EDWIN OF DEIRA.
As our attention in dealing with the history of the seventh century
will now be fixed chiefly on Northumbria, that being the region where
Christianity won its most glorious victories and as it was at this
time undoubtedly the predominant state in Britain, it is necessary
at the cost of a little repetition to describe the course of the
English settlements in that northern land. And first, a word as to
its geographical limits. The district which was popularly called
_Northhymbraland_, and which consisted politically of the two kingdoms
of _Beornice_ (Bernicia) and _Dearnerice_ (Deira), stretched from the
Firth of Forth to the river Humber. It is important to remember that
we have here no concern with the medieval and modern boundary between
England and Scotland, in which Tweed and Cheviot are the principal
factors. St. Cuthbert, born on the slopes of the Lammermoor Hills,
was no Scot but an Englishman; and Edinburgh, which is to us the
very type and symbol of Scotticism, was in all probability founded
by the English prince whose name stands at the head of this chapter.
Between these two great natural frontiers, the Forth and the Humber,
the bounding lines ran--as they still do, more than is generally
recognised--north and south rather than east and west. The western half
of the lowlands of Scotland, together with Westmorland and the greater
part of Cumberland, formed the British kingdom of Strathclyde, and
was--with the exception of some intervals of subjection to its Anglian
neighbours--under the rule of kings of Celtic race, whose capital
was the strong rock-fortress of Alclyde or Dumbarton. South of the
kingdom of Strathclyde the high land which now sunders Yorkshire from
Lancashire probably formed for some generations the boundary between
the Angles and the Britons; yet not even up to that boundary was the
Anglian dominion pushed in the first invasion, for we hear indistinctly
of a British kingdom of Elmet, otherwise called Loidis, which probably
included at any rate the upper part of the valleys of the Wharfe,
the Aire and the Calder, all Yorkshire streams. As to the boundary
between the two Anglian kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira we cannot speak
with absolute certainty, but we are told on trustworthy authority[53]
that it was the River Tees. The fact that both kingdoms were so often
united under one sovereign perhaps made the assignment of precise
boundaries less needful. Thus, to recapitulate these facts in terms of
modern geography, Bernicia included probably all the three Lothians,
the counties of Berwick, Peebles and Roxburgh, the eastern half of
Northumberland and the county of Durham; while Deira claimed the North
and East Ridings of Yorkshire.
Surveying the ethnological condition of this region during the fifth
and sixth centuries we can dimly discern a few important changes.
There are some indications of a settlement of Frisians in that which
we now call the Border country, and it is thought that they gave their
name to the town of Dumfries. The time of their migration, however,
is altogether uncertain, and as they were a Low German tribe, nearly
allied in blood to both Angles and Saxons, we may conjecture that
in the course of generations they so melted into the great Anglian
population by which Bernicia was overrun as to be indistinguishable
therefrom. Another national movement, about which we have more certain
information, was that migration of the Pictic chief Cunedag from
Lothian to Anglesey, about 380, to which attention has already been
called, and which gave to Wales a line of sovereigns that endured for
nine centuries. Then followed, about the middle of the fifth century,
that settlement of the Jutes on the east coast of Scotland to which
reference was made in our sixth chapter, and of which Hengest’s son and
nephew, Octha and Ebissa, were leaders. This settlement is mentioned
only by Nennius, but as we meet with it in that part of his history
which is borrowed from an earlier Northumbrian annalist, we may
probably accept it as historic fact that the Jutes thus bore a part
in the migrations which Teutonised the eastern half of Caledonia as
well as Britannia. Octha is spoken of in a later chapter of Nennius as
having passed over from the northern part of Britain into Kent on the
death of his father Hengest, and become the ancestor of the kings of
Kent who were reigning in the historian’s lifetime.
