625-644: Christianisation and Kingship

The last two posts gave a picture of two processes operating in tandem - the re-christianisation of England, now the appropriate name for the land of the Angles and Saxons who had only appeared in force in less than two centuries, and the transformation of the gangster warlord into a 'King'. The sacralisation of the King by the Church is the next natural step. It happens surprisingly quickly for all the reasons we gave in the previous posting.

Raedwald of East Anglia, overlord or bretwalda of England, who probably dies in or before 625 and is associated with the Sutton Hoo burial, is definitely pagan but the 'national' trend is now towards christianisation. The key statelet here is not Kent but Northumbria to whom the overlordship returns under Edwin. The story has it that Eomer, a West Saxon assassin, attempted but failed to kill Edwin. Paulinus, the seasoned missionary who became Bishop of Northumbria in 625, is promised (626) that his new-born daughter will be given to the christian god if Paulinus' prayers result in the defeat of the West Saxons. Cwichelm of Wessex is accordingly defeated and Wessex subjected to Edwin as bretwalda. Edwin's life had already been saved by Paulinus in exile in 616 so a certain personal bond is already in place, a fact made clearer when Paulinus is forced to leave the Kingdom on Edwin's death and return to Rochester (as Bishop) in Kent (633) where he was to die in 644. The baptism of Paulinus' daughter on Whit Sunday in York is a marker that christianity was now imperially associated with at least one bretwalda. The attempt to link overlordship with the christian faith is to be a key war aim of the Roman interest for the next few decades. The next year (Easter 627) Edwin himself is baptised into the Church.

The tide is never certain for Roman christianity though. Edwin's overlordship is clearly resented by some and in 622 or 633, at the Battle of Hatfield Chase, Edwin is defeated and killed by an alliance of the pagan Penda of Mercia and one of the last of the great Cymry leaders of the age, Cadwallon ap Cadfan, King of Gwynedd which was centred on North West Wales. Not only Edwin but his son Osfrith were killed in battle. His other son Eadfrith not long after. Penda becomes the dominant figure in England for the next thirteen years so we have a period when matters were in the balance between christianity and paganism. The pagans almost certainly did not reckon on the statecraft and diplomatic skills of the christian leadership.

Paulinus had fled Northumbria with good reason because Edwin's successor, Osric of Deira, reverted to paganism as did Eanfrith of Bernicia although their reigns lasted only a year. However, a christian heir to Northumbria, Oswald of Bernicia (later venerated by the Church as a saint), not only took the reins of power in 633 but added the previous year to his reign as if the pagans had never existed. Oswald becomes bretwalda in 634 as far as the christian faction is concerned. Northumbria becomes a safe haven for christianity once again after only a very brief gap and, as we shall see, Northumbrian royal legitimacy and the Church soon become intimately connected. It is at this time that christianised nobles such as Wilfred (later to be the key spokesperson for Rome at the Synod of Whitby in 664) are beginning to be educated at court to become potential clerical administrators in a much more formal way. Christian clerics of noble descent soon become as much a part of the machinery of the State in England as eunuchs in the Chinese empire, neutered by custom rather than physical force.

The christianisation of Northumbria is not just a court matter. An important initiative was the founding of the monastery at Lindisfarne (636) by Aidan, the Irish monk. Aidan also seems to have been influential in mediating between the Roman and Celtic branches of the faith. Lindisfarne was deliberately placed within sight of Oswald's Bamburgh Castle. Church and State are becoming separate but equal, each buttressing the claims of the other.

The Church's response to defeat elsewhere was to keep on trucking. It had Kent. It clearly had the dominant line of royalty in Northumbria and it could appeal to any Saxon Kingdom that disliked the tutelage of Mercia. It now mounted a clever game in which it would support a bretwalda that was christian (of the Roman persuasion) but also sought to appeal to those oppressed by a bretwalda when he was not - realpolitik has always been part of the clerical skill set. The obvious target was the hitherto powerful and ambitious but also divided West Saxons. Birinus, a Frank, was sent into Wessex as a missionary , successfuly converting the West Saxons to Roman christianity under King Cynegils. Cynegils was not King of all the West Saxons but rather someone who aspired to be from his smaller base in the upper Thames valley covering the modern counties of Somerset, northern Wiltshire, southern Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire and western Berkshire. Birinus baptised Cynegils in 635 with Oswald of Northumbria as his sponsor (Oswald also married Cynegils' daughter) so we are already seeing the lineaments of a strategy of encirclement of Mercia by Roman (not Celtic) christianity. Clearly, the Church of Rome in Kent was heavily diplomatically engaged in bringing these two Kingdoms into alliance. Birinus becomes the first Bishop of Dorchester in that same year.

The death of Eadbald of Kent could have removed a lynchpin from this rapidly growing system of Roman influence but his son Earconbehrt proved even more firmly christian than his father - according to Bede, he commanded that pagan cult images be destroyed and that Lent be observed. This was a step further than any other Saxon King had taken to date. It showed confidence that paganism was no longer politically powerful enough to present a threat to the court. Until this point, kings were happy to see the court and nobility flourish as christian while the people continued with their 'pagan superstitions'. Court and the christian element amongst the masses and traders worked around and then crushed the world of the pagan settlers. English christian totalitarian rule proves a creeping paralysis from this day on. It is an object lesson in what happens when a people loses its power and ceases to be vigilant. Religion creeps in not only from below but is insisted upon from above.

Another marker is the canonisation of Oswald of Northumbria after his death at the hands of Penda in 641 (probably in battle at or near Oswestry). The King is sacralised by the Church and another step is taken towards the symbiotic total system of Church and King that would dominate the English people right up until the nineteenth century and even beyond. The political culture that was put in place in these few years would define the English in one way or another for another 1,300. On the other hand, the Cymry were allies of the pagans so what we are seeing is an alliance of Rome and the proto-English State against dissident christians and traditionalist pagans rather than simply a matter of conflict between christian salvation and pagan honour. The Church's problem now was how to pull the Celtic christians back into its orbit and encircle the English pagans as a prelude to their extinction but this is for the future.

Two new Anglo-Saxon kings, Oswiu in Northumbria (641) and Cenwalh in Wessex (643) change little. Both men were christians man and boy in what seems to be an unquestioning way as if their identity as kings were now bound up with the faith. However, there is one change to note - Northumbria splits into its two constituents in 644, Deira and Bernicia. The details are not of interest to us since Northumbria comes together again within a decade but it tells us something of the complexity of state formation in the first half of the seventh century - nothing could be taken for granted and the kings and clerics of the era were very well aware of that fact. A unitary state could still fragment and the Church was thus trying to corral many small warlord kingdoms as a federated system under Rome. Rome was no longer a military but a 'spiritual' (that is, a cultural) power. There was no objection to any future unification of military and administrative power (quite the contrary) so long as it was ultimately culturally answerable to the Papacy. Since the Church increasingly provided the administrators of this proto-state system, and drew part of the warrior nobility into its ambit as those administrators, the process was slowly moving towards the 'global' reinstatement of the Constantinian arrangements that had collapsed when the Roman State collapsed.