TERRITORIAL CHANGES--THE CONFERENCE AT WHITBY--THE GREAT PLAGUE.
The victory by the Winwaed left Oswy undoubtedly the mightiest king in
Britain. It may be convenient to enumerate here the chief territorial
changes during the latter half of the seventh century which can be
discerned between the succession of bishops and the miracles of saints
that form naturally the chief subject of Bede’s _Ecclesiastical
History_.
1. Northumbria, at any rate after Oswy’s victory, may have stretched
along the eastern coast from Aberdeen or the Cromarty Firth nearly to
the Wash. We are distinctly told that “he subdued the nation of the
Picts or at least the largest part of them to the Anglian kingdom,”
and it is generally agreed that this must refer to the Picts north
of the Firth of Forth, which was at this time the ordinary Anglian
boundary. Southward, the dominions of which Oswy was overlord probably
now included the whole of Yorkshire. It seems, however, to have been
an accepted principle that when the overlord was king in Bernicia
there must be an under-king in Deira. For seven years, as we have
seen, the comely and gracious Oswin, either as equal colleague or as
such under-king, reigned in Deira (644–51). After his murder and the
consequent extinction of the direct male line of the descendants of
Aelle, Oswald’s son, Ethelwald, ruled over the southern kingdom. Did
his dubious conduct on the battle-plain of the Winwaed fail to secure
for him the favour of his victorious uncle? We cannot say, but it is an
ominous circumstance that soon after that event he vanishes from the
scene and is replaced by Alchfrid, son of Oswy by his first marriage.
We have heard of this prince as assisting in the conversion of his
brother-in-law, Peada, to Christianity; we have seen him fighting by
his father’s side against his father-in-law, Penda; we shall find
him taking a leading part in the discussions about the date of Easter
and generally befriending the Roman party; but besides these facts we
hear also of some action on his part, possibly in the way of overt
rebellion, whereby he added to the “labours” of his father. Whatever
the date of this rebellion, if such it were, after 664 we hear no more
of Alchfrid.
The mystery, however, that hangs over the life and death of Alchfrid
almost heightens the interest which is attached to a monument raised
to his memory, the celebrated Bewcastle Cross. There in the midst of
a wide and desolate moor, as desolate, perhaps, now as it was twelve
hundred years ago, rises an obelisk fourteen and a half feet high,
once surmounted by a cross which has now disappeared, bearing in
Runic letters the sacred name “Gessus Christus” (so must our Anglian
ancestors have spoken of the Saviour), and an inscription which, though
not yet deciphered beyond dispute, certainly says that the stone was
raised as a memorial of “Alchfrith, son of Oswy, and aforetime King”.
Other runes give us the names of Alchfrid’s wife, Cyneburga, of her
sister (?) Cyneswitha, and of her brother Wulfhere, King of Mercia. An
inscription seems to record that it was reared in the first year of his
brother Egfrid, that is in 670. This date gives additional interest
to the quaint but not ungraceful specimens of Anglian art with which
the obelisk is enriched, to the flowing tracery of vine-leaves and
grape-clusters, the birds and dogs, the figures of John the Baptist and
our Lord, and (in the lowest compartment of all) the standing figure of
a man with a bird on his wrist, perhaps King Alchfrid himself with his
falcon. Even should the reading of one line of the inscription, “Pray
for his soul’s great sin,” prove too fanciful to be accepted by future
students, we have in the other utterances of this monument enough to
invest with a peculiar interest the name of Oswy’s son and Penda’s
son-in-law.
After the death of this prince, two younger sons of Oswy are spoken of
on somewhat doubtful authority as successively holding the position of
Deiran under-kings. It seems clear that there was in the two provinces,
Bernicia and Deira, a certain reluctance to coalesce, an unwillingness
of each to submit to the king chosen by the other, which it is not
difficult to understand. Whatever may have been its cause, this
tendency to estrangement between its two great provinces had doubtless
something to do with the early downfall of Northumbria.
The southern boundary of Oswy’s kingdom was at this time a somewhat
uncertain one. In the first place, what is now the county of Lincoln,
or, as it was then called, Lindissi, was for generations the regular
prize of war between Northumbria and Mercia. It was added to his
dominions by the victorious Edwin, and if lost through his defeat by
Penda, it was recovered by Oswald, but, as we have seen, so little was
his yoke beloved that the monks of Bardney in Lincolnshire at first
refused to give shelter to his bones. Under Penda it was doubtless
again annexed to Mercia, and probably shared the fortunes of that
middle kingdom until, between 671 and 675, it was recovered from
Wulfhere, son of Penda, by Oswy’s son and successor, Egfrid. It was
once more regained for Mercia by Ethelred, probably about the year 679,
and apparently never after owned the sway of a Northumbrian king.