In the shadowy traditions of the Welsh bards we hear of a certain Ossa
Cyllelawr or Ossa the Knife-man, who is spoken of as a great antagonist
of Arthur, and who appears to be a genuine progenitor of the Bernician
kings. It is apparently his son Eobba who bears the terrible title,
“The Great Burner of Towns,” which is generally given to the next
link in the pedigree, Ida, King of Bernicia. Here, at last, we are on
firmer historical ground, for this is that Ida of whom we read in the
Chronicle (here quoting Bede) that “he began to reign in 547, and that
from him sprang the royal line of Northumbria,” that “he reigned twelve
years, and that he built Bebbanburh [Bamburgh], which was at first
surrounded by a hedge and thereafter with a wall”.[54] Notwithstanding
the comparative shortness of his reign, Bernician Ida from his
rock-fortress of Bamburgh evidently wielded a mighty power, and we are
probably right in attributing to him the first great extension and
consolidation of the Anglian power between the Tees and the Firth of
Forth. He had twelve sons, six of whom followed him in rather quick
succession during the last half of the sixth century. We have no hint
of civil war or domestic treason, and it is therefore reasonable to
suppose that many of these warlike kings fell in battle with their
Celtic neighbours in the west. This is indeed hinted by the scanty
notices in Nennius’s history.
We appear to be justified in speaking of Ida as king of Northumbria,
though that may not have been the title given to him by his
contemporaries, for it seems to be the outcome of the very confused
notices in Nennius’s _Historia Brittonum_ that Deira as well as
Bernicia was subject to his sway. But on the death of Ida (560), if we
may trust the Chronicle, a prince of another line claiming descent from
Woden through eleven generations of mortal men, Aelle or Ella, began to
reign over the southern kingdom, Deira, and reigned for twenty-eight
years. Were the relations between the two dissevered kingdoms friendly
or hostile? It is impossible to say. The presence of the Deiran slave
boys in the Roman forum suggests the latter hypothesis; the fact that
Acha, the daughter of Aelle, was married to Ethelfrid of Bernicia
suggests the former. Possibly a war between the two Anglian kingdoms
had been followed by peace and a matrimonial alliance. However this may
be, on the death of Aelle in 588, Ethelric of Bernicia, son of Ida,
succeeded--assuredly not peaceably--to the throne of Deira, which,
after five years of reigning, he handed on together with his ancestral
kingdom to his son Ethelfrid.
The reign of Ethelfrid which lasted for twenty-four years, from 593 to
617, was undoubtedly an important period in the history of Northumbria.
We are apt to think of him only in connexion with that relentless
persecution of his young brother-in-law, Edwin, which we shall soon
have to consider; but he was certainly a powerful ruler, this fierce
pagan sovereign of Northumbria. Read what Bede the Northumbrian, who
had often heard his name mentioned with reluctant admiration in the
cloisters of Jarrow and Wearmouth, says concerning him: “In these days
the kingdom of the Northumbrians was governed by Ethelfrid, a most
valiant king and most covetous of glory, who, more than all the chiefs
of the Angles, harassed the nation of the Britons, so that it would
seem fitting to compare him to Saul, King of Israel, except for this
one point that he was ignorant of the Divine religion. For no ealdorman
or king made wider tracts of land, after destroying or subduing their
inhabitants, either tributary to the English nation or open to their
occupation, than this king. So that the blessing which the patriarch,
anticipating the deeds of Saul, bestowed on his own son might fittingly
be applied to Ethelfrid: ‘Benjamin shall ravin as a wolf. In the
morning he shall devour the prey: in the evening he shall divide the
spoils.’”
