OSWALD OF BERNICIA.
When the cause of Christianity and, as connected with it, the hope of
eventually building in the new England a civilised and well-ordered
state seemed at its darkest, light arose from an island in the
Hebrides; it spread to a rough storm-beaten rock on the Northumbrian
coast; it illumined one of the noblest and loveliest pages in the
history of our nation, the reign of Oswald of Bernicia.
The conversion of the southern Picts to Christianity is believed to
have taken place more than two centuries before the date that we have
now reached. Near the close of the fourth century when the Roman empire
had already begun to crumble into ruin, St. Ninian, a Briton educated
at Rome, filled with veneration for the soldier-saint, Martin of Tours,
came to the region between the Roman Wall and the Grampians, preached
Christianity with much success to the Picts who dwelt in that country,
and built a monastic church dedicated to St. Martin, on one of the
promontories of Galloway which project south into the Irish sea. This
church, built of stone, and thereby differing from the humbler wooden
churches of the period, was called _Candida Casa_ (a name represented
in its modern successor Whithern), and it is said to have been still
in course of erection when Ninian heard of the death of the holy man
in whose name he dedicated his beautiful “white house”. Nearly two
centuries passed away. There was much intercourse of various kinds
between the dwellers in the Hebrides and their neighbours the Scots
of Ireland. The Dalriadic kingdom, Scottish (that is Erse) by race
and Christian by religious profession, was set up in Argyll and the
adjacent islands; but the Picts north of the Grampians whose relations
to Dalriada were generally hostile, remained obstinately heathen.
All this was changed by an event which took place about the year
563--the arrival of St. Columba from Ireland. Whatever accretions of
superstitious legend may have grown up around the name of this saint,
the historic importance of the great apostle of the Picts cannot be
denied, and can hardly be over-stated.
Born in Donegal, in the year 521, a scion of the princely clan of
the Hy Neill, descended from Irish kings both on his father’s and
his mother’s side, the young Irishman in his boyish days showed such
zeal in his attendance at church that his baptismal name of Colum
was changed to Colum-cille or Columba of the church. He was ordained
priest, but the bent of his religious temper like that of most of his
Irish contemporaries was all towards the monastic profession. During
his early middle life he was busily engaged in founding monasteries,
the first in point of date being that of Derry, and the most famous
that of Durrow in the diocese of Meath. But in his fortieth year,
561, he became entangled in one of the ever-recurring civil wars of
his distressful country. A great battle was fought at Cuildremhne,
in Connaught, near the boundary between that province and Ulster.
Columba’s kinsfolk, the northern Hy Neill, prevailed and the King of
Ireland, commanding the clans of the southern Hy Neill, was defeated.
Though his friends’ cause triumphed, the battle appears in some
unexplained manner to have injured Columba’s religious position in his
native country. He seems to have been excommunicated by some of his
brethren, possibly on account of his alleged responsibility for the
strife. At any rate he now resolved to quit his country and, perhaps as
a penance for his sins, to take up his abode in some place from which
he could not even see the shores of his beloved Ireland. Such a place,
after some wandering, he found in the then little known island of Hy,
famous to after ages under the name of Iona; where, as tradition tells,
he ascended a hill which still bears the name of Cul-ri-Erin (back
turned to Erin), and when he found that no line of the Irish coast,
however dimly seen, could thence be discerned on the horizon, amid all
the cluster of surrounding islands, he determined to make that little
spot his dwelling-place. Iona is separated from the much larger island
of Mull by a channel about one mile broad. It is only three miles long,
and from a mile to a mile and a half in breadth; yet in this little
space there is considerable variety of scenery; hills, the highest of
which attains to an elevation of 320 feet, “retired dells, long reaches
of sand on shores indented with quiet bays, little coves between bare
and striking rocks, and on the west wild barren cliffs and high rocky
islets opposed to the sweep of the Atlantic”.[61] As Bede says: “it is
not large but computed as containing five families according to English
reckoning”. (The word “families” is rendered “hides” in the English
_Chronicle_, and this is an important passage as showing what were
the average dimensions of a “hide of land” in early Saxon times.) The
ruins now visible on the island are those of a Benedictine abbey of the
thirteenth century. No traces remain of the buildings, probably wooden,
raised by St. Columba, but there are many interesting natural features
which may be recognised in the nearly contemporary life of the saint
written by the ninth abbot of Iona, Adamnan.
