Irish annals record the Mercian king’s comeuppance in two words: Pantha occisio –’Penda dead’. The Welsh remembered the battle as ‘the pool knee-deep in blood [when] twenty hundred perished in an hour’. Their leader, Cadfael escaped, into the void of Dark Age history. Winwaed was one of the total victories of the Dark Ages.
But where was it? There are no details of the campaign except for a statement in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s dubious history that Penda’s host had crossed the Humber. Battlefield detectives have looked for a site with a tendency to flood somewhere near Leeds that also has a name that sounds a bit like Winwaed. In 1893, a local historian, Edmund Bogg, proposed that the battle was fought on the ‘high table land’ of Whin Moor between the city of Leeds and the village of Barwick in Elmet.38 His River Winwaed was the Cock Beck which rises on Whin Moor and runs eastwards to join the River Wharfe at Tadcaster. Prehistoric earthworks running along the north bank of the stream and thence along the boundary of the West and North Riding of Yorkshire probably formed part of the defences of ancient Elmet. There are also older earthworks by the Norman motte-and-bailey castle at nearby Barwick. This complex of defences would have formed an impressive obstacle to an attacker, especially in combination with bad weather and floods. Whin Moor is crossed by the Roman road connecting Chester and York, now marked by the A64. On the southern end of the moor is an area, now partly smothered by a housing estate, long known as Penda’s Fields. Could the name be a genuine folk-memory of Penda’s camp, or perhaps the place where he met his deserts?
The main problem with Whin Moor as the battle site is that the Cock Beck is a small stream not prone to extensive flooding, and there is nothing in its geography to suggest that it was any more flood-prone 1,400 years ago. The moor itself lies on poorly drained clay and contained an ancient bank and ditch running downhill towards the village of Swillington which may have contributed to the flooding effect. But it is hard to imagine a mere ditch swallowing up Penda’s mighty army. To find a river of sufficient size and flood capability it is necessary to move several miles south of Whin Moor to the River Aire, which runs at this point through a flat ill-drained valley now studded with gravel-pits. Perhaps, if the battle was really fought on Whin Moor, the bulk of Penda’s army was destroyed in the rout as they attempted to wade across the freezing river between Swillington and Woodlesford. The dead were said to be buried at a spot near Whin Moor called Hell’s Garth.
An alternative site a dozen miles from Whin Moor was proposed by J W Walker in 1948.39 He argued that Bede’s Winwaed refers to the River Went which was known in the past as the Winned, the Wenct or the Wynt. It has high banks and occasionally floods, especially in late autumn. And, promisingly, it rises from a lake in Nostell Park long known as St Oswald’s Pool. Walker found a plausible battlefield ‘on the high ground whereon now stands the church of Wragby’, which he identified with the Welsh ‘Gau’s Field’. Possibly Penda met his watery fate trapped in the river bend at Hessle, below Ackworth Moor Top. Oswy is said to have founded a hermitage on the battlefield. This may have been the forerunner of Nostell Priory, whose foundation charter mentions a ‘wood of St Oswald’. All in all, Nostell Park and Wragby are the most likely site for the great battle.
Winwaed, like several of the more titanic battles of the Dark Ages, was not in a political sense a decisive battle. Although the ageing Penda was killed and his army destroyed, Mercia continued to be the rising power in England. For three years after Winwaed, Oswy ruled over Mercia, and attempted to diminish its power by dividing the kingdom in two. But the Mercians at length rebelled and proclaimed Wulfhere, son of Penda, ‘whom they had kept hidden’, as king. In short order they drove out Oswy’s representatives and ‘recovered their liberty and lands’. On the other hand, as we have seen, the battle did strengthen the Roman Church in Northumbria, and also hastened its establishment in Mercia. Not only did Oswy ‘deliver his own people from the hostile attacks of the heathen’, wrote Bede, ‘but after cutting off their infidel head [i.e. Penda] he converted the Mercians and their neighbours to the Christian faith’.40
Not that Penda was a pagan fanatic. He apparently considered Christianity a good religion except that it was impossibly demanding; hardly anyone lived up to its precepts. He did not persecute Christians, and at least four missionaries, three from England and one from Ireland, were active in Mercia during his reign. Penda, one feels, was one of history’s victims, the champion of a lost cause. Few mourned his passing but it is hard not to feel a sneaking sympathy for him.