In the year 603, when Ethelfrid had been ten years on the throne,
“Aidan, King of the Scots who inhabit Britain,”[55] resenting the
Anglian king’s encroachments, prepared to invade Bernicia. Here at
last we have the word Scots clearly used not of our western but of
our northern neighbours. For these are the Scots who crossed over the
straits between Ulster and Cantyre and founded in Argyll and the Isles
that kingdom of Dalriada which was one day to give a monarch, Kenneth
MacAlpine, to the whole of North Britain and impose on Caledonia the
name of _Scotland_. It is important also to observe that by this time
all the dwellers in what we now call Scotland professed the Christian
faith, the great mission of St. Columba to the Northern Picts and his
settlement in Iona having taken place in 565, thirty-eight years before
the events with which we are now concerned. The invasion of King Aidan,
the friend and in a certain sense the nominee of St. Columba, though
made by him at the head of a huge host, proved unsuccessful. He was met
(says the patriotic Englishman Bede) by Ethelfrid with but few men.
The two armies joined battle at Degsastan, probably the high moorland
which forms the watershed between Liddesdale and Upper Tynedale, and
which by one little stream, the Dawston Burn, still preserves the name
of that old battlefield of the nations. Ethelfrid’s brother, Theodbald,
with all the division of the army which he commanded, fell before the
Scottish onslaught, but in another part of the field Aidan suffered
so severe a defeat that he was forced to fly ignominiously from the
bleak moorland, covered with the corpses of his followers. The battle
of Dawston Rig seems to have been in truth the Flodden of the seventh
century. Bede, writing 128 years afterwards, says: “Never from that day
to this, hath any king of the Scots dared to join battle in Britain
with the nation of the Angles”.
Some years after this victory over the Scots, Ethelfrid won another
of equal importance over the Cambrian Britons (613?). The Archbishop
Augustine, as we have seen, in his last conference with the Welsh
ecclesiastics, warned them that if they were unwilling to preach the
way of life to the English nation they should suffer a bloody requital
at their hands.[56] And now Ethelfrid, having all the hosts of Deira
and Bernicia at his disposal, collecting a large army, marched,
probably by a branch of the Watling Street,[57] from York across
Yorkshire to Manchester, and appeared full of the menace of battle
before the walls of the city on the Dee, which, once known as Deva,
now, 200 years after the last Roman soldiers had quitted Britain,
still bore the name of the Camp of the Legions. In later times this
name--_Caerlegion_ in Welsh, _Legacaestir_ in the English tongue--has
been shortened to Chester, and thus this picturesque old city, which
still keeps its medieval walls and is crowded with interesting relics
both of Roman and of Norman domination, claims not unworthily the
right to be _the_ Chester among all the many Chesters in our land, the
representative of all the cities which have arisen on the site of the
camps of the legions.
On the eve of the battle, Ethelfrid descried a number of men clad in
priestly garb who occupied what they deemed to be a place of safe
shelter at a little distance from the British army. They were in fact
a large deputation from the monastery of Bangor (which contained not
fewer than 2,100 inmates), and they had come, sanctified by a three
days’ fast, to aid the British king Brochmail by their prayers. “Who
are those men?” cried Ethelfrid, “and what do they there?” Learning
the reason of their presence, he exclaimed, “If they are calling on
their God against us, they also are fighting against us, though it be
not with arms but with curses,” and he directed the first movements of
his army against them. This unexpected opening of the game seems to
have confounded Brochmail, who is accused by Bede of having in cowardly
panic forsaken the holy men whom he was especially bound to protect.
However this may be, 1,200 of the Bangor monks were slain and only
fifty escaped. The British king and his men fled in disgraceful rout;
Ethelfrid’s victory was complete; the city of the legions was taken and
sacked and remained apparently “a waste Chester” for near 300 years.