The objects which Columba set before himself after his migration to
Iona were political as well as religious. His kinsmen, the Scots of
Dalriada, were harassed and oppressed by the pagan Picts in the east of
the island, whose king, Brude, had in the year 560 inflicted a crushing
defeat on the Scottish king, Gabhran. Columba would fain convert the
Pictish conqueror to Christianity, and at the same time obtain more
generous treatment for his beaten countrymen; and by the magic of
his personality he achieved a striking success in both directions.
King Brude in 565 embraced Christianity, and relations of peace and
friendship were established between him and the man whom, in 574,
Columba succeeded in placing on the throne of Dalriada, Aidan, Prince
of Strathclyde. The thirty-four years of Columba’s life, after his
great migration, were spent in establishing monasteries in the land of
the northern Picts, in the Hebrides and in his native Ireland, to which
he paid several visits, and where the once excommunicated partisan was
now an honoured, almost worshipped guest. These Columban monasteries,
“the family of Iona” as they were called, were of a distinctly
different type from that of the monasteries of the Benedictine rule.
Like all the Irish monastic establishments they partook largely of the
tribal character. The tribe gave the land, contributed to the support
of the monks, had a right to receive, apparently without special
charge, their religious ministrations, and in certain circumstances
had also a right to nominate one of its members as abbot, though the
first claim upon this coveted office resided in the family of the
founder. It was thus that the first nine abbots of Iona were all
descended from the same family, the northern Hy Neill, from which St.
Columba himself had sprung. This tribal character of the monasteries
suited the genius of the Celtic populations, and was one reason of the
success of the missionaries in converting them to Christianity. It has
been truly said[62] that “these large monasteries, as in their external
aspect they appeared to be, were in reality Christian colonies into
which converts, after being tonsured, were brought under the name of
monks”.
The large part thus played by the monasteries in the work of conversion
impressed in its turn a peculiar character on the churches of Ireland
and Hebridean Scotland, rendering them more exclusively monastic
and less purely episcopal than the churches of Italy and Gaul. This
divergence resulted in part from the nature of things, and was due
to the differences of place and time in which the conversion of the
several countries was respectively effected. The Bishops of Lyons and
Vienne, of Toledo and Seville began their work while the Roman Empire
was still standing, were to some extent moulded by its form, shared the
prosperity and the influence of its great towns and were essentially
magnates of cities. Columba, his comrades and his pupils, came into a
much ruder and more primitive state of society. The rough tribal rulers
whom they converted had scarcely any cities worthy of the name. The new
missionaries planted their monasteries in such rural places as promised
them the supply of their simple wants, or even only safety from the
attacks of a midnight foe--often on an island in a lake or surrounded
by the ocean--and there, not so much by eloquent preaching as by mere
rightness and simplicity of living, succeeded in converting whole
populations to the religion of Christ. The conversions thus obtained
seem to have been for the most part more genuine and more durable than
those which were first effected in the large cities of the old Roman
world and from thence radiated outwards into the country.
It has seemed necessary to emphasise this distinction between the two
types of ecclesiastical organisation (the fourth century Gaulish and
the sixth century Irish Churches) because the difference reappears in
our own history. The Roman mission under Augustine and his successors,
and especially under Paulinus in Northumbria, seems to have gone on the
old urban and episcopal lines, while the far more successful mission
from Iona, with which we have now to deal, was monastic, many-centred
and rural. In the year 597, the very year of Augustine’s arrival
in England, St. Columba died. He is one of the most vividly seen
personalities of the early Middle Ages: a man of somewhat hot temper in
youth, softened and controlled in later life, with a stately beauty of
feature which seemed to correspond with his princely descent, and with
a kind of magnetic power of attracting to himself the devotion of his
followers, a lover of animals and beloved by them. One of his natural
gifts was an extraordinarily strong and resonant voice which, when he
sang the psalms of the church, could be heard distinctly for more than
a mile. A great open-air preacher, an organiser and a poet--he eagerly
championed the cause of his brother bards before an Irish synod--he
might, perhaps, not unfittingly, be called the John Wesley of the sixth
century.
In 615, about eighteen years after the death of Columba, when his
fellow-tribesman Fergna was ruling, fourth in the series of abbots, at
Iona, a party of refugees from the south crossed the little channel and
landed on the shore of the island, craving shelter and sanctuary. They
were some of the attendants of Ethelfrid, the late King of Bernicia,
who had been slain “when the river Idle ran foul with Anglian blood,”
and they brought, besides other noble youths, Oswald, that king’s
second son, and implored the brethren to protect him from the avenging
might of Edwin. There was no shadow of a claim for this young Anglian,
son of an obstinate pagan, on the hospitality of the Irish monks, but
the request was willingly granted. Oswald and the young nobles his
companions were kindly received, were soon baptised, and instructed
in the doctrines of Christianity, and growing up to manhood on the
sequestered Hebridean isle, probably looked forward to no other sort
of life than that which was led by the simple-hearted monks their
entertainers.