2. After the victory of the Winwaed, Oswy seems to have been virtually
master of Mercia. He continued his son-in-law, Peada, as under-king of
Southern Mercia, that is the part of the kingdom south of the river
Trent, but he apparently kept Northern Mercia in his own hands. In
the spring of the following year, however, at the very time when the
newly converted nation was celebrating the Easter festival, Peada was
murdered, and dark suspicions prevailed that his young Christian wife
was an accomplice in the crime. It is not hinted that Oswy himself
had instigated the deed, but doubtless the horror of it added to the
dislike with which the people of Mercia viewed the Northumbrian rule.
Three years after old Penda’s death, three of his veteran generals
successfully conspired against the Northerner, brought out of his
hiding-place a young son of their late master, named Wulfhere, whom
they had till then successfully concealed, expelled Oswy’s thanes,
and restored the independence of the Mercian kingdom, apparently with
its old boundaries. The new king Wulfhere was a zealous Christian--as
indeed, strange to say, were all the children of Penda--and reigned for
seventeen years well and gloriously (659–675). We hear of no attempt by
Oswy to recover his supremacy over Mercia, although, as we have seen,
his son did recover that shuttle-cock of battle, Lindsey. Wulfhere’s
chief wars seem to have been with the Kings of Wessex, over whom he
won several victories. The extent of his power is most clearly shown by
the fact that having formed a friendship with Ethelwalh, King of the
South Saxons, and persuaded him to be baptised, he handed over to him
the Isle of Wight and the district occupied by the Meonwaras in the
east of Hampshire, which he had wrested from the King of Wessex. The
son of Penda officiated as godfather to the new convert, whose example
in accepting the Christian faith was followed by many of his thanes and
soldiers, but not as yet by the bulk of the South Saxon people.
3. Of political events in the kingdom of the East Angles in the period
now under review, we find scarcely a trace. Shut off from the rest
of England by the great fen-lands, which covered almost the whole of
the modern counties of Cambridge and Huntingdon, East Anglia seems to
have generally kept the even tenour of her own solitary way, which
was at this time the way of holiness. If we may judge of the people
from their rulers, we should be inclined to conjecture that, under the
influence of the preaching of Felix and Fursa, this isolated district
of England was passing through a phase of religious fervour like that
which made its counties the stronghold of Lollardy in the fourteenth,
and of Puritanism in the seventeenth centuries, sending at the latter
period so many stern enthusiasts to fight in the new-modelled army
of Cromwell. Of course, in the seventh century religious zeal took
a direction which would have brought it into fierce collision with
the Ironsides of Naseby and Marston Moor. All the fairest fruits of
Christianity at this time were ripened in the cloister, and a monastic
life seems to have had irresistible attractions for the ladies of the
royal East Anglian race. King Anna, who, as we have seen, fell in
battle against Penda in the year 654, left three daughters, two of whom
were the wives of kings, but all of whom ended their lives as abbesses
in a convent, and in the next generation two daughters of one of these
saintly ladies (one of them also a queen consort) followed their
mother’s example.
4. Very different at one time was the religious history of the kingdom
of the East Saxons, represented by the two modern counties of Essex and
Middlesex. When we last heard of the affairs of this little kingdom
Mellitus had been contemptuously driven forth from his episcopal
seat in London because he refused to administer the white bread of
the communion to the heathen sons of King Saberct (617?). Since that
time a generation had passed away, and Essex was still heathen. The
king now reigning in London--one of the many Sigeberts who about this
time perplex the student of Anglo-Saxon pedigrees--was, we are told,
a friend and a frequent visitor to Oswy of Northumbria. In the halls
of Bamburgh and Ad Murum the conversation often turned on religious
subjects; and “How,” said the Northumbrian king, “can you think that
these things are gods, which are made by the hands of men? You take
a piece of wood or stone, and what is not needed for the purpose of
idol-making you either burn in the fire or shape into some common
household utensil which, when it is done with, is pitched out of doors
and trodden under foot of men. How can these things be divine? We must
think of the true God as incomprehensible, unseen, omnipotent, eternal,
the righteous ruler of the world, who does not dwell in perishable
substances but has His eternal seat on high. We can understand, too,
that the beings whom He has created, if they will learn His will and
do it, shall receive from Him eternal rewards.” Many dialogues of this
kind at last produced an effect. The East Saxon king was baptised by
Finan of Lindisfarne, Aidan’s successor, at the same royal _villa_
of Ad Murum which had witnessed the baptism of Peada, the Mercian.
Returning to his own kingdom he sought to bring his subjects over to
his new faith and sent to Oswy for a missionary (653). Hereupon Cedd,
one of a family of zealous Northumbrian converts who had been preaching
Christianity in Mercia, was recalled from his work in the Midlands
and sent to Essex, where he carried on a most successful mission, was
consecrated as bishop, and, apparently for the first time, founded the
church of London on a secure basis. Sigebert, however, was slain after
a reign of some years by two noblemen of his kindred who were offended
by his meek submission to the counsels of the bishop, and after one
intervening reign,[71] two kings named Sighere and Sebbi reigned over
the East Saxons jointly, but always in subjection to the overlordship
of Wulfhere, King of Mercia, whose “sphere of influence” evidently
included all the south of England with the doubtful exception of Wessex.