Thus for more than twenty years had Ethelfrid of Bamburgh marched from
victory to victory. Meanwhile his foe and brother-in-law, Edwin, son
of Ella, the rightful heir of Deira, was leading the life of a hunted
fugitive, “an ascender of the stairs of other men,” hearing perchance
of the victories of the enemy of his house, as Charles Stuart in
his places of refuge in Holland or France heard of the triumphant
campaigns of Cromwell. There is, indeed, a tradition that Edwin, when
a boy, had sought shelter at the court of Cadvan, the British king of
North-West Wales, and that this was the cause of Ethelfrid’s vigorous
assault on the British confederacy; but this story seems hardly
consistent with the pagan character of Edwin’s upbringing. For some
time he seems to have sought shelter with a sovereign of the new and
rising state of Mercia, whose daughter he married; but probably on
her death he wandered forth again into exile. And thus after long and
various experiences of the sad life of a fugitive in different kingdoms
of the land, he found his way to the court of Redwald, King of the
East Angles, and received a promise of protection from that powerful
monarch. When Ethelfrid, however, heard that his hated rival was
harboured at the East Anglian court, he sent messenger upon messenger
to Redwald, offering him large bribes to take the life of his youthful
guest. Long did Redwald refuse to do anything that would bring so dark
a stain upon his kingly honour, but at last the third messenger, who
brought not only more magnificent bribes, but the threat of war in
the event of refusal, prevailed. In the first watch of the night an
East Anglian noble, friendly to Edwin, entered the fugitive’s bedroom,
called him forth outside the palace, told him his danger, counselled
him to flee, and promised to lead him to a safe hiding-place, where
neither Redwald nor Ethelfrid would be able to find him. Edwin thanked
him for his warning, but refused to be the first to break covenant with
his host by showing a doubt of his protection, and wearily exclaimed:
“If I must die let me die here, rather than begin again that life of a
fugitive which I have already led for so many years in every province
of Britain”. His friend left him and he remained alone with his sad
thoughts in the darkening night.
Suddenly a man whose face and garb were alike unknown to him, stood
before him and asked him why he sat there so mournfully on his seat
of stone, while all within the palace were wrapped in sleep. “What
is it to thee,” said the weary exile, “where I choose to spend the
night?” “But I know,” answered the stranger, “both why thou art here,
and why thou art so sad and what thou fearest. Now what wouldst thou
give to any one who should free thee from thy anxieties and persuade
Redwald not to deliver thee into the hands of thy enemies?” “All that
I possess,” said Edwin. “And what if he assured thee that thou shouldst
overcome thine enemies and become a king greater than any English
king before thee?” “I would give the gratitude which he deserved to
any one who could confer on me such benefits.” “And how, if he could
point out to thee a new way of life and salvation better than any
that thy fathers have known? Wouldst thou hearken to his voice and
obey his counsels?” “Assuredly I would,” said Edwin. The stranger put
his hand upon his head and said: “When next thou shalt receive this
sign, remember what thou hast promised and fulfil it.” With that the
stranger, whether he were living man or spirit, zealous missionary or
martyred apostle, vanished into the darkness. A little cheered by the
vision but still melancholy and anxious, Edwin was sitting yet before
the palace when lo! his friend the courtier returned to him with joy in
his countenance and said: “Arise, dismiss thy cares, go to thy couch
and slumber with a quiet mind. The danger is past. The queen, to whom
in secret Redwald disclosed his purpose, persuaded him not for any
of Ethelfrid’s gold to sell his far more precious kingly honour, or
sacrifice the friend who had sought his protection in extremity.” When
day dawned it was seen that Edwin’s friend had spoken truly. The king
dismissed Ethelfrid’s messengers with a final refusal, and knowing now
that he would have to face that king’s anger, resolved to anticipate
the blow and to restore the fugitive to his kingdom. Hastily collecting
his army he came upon the surprised and imperfectly prepared Ethelfrid
on the banks of the Idle, a little river of Nottinghamshire, and there
won a decisive victory. It was true that Redwald’s own son, Regenheri,
perished in the fight, but Ethelfrid himself was also slain, and the
power of Bernicia for a season annihilated. It was a memorable day for
the dwellers in the fens by the Humber, and six centuries later the
historian, Henry of Huntingdon, still heard the proverb: “As when the
Idle river grew foul with Anglian blood.”