All this was changed, in 633, by the great and unlooked-for catastrophe
of Heathfield. The two Northumbrian kingdoms, united under the strong
rule of Ethelfrid and Edwin, fell once more apart. Osric, cousin of
Edwin, son of his uncle Elfric, ruled in Deira, and Eanfrid, eldest son
of Ethelfrid, in Bernicia. These two young princes, each of whom had
made profession of the Christian faith, both apostatised and returned
to paganism. Possibly the sordid calculations by which Coifi had
justified his renunciation of the faith of his fathers weighed with
them now in the opposite scale, and they felt themselves justified in
deserting the Christians’ God, who had abandoned their land to the
tender mercies of Penda and Cadwallon. But the triumph of paganism
was short. Osric, who with inadequate forces besieged Cadwallon while
holding the “municipium” of York, was killed and his whole army cut to
pieces by a sudden sally of the Welsh king. This happened in the summer
of the year which followed the battle of Heathfield, and, apparently
in the following autumn, Bernician Eanfrid, coming with twelve chosen
warriors to treat of peace with Cadwallon, was treacherously slain
by his orders. So full of gloomy memories was this year, 634, that
the monkish chroniclers, who afterwards drew up a scheme of Anglian
chronology, decided that it should not come into the number of the
years, and silently included it in the glorious reign of him who
succeeded the apostates.
This successor was Oswald, who came from Iona evidently determined to
play the part of a Christian hero-king, and who endured to his life’s
end steadfast in that decision. By one bold stroke he delivered his
nation, Bernicia, from the Cambrian ravagers. “When he arrived after
the death of his brother Eanfrid with a small army, and fortified by
the faith of Christ, the wicked general of the Britons with the immense
forces which, as he boasted, nothing could resist, was slain by him at
the place which is called in the English tongue Denisesburn,’ that is,
the stream of Denis.” So runs the first simple statement of Bede as to
this important encounter which for ever settled the question whether
the Celt or the Teuton was to be supreme in Northern Britain. From Bede
himself, as a kind of afterthought, and from Adamnan, the biographer of
St. Columba, we get some additional particulars which enable us to see
more clearly if not the strategic features of the battle at least what
was passing in the minds of the combatants. It seems that the battle
itself was fought not at “Denisesburn” but at Heavenfield, a little on
the north of the Roman wall, which probably was an important element
in the problem that the Anglian king, with his great inferiority of
forces, had to solve.[63] The great Roman work, striding across the
country in its uncompromising way, here traverses a high moorland which
separates the main stream of the Tyne from its northern affluent, and
in this portion of its career it is from 700 to 800 feet above the
level of the sea. Though none of its stones are here remaining, we can
yet trace the high mounds and deep fosses of its companion, the line of
fortification on the south, which is known by the name of the _vallum_.
Between these two lines, that of stone and that of earth, ran the
Roman road, still probably in Edwin’s day capable of being traversed,
notwithstanding 230 years of neglect. Along this road Cadwallon may
have marched, and by it he may have encamped for the night, while
somewhere, behind either wall or _vallum_, Oswald may have placed in
ambush his father’s veterans. He himself was in a mood of religious and
patriotic exaltation. On the day before the battle he had in his sleep
a vision of the blessed Columba, whom he had never seen with the eyes
of the flesh. The saint’s beautiful face shone with angelic brightness:
his figure rose majestic till it seemed to touch the clouds: he spread
his mantle over the Anglian camp. Addressing Oswald in the words which
Moses spake to Joshua he told him to be strong and of a good courage,
for the Lord would be with him. Let him march out on the following
night to battle: his foes should be all scattered in flight, and the
Welsh king should be delivered into his hands.
Awaking, Oswald assembled his council, told them his dream and received
the unanimous promise of the army that if they won the victory they
would make profession of the Christian faith. He then caused a large
wooden cross to be prepared and a hole to be dug, in which it was
firmly planted, he himself holding it erect with both hands while
his soldiers filled in the soil. When this was done he cried to the
host with a loud voice: “Let us all bend our knees and together call
upon God Almighty, the Living and the True, that He in His pity will
defend us from our proud and cruel foe: for He knoweth that this is a
just war that we have undertaken for the deliverance of our people”.
