The history of England, from the earliest times to the Norman Conquest

by Thomas Hodgkin

Armed with this papal decree, and not doubting of the triumph which it would procure for him, Wilfrid presented himself at the Northumbrian court, but was at once accused of having obtained the decree by bribery, thrown into prison and despoiled of his personal possessions. One of the most precious of these, a reliquary, was appropriated by Ermenburga to her own use, and always carried about by her, whether she abode in her bedchamber or rode abroad in her chariot. Wilfrid’s first place of imprisonment was the royal city of Bromnis.[80] On the refusal of the governor, whose wife had fallen dangerously ill, to act any longer as jailer of so holy a man, Egfrid sent him to another of his cities named Dynbaer (Dunbar), another proof, if any were needed, how far northward at this time stretched the kingdom of Northumbria. At last after he had undergone a rigorous imprisonment for nine months, the dangerous illness of Ermenburga (which seemed to take the form of demoniac possession), and the entreaties and warnings of the saintly Ebba, brought about Wilfrid’s liberation from the dungeon, but not his restoration to his bishopric. He went forth as an exile into Mercia, where he was favourably entertained by a nephew of King Ethelred and received land for the foundation of a monastery. But as Ethelred was Egfrid’s brother-in-law, he soon ordered Wilfrid to quit his kingdom. He turned his steps to Wessex and there for a little space had rest, but soon was expelled thence also, King Centwine having married Ermenburga’s sister. It is easy to see how hard the lot of a fugitive from one of the English courts might be made by the matrimonial alliances that were so frequent between them.

Thus expelled from Christian England the hunted fugitive turned his thoughts to the land of the South Saxons: “a heathen province of our race” (says the biographer) “which for the multitude of its rocks and the density of its woods remained impregnable by all the other provinces”. Here Ethelwalh, himself a Christian, as we have seen,[81] was reigning over a still heathen people, and to him Wilfrid confided the whole story of his wrongs. The king made with him a covenant of peace so strong that, as he declared, no terror of the sword of any hostile warrior and no gifts however costly should avail to move him from the troth then plighted. In this inaccessible corner of the land which we now name Sussex, Wilfrid remained for five years, preaching the story of the creation of the world, its redemption, the day of judgment, the rewards and punishments to come, with such eloquence and fervour that he achieved the conversion of the entire people, thus ending in the year 686 the long spiritual campaign for the conversion of England which was begun in 597 by the arrival of Augustine. King Ethelwalh gave him his own villa of Selsey for his episcopal seat, adding to it a gift of land amounting to eighty-seven hides.

During Wilfrid’s sojourn in Sussex his unreconciled enemy King Egfrid died. The story of his death brings us into close relation with our third great churchman, Cuthbert, to whose life we now turn. Born somewhere about 630 in the region of the Lammermoor Hills, the young Cuthbert, when he was tending sheep by the River Leader, saw one night in a vision angels carrying a holy soul into heaven. He found afterwards that it was on the same night, August 31, 651, that the venerable saint, Aidan, had died. He waited not, however, for this confirmation of his faith, but at once transferred the sheep to their owners and descended into the valley of the Tweed to seek admission into the recently founded monastery of Melrose. After some years’ residence there, he went in the train of the Abbot Eata to Ripon; but on the arrival of Wilfrid at that place fresh from Rome, and with a grant from King Alchfrid in his hand, the whole party of Celtic-trained monks, Cuthbert among them, were forced to leave the pleasant valley of the Nidd and return to Melrose on the Tweed. There, however, ended his antagonism to the new teaching. Whether actually present or not at the synod of Whitby, he certainly accepted its decisions, and after some years was sent by his friend, Eata, to govern as prior the monastery at Lindisfarne. It was not altogether an easy task to rule the monks on Holy Island after the revolution which the decrees of the synod had caused, but more by gentleness than by sternness Cuthbert succeeded in enforcing discipline, all the more readily perhaps as in food, in vigils, in dress, he set an example of rigorous austerity. But after all, neither as prior nor afterwards as bishop did he ever care for the possession of power. In character he much more closely resembled Aidan than either Theodore or Wilfrid. He loved to be alone with Nature and with God, and was ever moving about among the country folk and “stirring them up” by his conversation rather than by set sermons “to seek after the heavenly crown”. There is still shown in a cleft of the basaltic range of low hills on the mainland overlooking the winding shore of Holy Island a cave, affording bare shelter from the rain and none from the wind, where the saint is said to have passed some months of his life. “Cuddy’s Hole” is to this day the name given to it by the neighbouring farmers.