This great battle which for the time overthrew the Bernician dynasty
and gave the dominion of all Northumbria to Edwin of Deira was fought
probably in the year 617. Edwin, who was born in 585, and whose life
since he was a child of three years old had been passed in exile, was
therefore a man thirty-two years of age when he thus recovered his
father’s kingdom. The sons of Ethelfrid fled to the Celts of Scotland,
and at least one of them sought the friendly shelter of Iona. Edwin
no doubt fixed his capital at York, that great and important city
which under its Anglian name of Eoforwac carried on the traditions
of Roman Eburacum. The fact that the Roman name subsisted still with
so little change in the language of the conquerors makes it probable
that there was here no such utter destruction and desolation as at
Anderida and Chester, but that there was a continuous civic life from
the departure of the last Roman soldier to the enthronement of the
first Anglian king. How gladly would we exchange much of the scanty
knowledge of the invasion that we do possess for the details of the
capture of the Roman capital of the north;[58] but over this conquest,
as well as over that of the sister city of Londinium, there hangs a
pall of impenetrable darkness. The lines of the Roman city may still be
traced with considerable precision; the noble ruin of the multangular
tower clearly marks its western corner, but we have not yet recovered,
possibly shall never recover, the site of the once stately edifice
where the Roman _Dux Britanniarum_ dwelt aforetime, and where in
all probability the Anglian kings of Deira held their court. There,
however, we may safely imagine Edwin enthroned; from thence his armies
marched forth along one or other of the great network of Roman roads
which centred at Eburacum. One of his earliest conquests was probably
that of the British kingdom of Elmet or Loidis which still lingered
on in the dales of the West Riding, but seems to have come to an end
about this time. Having consolidated his power over Northumbria, Edwin
became the mightiest of all the English kings. The title of Bretwalda
was recognised as rightfully belonging to him, and all the other kings
of Britain, Anglian, Saxon, Celtic, for a time at least acknowledged
him as in a certain sense their superior. Even the islands of Man and
Anglesey were added by him to his dominions, the latter island probably
deriving from this conquest by the Angles the name which it still
bears. Only Jutish Kent still maintained its independence, and with its
king Edwin before long formed a close tie of alliance. An unexplained
phenomenon in these first ten years of Edwin’s reign, during which,
still heathen, he seems to have been pursuing a career of unbroken
success, is the disappearance of East Anglia from the scene. It was the
might of Redwald the East Anglian which broke the power of Ethelfrid
on the great day of the battle at the river Idle, and yet we hear of
Edwin, still apparently in the lifetime of his benefactor, establishing
his supremacy over all the kings of the Angles and Britons, including
therefore among his subject allies even Redwald himself.
It was probably about the year 624 when Edwin was in full middle life,
and his sons, by his first Mercian wife, were growing up towards
manhood, that he made proposals of marriage to the Kentish princess,
Ethelburga. She, like himself, must have been middle-aged. Her father,
Ethelbert, had been for some years dead, and her brother, Eadbald, had
the disposal of her hand. Mindful of the stripes and the warnings of
Laurentius, Eadbald was now loyal in his adherence to Christianity,
and replied to Edwin’s messengers “that it was not lawful to give a
Christian maiden in marriage to a pagan, lest the faith and sacrament
of the heavenly King should be profaned by intercourse with an
earthly king who was ignorant of the worship of the true God”. To
this objection (a remarkable one as coming from the offspring of the
union between the Christian Bertha and the pagan Ethelbert) Edwin
replied that he would do nothing contrary to the Christian faith of the
princess if she became his bride; that she might bring with her as many
ministers of that faith as she pleased, whether male or female, and
should have full liberty of worship along with them; and, moreover, he
held out hopes that he himself might become a convert to Christianity
if on examination by the wise men of his kingdom it should be found
more holy and worthier of the Most High than the religion which it
offered to supersede. After this reassuring statement, Eadbald’s
objections were withdrawn. Ethelburga was sent northwards to meet her
bridegroom, and in her train came Paulinus, who was now consecrated on
July 21, 625, by Archbishop Justus, bishop of York, which was virtually
equivalent to bishop of Northumbria.