All obeyed his command and prayed to the God of the Christians. That
night, just before dawn, they moved out of camp, attacked the probably
unsuspecting Britons, and inflicted upon them a crushing defeat. Many
of the enemy must have perished on the wide moorland; some who probably
fled southwards with Cadwallon, their king, were whelmed in the deep
waters of the Tyne. Cadwallon himself met his death (how we know not)
on the banks of the little Rowley Burn, some five miles south of the
Tyne and ten miles from the field of battle. Such was the event which
ruined the British hopes of a reconquest of the island, which confirmed
the endangered work of Ethelfrid, ratified the victory of Chester, cut
off the Britons of the south from their kinsmen in Strathclyde, and
confined the former to that mountainous rectangle of territory which we
know as Wales. The son of the slain king, “Cadwallader the Blessed,”
perhaps strove for a time to maintain the high, almost imperial
pretensions of his father, but his long reign seems to have been on
the whole disastrous, and when he died a pilgrim at Rome in the year
681, the Welsh chronicler himself admits that “thenceforth the Britons
lost the crown of the kingdom and the Saxons gained it”.[64] The two
centuries which followed the battle of Heavenfield are the darkest and
dreariest in the history of Wales.
Returning in triumph, as Columba in vision had promised him, Oswald
proceeded to his father’s wooden palace at Bamburgh, and from thence,
apparently with little difficulty, extended his rule over all
Northumbria. In Bernicia he would, of course, as the son of Ethelfrid,
find many loyal hearts ready to greet him; and even Deira, now that
Edwin and his progeny were off the stage, had possibly a welcome for
the man who was not only the deliverer from British oppression, but
also on his mother’s side descended from the old line. For it will be
remembered that Acha, wife of Ethelfrid, was daughter of Aelle of Deira.
Thus, then, did Bamburgh, which is now a lonely village by the German
Ocean, become “the royal city,” the most strongly fortified abode of
the most powerful king in Britain,[65] the centre of a realm which
stretched from the Humber to the Firth of Forth, and apparently,
through the rest of the seventh century, the destined capital of
England, if England should ever attain to unity. The traveller who
now visits this dethroned queen of Northumbria will see much that,
however noble and picturesque, must be eliminated by an effort of the
imagination if he would picture to himself the Bamburgh of King Oswald.
The massive keep that “stands four-square to every wind that blows,”
dates from the reign of Henry II.; the great hall of the castle now
ingeniously restored by a modern architect, was originally of the time
of Edward I.; some of the still existing buildings were reared by a
benevolent ecclesiastic in the reign of George III.; but the natural
features of the place are unchangeable and unchanged, and in looking
upon them we know that we behold the same scenes that met the eye of
the conqueror of Cadwallon. Such is the rock itself, an upheaved mass
of basalt upon whose black sides the tooth of time seems to gnaw in
vain; such are the long sandy dunes which gather round its base; such
the Inner and Outer Farne Islands, fragments of basalt rising out
of the ocean at distances ranging from three to six miles from the
castle; such the far-off peninsula, which when the tide flows, becomes
Holy Island; such the long range of Cheviot on the western horizon,
snow-covered for many months of the year. Such, we might almost say,
is the fierce wind which, from one quarter or another, seems for
ever attacking the lonely fortress, and which assuredly battered the
“timbered” palace of Oswald as it now batters the time-worn fortress of
the Plantagenet.
Scarcely had Oswald seated himself on the Northumbrian throne when he
began to labour for the conversion of his new subjects to Christianity,
a Christianity, however, not altogether after the fashion which
Paulinus had taught to Edwin of Deira, but rather according to that
which he himself had learned of his friends, the monks of Iona. The
abbot Seghine paid him a visit, probably soon after his accession,
and heard from his own lips the marvellous story of his vision of
Columba and the victory of Heavenfield; and one of his monastic family
was despatched to teach the Northumbrians the religion of Christ.