The accession of these two kings probably took place soon after
660, but dates as well as accurate pedigrees are grievously wanting
for all this portion of history. In 664 a terrible pestilence, which
ravaged Essex as well as all the rest of England, shook the newly-born
faith of the people and divided their rulers. Sighere and all his
subjects openly apostatised from the faith of Christ, sought out the
old half-ruined heathen fanes, and began once more to worship the
idols replaced therein. Sebbi, on the other hand, and the men under
his sway remained steadfast in their profession of Christianity. Nor
does the relapse into heathenism of the other half of the kingdom seem
to have been of long continuance. The zeal of the overlord Wulfhere
soon remedied that error. He sent his Mercian bishop, Jaruman, on a
mission to the East Saxons, the third which had been despatched to
that wavering people, and Jaruman, backed by the authority of his
sovereign, without much difficulty overturned once more the idol-altars
and brought back the recalcitrant East Saxons within the embraces of
the Church. From this time onwards London, its bishops and its commerce
become of ever-increasing importance in the pages of the historians.
5. The political history of Kent during this period offers little of
interest. The king whose name figures most largely in the pages of
Bede is Erconbert (640–64). He married Sexburh, daughter of Anna, one
of the devout East Anglian family, and, partly perhaps owing to her
influence, Church and State were more closely welded together in this
than in any of the other kingdoms. “He was the first of all the English
kings who by his princely authority ordered the idols throughout his
kingdom to be abandoned and destroyed, and the fast of the forty days
[of Lent] to be observed. And in order that these commands might be
despised by none, he proclaimed fit and proper punishments against the
transgressors.” Thus in Kent we have reached the second stage in the
establishment of Christianity, which is now no longer merely tolerated
or approved by the sovereign but dominant and in a certain sense
persecuting.
6. The obscure history of the South Saxon kingdom has been already
touched upon in connexion with that of Mercia. Suffice it to remind
the reader that under the protecting hand of the great Midland king,
who evidently wished to make of this kingdom a counterpoise to the
power of Wessex, it included not only the modern county of Sussex but
also the Isle of Wight and a good deal of the east of Hampshire; and
that though its royal family were Christian the bulk of the people
remained idolators. This religious isolation of the South Saxon people
is generally attributed to the fact already alluded to, that they
were separated from the rest of England by the mighty forest of the
Andredeswald, that “dark impenetrable wood” which yielded in later
ages to the axes of the charcoal-burners of Sussex and Kent, so that
the country which we call the Weald is now left comparatively bare and
treeless. It is hard for us who now know the chief town of the coast
of Sussex as virtually a suburb of London, to imagine the time when
Sussex, isolated in its heathen barbarism, remained virtually another
world to the inhabitants of Essex and Middlesex.
7. The history of the West Saxon kingdom, for which such a brilliant
future was reserved in the coming generations, is for the seventh
century obscure and uninteresting. Partly, of course, this may be
accounted for by the fact that our one transcendent authority for this
period, Bede, is himself a most patriotic Northumbrian, and cares
little for distant Wessex. But even after making allowance for this
weighting of one of the scales, it is impossible not to recognise the
fact that in the West Saxon line during the greater part of the seventh
century we meet with no such powerful personalities as Edwin, Oswald,
and Oswy, nor do we find there any symptoms which would have warranted
a beholder in looking for the eventual appearance of the splendid
figures of Alfred, Edward, and Athelstan.
As we have seen, the fortunes of Wessex in her conflict with Mercia
were at this time generally unprosperous. In 628 there was the
disastrous war with Mercia. Then came the preaching of Birinus, the
baptism and death of Cynegils and his son, the accession of the still
heathen Cenwalh and his expulsion by his enraged brother-in-law of
Mercia. He returned, perhaps, on the invitation of his kinsman Cuthred,
to whom he made an enormous grant of property (3,000 “lands” or hides)
at Ashdown in Berkshire. Having embraced Christianity in his exile, he
completed the conversion of Wessex to the new faith. Unsuccessful as
he seems generally to have been in his wars with Mercia, he met with
better fortune in his campaigns against the southern Britons. In 652
we are told that he fought--assuredly with the “Walas,” though this
is not expressly stated--at Bradford-upon-Avon. He thus apparently
completed the conquest of Wiltshire, and it may well have been within a
generation after Cenwalh’s victory that Aldhelm, Abbot of Malmesbury,
built that quaint little church, dedicated to St. Lawrence, which still
stands overlooking the south-country Bradford, and which is nearly the
best surviving monument of true Saxon architecture. Six years later
(658) Cenwalh again fought with the Welsh at Peonnum (or the Pens,
generally identified with Pensel Wood on the south-eastern border of
Somerset), and this time we are distinctly told that he drove them as
far as the river Parret. The larger half of the county of Somerset
thus became definitively West Saxon, and the far-famed sanctuary of
Glastonbury and the poetic valley of Avalon now owned the sway of a
king who, though a Saxon, was also a Christian.