Paulinus, who is certainly the noblest figure in the Roman mission
to England, was constant in preaching the Christian faith in season
and out of season to the men of Northumbria. He met at first with
but little success, but a year after his arrival, in April 20, 626, a
foully attempted crime brought him in a strange way nearer to his goal.
The history of Wessex for some generations after the dethronement of
Ceawlin in 592 is obscure and inglorious. Her once powerful kings seem
to have accepted without a murmur the supremacy first of Kent and then
of East Anglia, and if now they resented the rapidly extended dominion
of Northumbria they sought to overthrow it not in fair fight but by
the dastardly hand of the conspirator. The kings of the West Saxons at
this time were Cynegils and Cwichelm, the latter of whom, perhaps in
concert with his colleague, sent an assassin named Eomer, armed with
a poisoned dagger, to the court of Edwin. The king was then dwelling
in a royal villa near the Yorkshire Derwent (one of the many English
rivers bearing that name), and there Eomer presented himself with a
pretended message from his master. While Edwin listened intently to
his words he drew the deadly weapon from its sheath and made a sudden
onslaught upon the king. A faithful thegn named Lilia, who dearly loved
his lord, having no shield ready to hand, rushed in between and broke
the force of the blow, but not even the sacrifice of his life saved the
monarch from a wound; and before Eomer was hewn down by the swords of
the surrounding soldiers he had succeeded in stabbing one of them named
Fordheri with his fatal weapon. That very night--it was the night of
Easter Sunday, 626--Edwin’s queen was delivered of a daughter, to whom
was given the name of Eanfled. Touched by the mingled congratulations
and exhortations of Paulinus, Edwin gladly consented that his infant
daughter, along with eleven members of his household, should receive
baptism on the eve of the following Whitsunday. For himself, though he
was inclined to listen to the advice of Paulinus, all other matters had
to be postponed to the great campaign of vengeance which, as soon as he
had recovered from his wound, he undertook against the vile West Saxon
murderers. In this campaign he was completely successful. Having slain
five kings and much people, and returned victorious from the war, he at
once abandoned the worship of idols and began seriously to consider the
question of making a formal profession of Christianity.
It was apparently during this religious interregnum that the King and
Queen of Northumbria received each a letter from Pope Boniface V. The
letters, verbose and unpersuasive in style, can hardly have had much
influence on the fresh and vigorous intellect of the Northumbrian king,
but no doubt the fact that they should have been written at all by
the father of western Christendom was felt as a compliment to Edwin’s
greatness. Still, however, the king hesitated before making a final
breach with the traditions of his fathers and accepting Christ instead
of his ancestral Woden. Unable to dismiss the subject from his thoughts
he sat much apart in solitary places and there mused upon the parting
of the ways. While he thus sat one day, Paulinus came unbidden into
his presence, laid his hand upon his head and said: “Rememberest thou
this sign?” With that the scene outside the East Anglian palace came
back vividly into Edwin’s memory. He was about to fall at the feet
of Paulinus, but the bishop lifting him up said in a gentle voice:
“Behold thou hast escaped by the Divine favour the snares of thine
enemies: thou hast received the kingdom which was promised thee: delay
not to stretch out thy hand and grasp the third blessing, even eternal
life”.[59]
Thus admonished Edwin determined to delay no longer his profession of
Christianity, but wisely resolved to associate as many as possible
of his counsellors with him, and to make the great change the act of
the nation rather than of the king alone. Then followed the memorable
and well-known scene in the Witenagemot, or meeting of the wise men,
perhaps at York, perhaps at the royal villa by the Derwent. When the
subject of the proposed change of faith was mooted in the assembly
of the elders, its first and most strenuous advocate was found to be
the chief priest Coifi, who complained that his past years spent in
zealous service of the gods had brought him no proportionate share of
the royal favour. To this sordid calculator of the worldly advantages
to be derived from this or that form of faith, succeeded an unnamed
ealdorman who, in words as well fitted to the twentieth century as to
the seventh, painted the short, perplexing and precarious life of man
“like a sparrow flitting through your hall, O king! when we are seated
round the fire at supper-time, while the winds are howling and the
snow is drifting without. It passes swiftly in at one door and out at
another, feeling for the moment the warmth and shelter of your palace,
but it flies from winter to winter and swiftly escapes from our sight.