Often, too, he seems to have retired to the little island which still bears his name and which lies at a short distance from the ruined abbey on Holy Island, being like Lindisfarne itself island or peninsula according to the state of the tide. There, while apparently still holding the office of prior, he “began to learn the rudiments of a solitary life,” and when his education was completed and his spirit braced for the great renunciation, he gave up his office of prior (676) and withdrew to the more utter seclusion which was afforded by one of the little group of Farne Islands, about five miles from Holy Island and two or three miles from the rock of Bamburgh. These rocky islets, some thirty or forty in number, are now furnished with two lighthouses; and the memory of Grace Darling, the courageous daughter of an old lighthouse keeper, rivals but does not eclipse the fame of St. Cuthbert. Countless flocks of sea-birds make these rocks their breeding place; and there are seen the eider ducks, bold in their gentleness, which calmly hatch their young within a few feet of the intruding wayfarer, and whose tameness, attributed to the miraculous working of the saint, has procured for them the name of “Saint Cuthbert’s Chickens”. Was it the loneliness of these weather-beaten rocks or the sad cry of the sea-birds that procured for them the evil reputation of being “unfit for human habitation by reason of the number of malign spirits by whom they were haunted”? Howsoever that may be, it is admitted that at the approach of the man of God the evil spirits departed and the place at his prayer became completely habitable. Here then Cuthbert built for himself a little round cell made of large unwrought stones and turf, and so constructed that he could see from it nothing of earth or sea, but was forced to keep his eyes ever fixed on the heaven above him. Here, after dismissing the few brethren who had helped him in his labours, Cuthbert lived absolutely alone for eight years, enjoying the heavenly visions, but also wrestling with the awful spiritual terrors, which have ever been the portion of the anchorite.

At length in 684, Tunberct, Bishop of Hexham, one of Theodore’s intruding prelates, having been for some reason deposed from his see, a synod was held at “Twyford” on the Alne (probably the modern Alnmouth) to consider the question of the appointment of his successor. In this synod, at which Theodore himself presided, the name of Cuthbert was suggested and received with unanimous approval. It was, however, no easy matter to induce the anchorite thus to return to the common abodes of men. At last a deputation of nobles and ecclesiastics, headed by King Egfrid himself and by Trumwine, Bishop of Pictland, accomplished the difficult task, and on March 26, 685, Cuthbert received at York the episcopal charge at the hands of Theodore and six other bishops. He still, however, remained so far faithful to the wind-swept shores of the North Sea that he chose Holy Island for his episcopal seat, persuading his old friend Eata to migrate from thence to the busier diocese of Hexham.

It must have been during the long negotiations which preceded the consecration of St. Cuthbert that he pressed upon the unwilling king his vain dissuasions against the barbarous Irish expedition. Equally vain, as we have seen, was his attempt to dissuade Egfrid from that disastrous expedition against the Picts, which was undertaken in the very first months of Cuthbert’s episcopate. At the time of Egfrid’s invasion of Scotland Cuthbert was abiding at the Roman city of Luguvallium (Carlisle), which had been bestowed upon him by the king at his consecration. There also was dwelling the queen, Ermenburga, Wilfrid’s enemy, who had gone for shelter during this warlike time to a convent ruled by her sister. While Cuthbert was going round the walls of the city on the afternoon of Saturday, May 20, escorted by the king’s reeve, Paga, and by a multitude of the citizens, he suddenly stood still, leaning on his staff. With downcast face he gazed upon the ground, then looked up at the darkening sky and said with a deep groan: “Perhaps even now the conflict is decided”. He would not more plainly impart his fears, even to his own clerical companions, but hastening to the convent warned the queen to be ready to depart on the Monday for York “lest haply the king should have fallen”. On Sunday he preached a sermon which hinted at some coming trouble. On Monday came the tidings of the fatal field of Nechtansmere, fought on the very day and hour when Cuthbert had his telepathic warning of the disaster.

Egfrid’s widow, Ermenburga, according to her enemy Eddius, “after the slaughter of the king, from a she-wolf became one of God’s lambs and was changed into a perfect abbess and a most excellent mother of her [monastic] family”. Apparently there was no issue of her marriage with Egfrid, who was succeeded by his half-brother or nephew Aldfrid, either a son or grandson of King Oswy. He had been for some years an exile in Ireland and the Hebrides, and had acquired a considerable store of learning in the Celtic monasteries, so that he was generally known as Aldfrid the Learned. The twenty years’ reign of Aldfrid (685–705) was marked by few striking events. Northumbria, as we have seen, was now shorn of her greatness and was no longer the leading power in Britain. It was probably as much as Aldfrid could do to preserve his weakened and diminished kingdom from conquest by its Pictish and Mercian neighbours. It will suffice briefly to indicate the further fortunes of the three great Churchmen whose lives had been of late so closely intertwined with that of Egfrid.