An important acquisition certainly: yet the very fact that it had
still to be made, illustrates the extremely gradual character of the
Saxon conquest of Britain. Two hundred years have now elapsed since
the accepted date of the landing of Hengest, one hundred and seventy
since Cerdic, one of the latest of the invaders, set foot on the shore
of Southampton Water, and yet the West Saxons have only just crossed
the Mendip Hills; nearly half of Somerset and the whole of Devonshire
and Cornwall have yet to be won. The other records of the reign of
Cenwalh relate to his battles, generally unsuccessful, with the Mercian
kings. His fellow-Christian, young Wulfhere, ravaged what was left of
West Saxon territory north of the Thames, as far as Ashdown. While the
territory of Wessex had been in some degree growing towards the west,
it was, as we have already seen, curtailed towards the east by the
loss of the district of the Meonwaras and the Isle of Wight which were
handed over by Wulfhere to Sussex. Altogether there was little in the
fortunes of the West Saxon dynasty under Cenwalh, or under the obscure
rulers who followed him, to betoken that the hegemony would one day be
theirs. When towards the end of the century Caedwalla and Ine appear
upon the scene, the prospect somewhat brightens, but the victories of
the first and the laws of the second must be dealt with in a later
chapter.
From this brief review of the relations of the various English
kingdoms to one another towards the close of the seventh century, it
will be abundantly evident how far we yet were from anything like
national unity. There does not even seem to be any dawning feeling
of fellowship of race. Angle wages with Angle and Saxon with Saxon
a long and embittered warfare; and more than once a Mercian or West
Saxon king avails himself of British help to win the victory over
his kinsfolk. If Anglo-Saxon unity was at length obtained, and we
know that it was not till far on in the tenth century that it was
even approximately realised, this result was due undoubtedly to two
great causes: the influence of the national Christian Church and the
necessity of self-defence against the Scandinavian invaders. With the
first of these causes alone we have here to deal. It cannot be doubted
that zeal for their new-born Christian faith was already in some
measure drawing the English kings together. When Oswald of Bernicia
stood sponsor for West Saxon Cynegils, when his brother Oswy persuaded
East Saxon Sigebert to forsake the follies of idolatry, a moral
bond of union was formed, which might be developed into a political
relationship. The consciousness of common interest in the _Civitas
Dei_ might well become, and eventually did become, a consciousness of
fellow-citizenship in one great country.
In order however that the Church might exert this unifying influence
on English politics it was essential that she should be of one mind
herself; but at this time the unfortunate division between the Roman
and the Celtic Churches on the utterly unimportant questions of the
shape of the tonsure and the right calculation of Easter did much to
prevent so desirable a consummation. Utterly unimportant they seem to
us, and probably few ecclesiastics of any school of thought would now
deny their triviality; but there is a well-known law of theological
dynamics that the bitterness of feeling between rival Churches is in
inverse proportion to the magnitude of the issues between them; and so
it proved at this crisis. Owing to the different quarters from which
the different English kingdoms had received their Christianity, the
religious map of England was divided in the following manner. Kent and
East Anglia were firm in their following of Rome. Wessex also, which
had been won for Christianity by Birinus, was steadily, though perhaps
not enthusiastically, Roman. Bernicia, till late in the reign of Oswy,
clung firmly to the teachings of Iona. Deira seems to have been
generally on the same side, though the remembrance of the teaching of
Paulinus, kept alive, as it was, by the teaching of his follower James
the Deacon, had probably modified the strength of its Celticism; and
Alchfrid the king, influenced by the persuasions of his friend Cenwalh,
King of Wessex, had embraced with fervour the party of Rome. Mercia and
Essex, both of which had been evangelised by Northumbrian missionaries,
seem to have been somewhat half-hearted in their adherence to the
Celtic traditions.
Such being the condition of things, Oswy, in conjunction with his
son and colleague, Alchfrid, convoked in the year 664 a synod at
Streanæshalch to discuss the thorny question of the difference
between the Churches. The place was well fitted to be the scene of a
memorable meeting. Its Saxon name, which, according to Bede, signified
lighthouse-bay, well indicates that conspicuous cliff on the Yorkshire
coast which we now know so well by the more common-place name of
Whitby, given to it some three centuries later by its Danish destroyers
and rebuilders. Hither, to this wind-beaten rock, had the holy Hilda,
great-niece of Edwin of Deira, removed her convent from the more
northern Hartlepool; and here she dwelt, ruling her double monastery of
monks and nuns in all gentleness and purity, while the little Elfleda,
Oswy’s youngest daughter, whom he had vowed to God on the eve of his
great battle with Penda, was growing up under her tuition into all
the virtues of a perfect nun, and preparing to take her place one day
as abbess of the convent. To the student of English literature Whitby
monastery is for ever memorable as the home of the first English poet,
Caedmon, who there, while sitting in the cow-byre, received the command
from a heavenly visitor to sing “the beginning of things, the going
forth out of Egypt, the suffering and the resurrection of the Lord”.