Even such is our life here, and if any one can tell us certainly what
lies beyond it, we shall do wisely to follow his teaching.” Moved
by these and similar arguments the elders and counsellors of the
king, unanimously as it would seem, voted for the proposed religious
revolution.
After Paulinus had expounded to the assembly the doctrines of
Christianity, Coifi exclaimed: “Long ago had I suspected that the
things which we were worshipping were naught, for the more earnestly I
sought for truth in that worship the less did I find it. Now I openly
profess that in this new preaching alone is the way of eternal life to
be found. O king! let us at once give over to the flames the temples
and altars which we have consecrated so vainly.” The king gladly
consented, but asked who should deal the death-blow. “I,” said Coifi.
“Who more fitting than I to destroy, in the new wisdom which is given
me, the idols which I worshipped in my folly?” He besought the king to
give him arms and a war-horse, and though the multitude, who knew that
it was forbidden to one of their priests to bear arms or to ride on
anything but a mare, deemed him to be insane, he mounted the charger,
rode to a great temple in the neighbourhood, hurled his lance into its
sacred precincts and called upon his companions to give to the flames
the shrine itself and all the enclosures by which it was surrounded
from the gaze of the multitude. A hundred years afterwards men still
showed at Goodmanham on the Derwent, east of York, the ruins of this
great iconoclasm.
The overthrow of the old faith was followed by the visible triumph of
the new. On Easter eve, 627, just a year after his escape from the
dagger of the man of Wessex, Edwin was baptised by Paulinus in the new
wooden church of St. Peter at York, a church which he was shortly to
replace by a more elaborate edifice in stone. His sons by the Mercian
princess before long followed his example: his young children, the
offspring of Ethelburga, and even a little grandson Yffi, son of
Osfrid, together with a great number of the nobles of the court, were
all solemnly received into the Christian Church. The preaching of
Paulinus, so long resultless, now seemed to be bearing abundant fruit.
Up in remote Bernicia, where the royal villa of Yeavering nestled under
a hill, an outlying sentinel of the Cheviots which still bears the name
of Yeavering Bell, Paulinus was engaged for twenty-six consecutive days
catechising and baptising in the river Glen the multitudes who flocked
to him. Returning to Deira, to the Roman station of Cataractonium,
he there baptised many converts in the river Swale, no church or
oratory having yet been erected for Christian worship. In his zeal he
overpassed the strict limits of Northumbria: he crossed the Humber,
preached the Gospel in Lindsey, converted the “prefect” of the city of
Lincoln, and baptised a multitude of people at noon-day in the river
Trent, King Edwin himself honouring the ceremony by his presence. One
of the many converts who went down on that day into the river with
Paulinus described the scene to a youth who when an abbot, in his
reverend old age, passed the tradition on to Bede, telling him that
the great missionary was a man of tall stature, slightly stooping,
with black hair, thin face, aquiline but slender nose, in his general
aspect at once venerable and awe-inspiring. His constant attendant was
a certain deacon James, a courageous and energetic man, who also lived
to be a contemporary of the historian.
In after years of turbulence and discord men looked back on the reign
of Edwin as a sort of golden age. They said that then a woman with her
new-born babe might cross Britain from sea to sea unharmed by any man.