This missionary was a man of narrow intellect and austere temper, who
soon returned to Iona with the unwelcome tidings that it was but lost
labour to try to teach a nation so barbarous and untamable. At the
council whereat this report was rendered sat a man, probably in early
middle life, the monk Aidan. “It seems to me, my brother,” said he,
“that thou hast been somewhat too hard on these poor unlearned folk,
and hast scarcely remembered the apostolic precept to give milk to
babes till such time as they may be able to understand and to keep
the more sublime commands of God.” The eyes of all in the council
were turned upon the speaker who had so opportunely spoken words of
wisdom. “Aidan shall be bishop,” “Aidan shall be ordained to preach
to the Northumbrians,” was the unanimous decision of the assembly. He
accordingly went southward, and for the next sixteen years (635–51) was
the great missionary bishop of Northumbria.
It must have seemed to Aidan when he visited the palace of the
king, his patron, as if it was a special act of Providence that had
fixed that palace where he found it. For here on the storm-beaten
Northumbrian coast, within six miles from the royal dwelling, lay
an island whereupon he could establish his monastery, and wherein
he could be out of the world yet within reach of the world like his
prototype Columba in Iona. This island which was given him by the king
for his possession, bore then and has borne intermittently ever since
the name of Lindisfarne; but even at this day for once that its legal
designation of Lindisfarne is mentioned, you shall hear it a thousand
times called by the endearing appellation of Holy Island, given to it
probably twelve centuries ago when it first received the imprint of
Aidan’s sandals. The island is but a small one, only about 1,000 acres
in extent, with three fair-sized farms, and a population of about 800
persons, chiefly engaged in fishing, and in winter often hard pressed
for subsistence. The beautiful ruins of the Benedictine abbey, the
parish church, the castle, built in the Commonwealth period, all belong
to ages long posterior to the time when it first became “Holy Island”;
but here, as at Bamburgh, the natural features of the landscape are
so unchanged that it requires but little effort of the imagination to
enable the beholder to travel backward through the centuries to see
Cuthbert praying among the sea-gulls, or Aidan slowly pacing the long
spit of sand which lay between him and the palace of the king. It will
be seen that it is spoken of as an island, and such for all practical
purposes it has ever been; for though on the north it stretches out a
long sandy arm to the mainland, and at dead low water travellers may
reach it from thence all-but dry shod, still their path, traversing
three miles of wet sand and leading them through the waste of waters on
either hand, seems to sever them from the mainland rather than to unite
them thereto, and the inhabitants are at this day islanders in heart
and feeling.
Here then dwelt the Celtic apostle of Northumbria, and from hence did
he diffuse that influence which accomplished the lasting conversion of
the northern Angles to Christianity. In this work he was powerfully
aided by King Oswald. In all the history of Christian Church and
state during eighteen centuries there are few fairer chapters than
that which deals with the intercourse between Oswald and Aidan. There
was evidently something in the character of the Celtic bishop which
won for him more than the veneration, the love, of the Anglian king.
Aidan was a man of absolute simplicity of character, intent on one
purpose alone, that of spreading the Christian faith in the kingdom of
Northumbria, utterly indifferent to wealth, and fame, and power, and
yet without that harshness and austerity which the men of one idea so
often display, and which made many of the noblest of medieval saints
unloveable. Herein, and in his genuine, not feigned, contempt of riches
we trace a certain resemblance between the saint of Lindisfarne and
the saint of Assisi. Bede describes the character of Aidan with an
enthusiasm all the more trustworthy, because he regretfully observes
that “his zeal for God was not according to knowledge, since he kept
the day of the Lord’s Pascha according to the manner of his race, that
is from the fourteenth day to the twentieth”. He says of him, however,
that “herein did he chiefly commend his doctrine to others in that he
taught none otherwise than as he lived among his friends”; words which
remind us of Chaucer’s often quoted description of the “Poure Persoun
of a Toun”:--
But Criste’s loore and his Apostles twelve
He taughte, but first he folwed it hymselve.
It was a strange, but, as Bede says, a most beautiful sight, when
the missionary who as yet had not fully mastered our English tongue
would preach to the people; when Oswald, whose boyhood passed at
Iona had made him master of the difficult Gaelic tongue, stood forth
as interpreter, and translated to his own grim warriors and to the
servants of his palace “the words of the heavenly life” as they fell
from the lips of Aidan. Occasionally, but not too often, for he
dreaded the fascinations of a court, Aidan would accept the royal
invitation and appear with one or two of his clergy in the great hall
at Bamburgh. Even then after a short and hurried repast he would go
forth speedily with his friends to read the Scriptures, to chant the
Psalter, or to pray. But the scene enacted at one such courtly festival
lingered for generations in the memory of men. It was Easter day (the
heterodox Easter, as it may be feared), and the king and the bishop
had just sat down to the mid-day meal. The bishop was on the point
of stretching forth his hand to bless the royal dainties which were
served in a splendid silver dish, when the king’s almoner abruptly
entered and told his master that a multitude of poor persons gathered
from all quarters had arrived, and were sitting in the streets and in
the courtyard of the palace, plaintively demanding alms from the king.