At this place, then, all that was eminent for holiness in the infant
Church of Northumbria came together to discuss the then all-important
question of the true date for the keeping of Easter. However
uninteresting from a religious point of view this question may now
appear, the practical inconvenience of its unsettled condition was
clearly seen in the household of King Oswy. Here was he, following
the Celtic usage, celebrating his Easter feast on the fourteenth day
of the lunar month which included the vernal equinox, while his wife,
Eanfled, daughter of Edwin and granddaughter of Ethelbert of Kent,
refused to recognise as a possible Easter any Sunday earlier than the
fifteenth of the same month. Hence it might possibly happen, nay, in
the very next year after the council it actually would have happened,
that in the very same palace the king would be celebrating Easter
Sunday with all the feasting and the gladness which were considered the
suitable accompaniments of the day of the Lord’s resurrection, while
the queen and all the holy men and women of her party would be sitting
in the sadness of Lent preparing to follow in imagination the Dolorous
Way by which on the successive days of Passion week the Saviour would
be led up to the crowning grief of Calvary. The difference, as the
fair-minded Bede is careful to explain, was not the same as that which
separated the so-called Quarto-decimans from the Western Church, and
which was finally condemned at the Council of Nicæa. That party,
adhering strictly to the Jewish usage, celebrated Easter at the same
time as the old Passover on “the fourteenth day of the first month,”
on whatever day of the week that day might happen to fall. Not so,
however, with the sons of Iona. Columba, Aidan and all the saints of
the old Celtic Church remembered the Crucifixion on a Friday and the
Resurrection on a Sunday, whether those days fell on the fourteenth
or sixteenth of the lunar month or not. Thus the correct date for the
Christian seasons for both parties had to be arrived at by a compromise
between the week reckoning and the month reckoning; the only question
at issue being the form of that compromise and the limits of permitted
deviation. The Celt contended that the pendulum must swing between
the fourteenth and the twentieth days of the moon’s age; while the
Roman ecclesiastic allowed it to swing only between the fifteenth and
the twenty-first. A small difference truly to cause such long and
heated arguments, yet, as we have seen, where a house was divided
against itself on this question, it might occasion no little practical
inconvenience.
There was much that was illogical and unscientific in the arguments
on both sides of the controversy. The fathers from Iona were fond
of appealing to the authority of the beloved Apostle John, which,
so far as it proved anything, proved not their contention but that
of the old, universally condemned Quarto-decimans. The supporters
of the Roman usage loudly asserted the necessity of following St.
Peter, who certainly cannot be proved, nor can with much probability
be even conjectured, to have ever expressed an opinion on the point
at issue between the Churches. Much stress did they also lay on the
unchanging custom of the Roman Church, whereas that Church had in
fact shown its good sense by modifying its calendar in some important
particulars in deference to the calculations of the more scientific
fathers of Alexandria. Doubtless the real arguments, appealing to the
heart rather than to the head, were on the one side the remembrance of
saintly Christian lives, such as those of Columba and Aidan, producing
a natural reluctance to admit that such men had lived and died in
grievous error; and on the other side a feeling of impatience that
the inhabitants of a few rocky islands in the wild Atlantic should
set their judgment against the richly endowed and stately Churches of
Paris, Arles and Vienne, of Milan and of Rome.
On the Celtic side of the controversy were ranged the saintly Hilda
herself, and Colman, Bishop of Lindisfarne, who, after the short
intervening episcopate of Finan, had succeeded to the dignity held by
the universally venerated Aidan. It was probably hoped, too, that King
Oswy would be a stout defender of the usages which he and his brothers
had learned in their long boyish banishment at Iona. On the other side,
eager for union with Canterbury and Rome, stood Eanfled, the queen,
and her step-son, Alchfrid of Deira. There, too, was James the Deacon,
the follower of Paulinus, who for thirty-one years had maintained the
cause of Roman Christianity in Deira. Highest in ecclesiastical rank
on this side was Agilbert the Frank, Bishop of Dorchester, a learned
man who had studied for some years in Ireland--then a great centre of
theological study--but had apparently not cared to add the knowledge
of Anglo-Saxon to his other accomplishments, for we are told that
Cenwalh, King of Wessex, once his friend and admirer, growing weary at
length of his “barbarous” way of talking, planted down at Winchester a
rival bishop who could talk with him in Saxon. This gave Agilbert such
offence that he resigned his diminished see of Dorchester, and returned
to Gaul, where he was appointed Bishop of Paris. That migration was,
however, yet in the future, and it was still as Bishop of the West
Saxons, though possibly of the divided see, that Agilbert appeared to
support his sovereign’s friend, Alchfrid, in the great controversy.