In many a place where he saw a clear fountain bubbling up beside the
public way he would order stakes to be erected, upon which brazen pots
were hung, and none dared to touch them save the thirsty travellers for
whose use they were designed. His state was indeed kingly. Not only in
war was his standard displayed; but in peace also, as he was journeying
from villa to villa and from province to province, attended by a long
and brilliant train of servants, a banner with a tuft of feathers,
called by the Romans _tufa_ and by the English _thuuf_ and hinting
perhaps at something like imperial dignity, was borne before the mighty
king of Northumbria.
But this splendour of regal power was early overshadowed. It was not,
after all, from Eburacum that the word of power was to go forth which
was to bind the various Teutonic races of England into one nation. The
Anglian power was not thoroughly established over Wales, and already
the destined rival of Northumbria, the Mercian kingdom, was rising into
baleful pre-eminence. Singularly enough, it was from these two powers
which are said to have sheltered Edwin in the time of his evil fortunes
that his ruin came. Cadwallon, King of Gwynedd, descended from that
Maelgwn whom Gildas vituperated under the name of “The Great Dragon of
the Island,” was son of Cadvan, at whose court, it is said, Edwin had
passed his boyhood. Doubtless Cadwallon keenly resented the position
of inferiority to which his nation had been reduced by Ethelfrid’s
great victory of Chester, which shut them off from Strathclyde, as
Ceawlin’s victory of Deorham had shut them off from Devon and Cornwall.
When Edwin, once Cadvan’s humble guest, had become the mightiest
prince in Britain, Cadwallon, unwilling to accept his yoke, had taken
refuge--so say the Welsh annals--in Ireland. He had now returned and
was determined to strike one more blow for independence and for liberty
of passage to Strathclyde. With this intent he formed an alliance with
the ruler of Mercia, Penda, who became king in 626, a year before
Edwin’s baptism; who was still pagan; and who in his dull ferocity
was as typical a specimen of the old faith as Edwin of the new. The
alliance of the Welsh Christian and the English pagan for the overthrow
of the newly born Christianity of Northumbria was scarcely felt to be
unnatural, so intense was the bitterness engendered by the Paschal
controversy and the varying fashions of ecclesiastical tonsure.
The armies met at Heathfield, which is identified with Hatfield Chase
on the north-east of Doncaster, on October 12, 633. We have no details
of the encounter: we only know that Edwin was defeated, that he and his
eldest son Osfrid were slain, and that Cadwallon and his ally roamed
in savage wrath over the plains of Yorkshire and Northumberland. The
Christian, even more ferocious than the pagan, spared neither sex nor
age, recognised no claim to mercy drawn from the profession of one
common faith, and vowed (this surely when out of hearing of his ally)
that he would root out the whole brood of Angles from the land of
Britain.[60]
Edwin’s second son fled for refuge to the court of the Mercian king,
and was afterwards slain by him, in violation of his sworn promise of
protection. The widowed Ethelburga fled to the court of her brother,
the King of Kent, under the escort of Paulinus. The royal infants--such
was the terror of the times--were separated from their mother, and it
was left for a brave soldier named Bass, one of Edwin’s thegns, to
bring to the Kentish court the girl Eanfled, her brother Wuscfrea, and
their little nephew Yffi, the orphaned son of Osfrid. The widowed queen
afterwards sent the boys to the court of her cousin, Frankish Dagobert,
that they might be safe from the new rulers of Bernicia, but both died
in infancy in that foreign land. As for Paulinus he seems to have bowed
his head to the storm of the recrudescent paganism of Northumbria. He
vacated his Yorkish see, and was appointed Bishop of Rochester, in
succession to Romanus, who had been drowned in the Mediterranean when
sent on a mission to Rome. He died in 644. The ill-starred union of
Mercian paganism and British fanaticism seemed to have accomplished its
purpose. Northumberland was a wilderness and Northumbrian Christianity
a vanished dream.