Thereupon Oswald at once ordered the victuals to be distributed among
the beggars, and the dish itself to be broken up into fragments, one of
which should be given to each of them. Aidan, who was himself a most
generous benefactor of the poor, was so delighted with the deed that he
clasped the king’s right hand and exclaimed, “May this hand never see
corruption!”
Devoted as Oswald was to the Christianisation of his people he was
no pious _roi fainéant_, but a strong and successful monarch who
made his power felt at least from the Firth of Forth to the Bristol
Channel. Bede tells us, perhaps with some unconscious exaggeration of
the glory of his native Northumbria, that “he received under his sway
all the nations and provinces of Britain, which are divided into four
languages, those of the Britons, the Picts, the Scots, and the Angles”.
As he evidently here uses “Angles” as equivalent to Angles and Saxons,
this sentence represents Oswald as accomplishing more than Egbert was
to achieve two centuries later, and as practically the lord of our
whole island. Consistently herewith he represents him as the sixth of
the Bretwaldas; and Adamnan, who at first calls him merely “regnator
Saxonicus,” says that after the victory of Heavenfield he was “ordained
by God emperor of the whole of Britain”. But all these statements must
be taken with considerable reservation. Oswald wielded evidently during
the seven years of his reign the predominant power in the island, but
we are not to think of him as interfering with any of the details of
administration in Wessex or East Anglia, still less in Wales or among
the Scots of Dalriada. With Wessex, indeed, we are expressly told that
he formed ties both of relationship and of religion. When Cynegils,
King of the West Saxons, who had been converted to Christianity by
the preaching of Birinus, was baptised, his godfather, the man who,
according to ecclesiastical phrase, “received him emerging from the
sacred laver,” was Oswald of Bernicia, who also became his son-in-law,
accepting from the old West Saxon king the hand of his daughter in
marriage.
From the character of our one chief authority, Bede’s _Ecclesiastical
History_, it naturally but unfortunately follows that we are left in
almost total ignorance of the political events in Oswald’s reign.
Gladly would we know, for instance, whether the fierce Mercian,
Penda, bowed his head even for a time under the yoke of Northumbrian
supremacy, but on this point we are left without information. There are
hints of earlier wars and fightings between the two states, but all
that we can certainly say is that on August 5, 642, Oswald and Penda
met in battle at a place called Maserfield,[66] and that though Penda’s
brother fell in the fight the Mercian king “was victorious by diabolic
art,” and Oswald lay dead on the battlefield. He died praying: when he
saw himself girt round by the Mercian host and knew that his death was
inevitable, he cried aloud: “Lord, have mercy on the souls of my army,”
and the remembrance of this prayer passed into a proverb: “‘Lord, pity
their souls,’ as Oswald said when he was falling to the ground”.
Oswald was in his thirty-eighth year when he died, the second
Northumbrian prince in the prime and vigour of his days, who had
fallen before the elderly barbarian, Penda. The brutal heathen had his
head and hands severed from the body and fixed on stakes; but before
long, at a turn of the wheel of fortune, these relics, now deemed to
be endowed with miraculous power, were carried to distant sites where
they met with more honourable treatment. The head was deposited in the
monastery at Holy Island, and in after years shared the migrations of
the relics of St. Cuthbert: the hand, “the uncorrupted hand” which
Aidan had blessed, was enshrined at Bamburgh: the body, by the order
of Oswald’s niece, Osthryd, now Queen of the Mercians, was reverently
laid in the monastery of Bardney in the centre of Lincolnshire. In
his lifetime Oswald had, with some display of force, extended his
dominion over this South-Humbrian land, mindful of which fact the
patriotic monks were loth to receive the body of their conqueror, but a
pillar of fire hovering at night over the coffin showed them that the
corpse to which they were refusing admittance would be a precious and
wonder-working relic, and turned their aversion into eagerness for its
possession. Numerous in fact were the miracles alleged to be wrought
by the dissevered fragments of the kingly body, and even by the dust
of the battlefield on which he had fallen. The day of his martyrdom,
August 5, was appropriated to the cult of Saint Oswald, and the fame of
the new saint and his wonder-working relics spread rapidly not only in
England but in Ireland and on the Continent.