The hint about Agilbert’s “barbarous” Frankish language is especially
interesting to the philologer as showing how widely the language of
the Franks, probably from its admixture with degenerate Latin, was
beginning to diverge from the kindred Anglo-Saxon. Two generations
previously at the court of Ethelbert, the Kentish courtiers seem to
have conversed without difficulty with the companions of their Frankish
queen.
When all were seated, King Oswy arose and made a speech on the need for
unity of practice between men who were all seeking the same heavenly
kingdom. Let them inquire which was the true rule for the calculation
of Easter, and all follow that. He then called on his own bishop,
Colman, to set forth the reason for his rule. Colman replied with
the usual reference to the holiness of his predecessors and to the
authority of the beloved Apostle John. Bishop Agilbert being called
upon to reply, acutely conscious of his inability to speak in the
English tongue, prayed that the task of replying might be assigned to
one of his disciples, named Wilfrid the presbyter, who fully shared
all his opinions and could clearly set them forth in the king’s own
language without the intervention of an interpreter.
Herewith there stepped on to the stage of English history an actor who
was never to be long absent thence through more than forty troublous
years. Wilfrid, who was now about thirty years of age, was the son of
a Northumbrian thegn, a youth brought up in the rude luxury of a rich
Anglian’s hall, with horses, armour and goodly raiment at his disposal;
but at the age of fourteen a harsh step-mother in his home, and some
instinct of aspiration after a holier life, sent him to Lindisfarne,
where he learned much, but gradually became dissatisfied with the
Celtic position of isolation from Rome. Queen Eanfled, encouraging his
disaffection, assisted him to visit the court of her cousin, Erconbert
of Kent, from whence in his twentieth year he set out for Rome. On his
way through Gaul the bright and handsome Northumbrian had offers of
worldly preferment and a rich marriage from the Archbishop of Lyons,
but refusing all such worldly advantages, he pressed on to “the tombs
of the apostles”. Though to the reader of the pontifical annals, Rome
in the middle of the seventh century, with its Monotheletic controversy
and its Lombard wars, may not seem a very inspiring theme, it is
clear that the great world-city, with its stately ruins and statelier
church-organisation, exerted a powerful fascination over the mind of
the young Northumbrian, and during all the rest of his life we find
him, like another Loyola, staunch in his resolve to live or die for
the defence of the Holy See. He learned from a certain Archdeacon
Boniface “the daily lessons from the four gospels, the reasonable mode
of calculating Easter, and many other things relating to the discipline
of the Church of which he had been ignorant in his own country,” and
then returning through Gaul he again visited his friend, the Archbishop
of Lyons, and received from him the monastic tonsure. The archbishop
was still minded to make him his heir, and apparently with some such
expectation Wilfrid remained for three years in attendance upon him.
By one of those reverses of fortune to which the courtier-prelates of
Merovingian Gaul were frequently subject, Wilfrid’s patron lost both
office and life, and Wilfrid himself narrowly, and only on account of
his foreign origin, escaped sharing his doom.[72] Returning at last
(in 658), after long wanderings, to his native Deira, he there found
Alchfrid reigning, a man like-minded with himself in his preference
of Rome to Iona. He settled eventually in a monastery at Ripon, from
which Eata, friend and pupil of Aidan, had been expelled on account of
his adherence to the Celtic usages by the hotly partisan king. Here
Wilfrid, a year before the convocation of the synod, had been ordained
as priest by Bishop Agilbert and installed as abbot of the monastery,
which seems to have been to the end of his days the most dearly loved
of his homes.
Such was the man, already well versed in the Paschal controversy, and
deeply tinged with the Roman and Gaulish contempt for the religion of
the Hebrides, to whom the grateful task was assigned of demolishing the
arguments of Colman. “The Easter which we observe,” said he, “is that
which I myself have seen celebrated at Rome, home and burial-place of
the two great apostles. Wheresoever I journeyed, intent on learning and
on prayer, throughout Italy and Gaul I found this feast celebrated.
This feast, Africa, Asia, Egypt, Greece, nay, and the whole Christian
world through all its various nations and languages do observe,
save only these two obstinate nations, the Picts and the Britons
(inhabitants of the two furthest isles in the ocean and of only a part
even of them), who do with stupid energy strive against the opinion of
the whole world.” So spoke the haughty, foreign-fashioned ecclesiastic;
and when we have heard this first tactless utterance of his, we are the
better able to understand why all the forty years of his episcopate
were more or less passed in strife. Colman plaintively asked if
Wilfrid would call the blessed apostle John stupid. Wilfrid replied
that St. John like St. Paul might do many things to conciliate Jewish
prejudice, and that after all, his usage being that of the earlier
Quarto-decimans, did not coincide with the Celtic Easter which must
always fall on a Sunday. “No,” he ended, “you who shut out the 21st day
of the moon from your calculation, agree neither with John nor with
Peter, neither with the Law nor with the Gospel.”