The newly consecrated bishop Cuthbert did not long sustain the weight of the uncongenial mitre. In 686 he made another journey to Carlisle, on which occasion he gave the nun’s veil to the widowed Ermenburga. Here also he received a visit from an old friend of his named Herbert, who like him led the life of an island-hermit but amid far different scenes from the stormy Farnes. Herbert dwelt on an island of “that very large lake from which the young waters of the Derwent issue forth”—in other words, on St. Herbert’s Isle in Derwent-water—and had been accustomed to pay a yearly visit to Cuthbert and to hear from him counsels concerning the life eternal. He now besought his friend, whose whole soul was filled with thoughts of his coming end, to pray that they might both die at the same time, a longing which was in fact fulfilled. Soon after Christmas Cuthbert returned to his lonely dwelling on the Farnes: at the end of February he was seized by his last illness. The monks of Holy Island prayed to be allowed to minister to him in his extreme weakness, but it was not till near the very end that he suffered them to enter his cell. In the morning of March 20, 687, after many faintly uttered words of advice and farewell, the great anchorite passed away. There was no English saint, till Thomas Becket was slain before the altar in Canterbury, who filled half as large a space in the memories of the English people, at any rate in the North of England, as Cuthbert of Lindisfarne. The strange migrations of his corpse in later centuries, the magnificence of its final resting-place, the wide domains and princely revenues of the Bishops of Durham, whose chief claim to lordship was derived from the fact that they were the guardians of his tomb—all these things fixed deep in the mind of the medieval Englishman the greatness and the glory of the shepherd of the Lammermoors. Eight centuries after his death we find the soldiers of “the bishopric” rejoicing over the fall of James IV. on the field of Flodden, and tracing therein the manifest workings of the anger of the saint, whom he had offended by the demolition of his castles at Ford and Norham.

We pass from the hermit to the archbishop. Of Theodore of Tarsus there is little more which need be related here save that soon after Egfrid’s death he became reconciled to Wilfrid; asked him to come to London to meet him, and (according to Eddius) made him a full apology for all the injustices which he had committed towards him, even expressing a desire that Wilfrid might succeed him in his archbishopric. He died on September 19, 690, in the eighty-eighth year of his age after an archiepiscopate of twenty-two years, and was laid to rest in the abbey of St. Peter and St. Paul, along with many other primates and princes of Kent.

The long exiled Bishop Wilfrid was at last, soon after the death of Egfrid, permitted to return home and restored to some portion of his lost grandeur (686–87). The death of the hostile king, interpreted by Wilfrid’s partisans as the judgment of heaven on his despoiler, had probably something to do with this change of policy, to which also his reconciliation with the archbishop largely contributed. His restoration was not, however, by any means to all his old dignities, though he was once again in possession of his favourite abbeys of Hexham and Ripon. And even this restoration was only for a time. After five years of peace the eternal dispute broke out again on Wilfrid’s refusal to acknowledge the lawfulness of some of the acts of Theodore. He was banished from Northumbria and took refuge in Mercia, where he dwelt for ten years (692–702). Then came one more journey to Rome, undertaken by the brave old man in the sixty-ninth year of his age. His appeal succeeded, but, as before, the decree in his favour failed to change the purpose of the Northumbrian king. Aldfrid was still immutably fixed in his determination to modify nothing in that decision “which formerly the kings, my predecessors, and the archbishop with their councillors did form, and which afterwards we, with the archbishop sent us from the apostolic see and with almost all the [spiritual] rulers of our race in Britain, confirmed. That decision,” said he to Wilfrid’s messengers, “so long as I live I will never change for the writings which, as you say, you have received from the apostolic see.” Scarcely had this answer been returned when the Northumbrian king was stricken with mortal sickness, an event in which the partisans of Wilfrid not unnaturally thought that they could trace the vengeance of Heaven for his audacious contempt of the papal mandate. It was believed that on his death-bed he repented of his behaviour towards Wilfrid and expressed his intention of being reconciled with him in the event of his recovery, but he died in 705 after lying speechless for many days, and was unable to give effect to his intentions if such intentions ever existed.