The debate then drifted off into a discussion of “the cycle of
Anatolius,”[73] and an appeal by Colman to the virtues of Columba and
his successors who had kept the Celtic Easter. “Surely,” he pleaded,
“the miracles which they had wrought showed that their teaching was
acceptable in the sight of God.” “I do not deny,” answered Wilfrid,
“that these men of whom you thus speak were God’s servants. I think
that if any Catholic calculator had come to them and taught them the
better way, they would have obeyed his monitions. And however holy
your, or I would rather say our, Columba may have been, however mighty
in signs and wonders, can you prefer his authority to that of the
blessed Prince of the Apostles, to whom the Lord said, ‘Thou art Peter,
and on this rock I will build My Church, and the gates of hell shall
not prevail against it, and I will give thee the keys of the kingdom
of heaven’?” As Wilfrid made this closing quotation the king turned
to Colman and said: “Is it true that these words were spoken by the
Lord to Peter?” “It is true, O king!” was the answer. “Can you produce
any instance of a similar power conferred on your Columba?” “We have
none,” answered Colman. Said the king: “Do both parties agree without
controversy on this point, that these words were spoken pre-eminently
to Peter and that to him the keys of heaven were granted by the
Lord?” Both answered: “We do”. Thereupon the king thus announced his
conclusion: “Then I say to you that this is the door-keeper whom I am
loth to contradict, and whose ordinances I desire to obey to the utmost
of my power, lest haply when I arrive at the doors of the kingdom there
shall be none to open them unto me if I have lost the favour of him who
keeps the keys thereof”.
The Bernician king evidently conceived of heaven as of a Northumbrian
palace hall: and not unnaturally he, who knew his hands to be stained
with the blood of his gracious kinsman Oswin, desired to enlist the
sympathies of the most powerful patron possible on his side against
the day when he should have to plead for entrance therein. Oswy’s
decision was, of course, final. All over Northumberland the Roman
customs as to Easter and the tonsure now prevailed. Bishop Colman, who
could not reconcile himself to the new ways, abdicated his see and
returned to Iona, accompanied by all the Irish monks from Lindisfarne
and by thirty Anglian brethren who shared their opinions. From Iona
he afterwards went to Ireland and founded a monastery on an island
off the coast of Mayo, which had not a very successful career. Cedd,
bishop of the East Saxons, who had acted as interpreter and to some
extent as mediator between the two parties, accepted the decision of
the synod, and returned to enforce it in London and the rest of his
diocese. Everywhere now throughout Teutonic Britain unity with Rome
was established, and little more than a century elapsed before all the
Celtic communities in Iona, in Ireland, even in sturdy recalcitrant
Wales, had adopted the Roman Easter and the coronal tonsure.[74]
The change was one which probably ought upon the whole to be considered
beneficial. Unity was the thing now most needed, both politically and
ecclesiastically, and unity had to be achieved by the State through
the Church. It was, therefore, well that this pebble, which broke the
full flow of the stream towards unity, should be removed out of the
way by the synod of Whitby. It was well, also, that there should be no
hindrance to free and full intercourse between the ecclesiastics of
England and those of the continent. True, the civilisation of Italy
and Gaul in the seventh century was nothing to boast of. To Cicero
or to Marcus Aurelius it would have seemed like barbarism: but it
was superior to the barbarism of the Saxon, perhaps in some respects
superior even to the undoubtedly high civilisation, at this time, of
Celtic Tara and Armagh. Still it was not all gain that resulted from
the decision of the synod of Whitby and the rupture of the spiritual
bond that had bound Lindisfarne to Iona. Even Bede, with all his
loyalty to Rome and abhorrence of the Celtic Easter, seems to feel
this fact; else why does he introduce just at this point an eloquent
panegyric on the simple life of Colman and his predecessors, their
genuine poverty and the faithfulness with which they at once handed to
the poor any money which they received from the rich? “At that time
the religious habit was held in great veneration, so that wheresoever
cleric or monk appeared, he was joyfully welcomed by all as the servant
of God; those who met him on the road with bent necks rejoiced to
receive the blessing of his lips or of his extended hand: they listened
eagerly to his words of exhortation. The priests and clerics of that
day had no care for anything else but preaching, baptising, visiting
the sick--in a word, for the salvation of souls. So utterly were
they delivered from the poison of avarice, that no one of them would
receive land or presents even for the building of monasteries, unless
absolutely compelled to do so by secular rulers.” In these and similar
sentences Bede hints at the degeneracy of his own times and seems to
mourn that more of the spirit of Iona had not lingered in the Anglian
Church. In Columba, Aidan, Colman and their disciples, as has been
already said, we seem to see something of that absolute indifference
to wealth, that kinship with Nature and her children, that almost
passionate love for Poverty and the Poor which, six centuries later,
was to shed a halo round the head of Francis of Assisi. These men were
zealous missionaries, “humble and holy men of heart”: the men who were
about to replace them in the organised and regularly affiliated Church,
though by no means devoid of missionary zeal, nor of the spirit of
self-denial, were before all, great ecclesiastics and lordly rulers of
the Church.
The year 664 which witnessed the assembling of the synod at Whitby
was, for other reasons, a sadly memorable one to the English nation.
In that year, on May 1, there was a total eclipse of the sun, and
this, to the unscientific minds of our ancestors, seemed to be in some
mysterious way connected with a terrible visitation of pestilence
which, apparently in the summer and autumn, swept over our island,
beginning at the southern shore and from thence passing northward till
it reached Northumbria, and crossed over into Ireland; everywhere
carrying off multitudes of people. On July 14, Erconbert, King of
Kent, and Deusdedit, archbishop, both died within a few hours of each
other, apparently smitten by the pestilence. Later on, probably in
the same year, Tuda, the new Bishop of Lindisfarne, and Cedd, the
interpreter-bishop of the Whitby synod, fell victims to the same
wide-wasting enemy. We have already had occasion to notice the effect
which this terrible calamity had in causing many of the East Saxons
to relapse for a time into idolatry. The stories concerning the
plague with which Bede crowds his pages are generally of the edifying
death-bed sayings uttered by its victims and the visions of supernal
bliss vouchsafed to them before their departure. Intent on these
spiritual aspects of the visitation, and not sparing his readers one
of the miracles which he had heard of as marking its course, Bede has
not recorded any of its physical symptoms as Thucydides has done in
his memorable description of the Plague of Athens. We learn, however,
from other sources[75] that it was intensely infectious, that one of
the symptoms was inflamed swellings, and that the faces of the patients
were tinged with a ghastly yellow colour. Probably, therefore, it
belonged to the same type of disease as the yellow fever which is
now so suddenly fatal in tropical countries. We perceive from Bede’s
narrative that its force was not expended by the visitation of 664, but
that it returned at intervals during the next twenty years, and that
there was one outbreak of especial violence in the year 686 from which
Bede’s own monastery of Jarrow suffered severely. The coadjutor-abbot
Eosterwine of the sister convent of Wearmouth died of the plague in
his thirty-seventh year; and at Jarrow the pestilence carried off all
the monks who could read or preach or sing the antiphons, save only
the abbot Ceolfrid and one little boy whom he had trained. The old man
and the child kept up an abridged form of the daily service without
the antiphons for one week. Then, as the tears of Ceolfrid had almost
prevented him from taking part in this mutilated service, they summoned
up courage to sing the whole psalter through, antiphons and all, till
at last a full choir had been trained to help them to bear the burden.
It is generally believed, though it cannot be proved, that the little
boy who thus officiated with Ceolfrid was Bede.
In reading Bede’s _Ecclesiastical History_ it is impossible not to be
struck with the especial severity wherewith the plague raged in the
monasteries both of men and women. At Lindisfarne, at Ely, at Wearmouth
and Jarrow, at Carlisle, at Barking and at Lastingham in the East
Riding of Yorkshire, the plague committed great ravages, often carrying
off nearly all the inmates. The manager of a modern school or hospital
will not be surprised at this, when he remembers that the monastic rule
enjoined the use of woollen garments and prohibited linen; that the
more ascetically disposed monks or nuns washed themselves only three
or four times in the year; and that the monks lay down to rest in the
same woollen garments and with the same unloosed shoes which they had
worn and in which they had worked throughout the day. This self-denial,
especially in the sons and daughters of princely houses, sprang from
a noble motive: it had been perhaps originally ordained as a protest
against the luxurious life of the young Roman nobility for whom
The Bath and Wine and Women made up life.
But it was none the less a calamity for Europe that an unnatural
and unneeded divorce should have been made between Christianity and
cleanliness. Sanitary science, during the long medieval centuries and
even for some time after they had ended, had little chance of making
its way in the world. Exactly one thousand years after the pestilence
of 664 were felt the first foreboding symptoms of the Great Plague of
London.
* * * * *
There is little else to record as to the reign of Oswy of Bernicia
after the departure of the ecclesiastics from Whitby. In consequence
of the death of Archbishop Deusdedit, the two Kings of Northumbria and
Kent took counsel “concerning the state of the English Church” (this
joint action of North and South in an ecclesiastical matter was itself
an important event), and decided to send one of the late archbishop’s
clergy named Wighard to Rome that he might there be consecrated as his
successor. This step was taken probably in the year 667, and though at
the time unsuccessful, for Wighard and nearly all his companions died
of pestilence soon after their arrival in Rome, it led to important
results.
Towards the end of his reign Oswy suffered from declining health.
Like so many other kings and ecclesiastics of Anglo-Saxon stock, he
desired to go to Rome and, if it might be, end his days there, and
he would fain have had Wilfrid, now a consecrated bishop, as guide
of his journey. With this view he offered large moneys to the young
ecclesiastic--the very offer seems to show the difference between
Wilfrid’s character and Aidan’s--but apparently the disease made too
rapid progress for the fulfilment of his design. The journey to Rome
had to be abandoned; Oswy died on February 15, 671,[76] and Egfrid his
son, son of Eanfled and grandson of Edwin of Deira, reigned in his
stead.