Anglo-Saxon kings and kingship have always lain at the heart of Simon Keynes’ academic interests. Several of his publications have assessed the activities of individual monarchs ranging from Rædwald ‘the bretwalda’ to Cnut; others explored aspects of royal government, particularly as revealed through charters, most notably his study of the diplomas of Æthelred ‘the Unready’.Footnote 1 Simon communicates his enthusiasm to great effect in his undergraduate lectures and used to open (and perhaps still does open) his annual Cambridge lecture series on the history of pre-Conquest England with a bravura performance debunking popular mythology about Anglo-Saxon kings. As I now recall it, the account that he gave in my first undergraduate year ranged from the obvious (Alfred and the cakes, Cnut and the waves, Harold with the arrow in his eye) to some rather more obscure figures. The whole lecture offered unexpected insights into the memorialisation of the Anglo-Saxon past across a range of cultural media from architecture to opera. An accompanying hand-out was a masterpiece of the genre, reproducing at its centre a poem published in The Times in November 1977: Christopher Logue’s ‘An Archaic Jingle’ with its refrain ‘Ethelred! Ethelred! / Spent his royal life in bed / one shoe off and one shoe on / greatly loved by everyone’, together with Bert Kitchen’s illustration of the prone king, one foot duly unshod, his crown slung over the bed-post.Footnote 2 I can trace my own interest in the history of the Anglo-Saxons and their kings back to that lecture, but also to the stimulus of weekly supervisions with Simon over my first two terms in Cambridge, his direction of my final-year dissertation on King Æthelstan and the many later conversations I enjoyed as a graduate student and as my own career has developed. Since first writing an essay for him on Bede’s merits as an historian, I have frequently discussed Bede’s writings with Simon. In many ways I thus owe it to him that I now find myself beginning work on a major intellectual biography of the Venerable Bede, for which this chapter on Bede’s ideas about kingship represents a preliminary study.Footnote 3
Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, completed c. 731, has unparalleled significance as the most informative source for the study of kings and kingship in early Anglo-Saxon England. Dedicated to a king (Ceolwulf of Northumbria), the History can be seen at least in part as a mirror for princes, explicitly providing examples of kingly behaviour to be emulated or avoided.Footnote 4 Yet, as James Campbell observed, for all its outward trappings of comprehensiveness and objectivity, it supplies a highly selective account of royal behaviour and of the nature of monarchy, one tailored to Bede’s own wider purposes in writing an ecclesiastical history, which did not include the definition or description of secular institutions.Footnote 5 Simon Keynes has noted that ‘it is difficult for all of those who have followed him, from the compilers of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in the late 9th century onwards, to break free from his influence.’Footnote 6 That problem relates as much to the silences in Bede’s account – particularly, for example, over the early history of Mercia – as to those passages in which he offered notably strong opinions of his own. Already in his own day Bede’s writings were in great demand among ecclesiastics on the continent, as well as readers in his own land.Footnote 7 One of the most frequently copied books written in pre-Conquest England, the Historia was translated into Old English in the late ninth century, albeit in an abridged form, omitting many of the documents Bede had faithfully transcribed as well as passages about chronology, doctrinal dispute and natural phenomena.Footnote 8 Those omissions, by narrowing the focus of the text as a whole, served to accentuate further the stories of the individuals whose example Bede intended his readers to imitate or to condemn, among them the saints but also, of course, kings.Footnote 9 Kings and the formation (and destruction) of kingdoms dominated the writings of twelfth-century Anglo-Norman historians who used Bede (together with other sources such as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, royal genealogies and king-lists and legends of the saints) to construct their own visions of the pre-Conquest past.Footnote 10
Modern scholars have devoted considerable attention to Bede’s conception of kingship, and it is not my intention to reprise all that literature here; rather, I wish to reconsider the question of whether Bede promoted a particular ideal of kingship. Charles Plummer’s edition of Bede’s historical works, with its detailed commentary, is still the starting-point for all modern study, shedding light on numerous aspects of Bede’s thought as well as on the sources on which he drew.Footnote 11 Among more recent literature, Michael Wallace-Hadrill’s Ford Lectures of 1970 on the nature of early Germanic kingship together with his article comparing Bede’s views of royal behaviour with those of Gregory of Tours and his own commentary on Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica remain essential,Footnote 12 as do the essays by Judith McClure, Clare Stancliffe and Alan Thacker in Wallace-Hadrill’s own Festschrift.Footnote 13 Equally important are Campbell’s Jarrow Lecture, a volume of essays on Saint Oswald and the contributions of Patrick Wormald, Stephen Fanning, Simon Keynes and Barbara Yorke on the vexed problems of the kings whom Bede described as holding imperium, termed ‘bretwaldas’ in the ninth-century Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.Footnote 14
Wallace-Hadrill argued that, like Gregory the Great (who probably more than any single patristic writer had the most influence on Bede’s understanding of kingship), Bede did not have a developed doctrine of kingship; he did, however, consider that Bede was ‘feeling his way towards one’.Footnote 15 Clare Stancliffe went further than this. Her own reading of the Historia led her to the view that Bede did not articulate a single stereotyped ideal of a Christian king to which he believed that each individual should conform in some fashion; rather, she has suggested that Bede took account of the different personalities and actions of the kings about whom he wrote and used them as a basis on which to draw a series of portraits, which in each case emphasised the different qualities of the individuals concerned.Footnote 16 In her opinion, among the various kings included in the Historia, Bede presented only Oswald unambiguously as a saint, even while he served as a successful king; most other saint-kings owed their sanctity to lives lived after giving up their throne or to their death as martyrs in battle,Footnote 17 with the exception perhaps of Oswine, who evinced saintly characteristics also in life.Footnote 18 Although Stancliffe has indeed shown, to considerable effect, how Bede presented portraits of different kings in various idealised terms, I should like to reconsider her proposition that these reflect his lack of a single ideal model.Footnote 19 Here I shall adopt a self-consciously biographical perspective, looking at the effect that Bede’s own personality and experience might have had on the ideas he articulated about kingship in his own day and considering how his views of earthly power cohered with his broader theological understanding of human existence. What was the role of kings in Bede’s wider narrative about God’s plan for humanity; where did Bede place kings in his economy of salvation; and how did Bede reconcile the tensions found inevitably in this newly Christianised society between a religious ideal that promoted peace and love (love of Christ, love of neighbour) and the brutal realities of the exercise of kingship in a Germanic warrior society?
Several passages in Bede’s Historia illustrate those tensions, perhaps most memorably his description of the battle of Chester at which (sometime between 613 and 616) the pagan Northumbrian king, Æthelfrith, defeated a great army of Britons. When the king ‘was about to give battle and saw [the Britons’] priests, who had assembled to pray to God on behalf of the soldiers taking part in the fight standing apart in a safer place, he asked who they were and for what purpose they had gathered there’. Told that they were from the Welsh monastery of Bangor Is-coed, the king reportedly said, ‘If they are praying to their God against us, then, even if they do not bear arms, they are fighting against us, assailing us as they do with prayers for our defeat’. So he ordered the clergy to be attacked first, before going on to destroy the rest of the British host, albeit with heavy losses on the Northumbrian side. Bede reported that about twelve hundred men who had come to pray were killed on that day, only fifty managing to escape by flight, the force that had been meant to protect them from the enemy having ‘turned their backs on them, leaving them unarmed and helpless before the swords of their foes’.Footnote 20
Bede said nothing about what these defenceless monks carried with them to aid their intercession for their enemies’ downfall. They might have brought one or more precious manuscripts from their monastery’s collection, a prayer-book or a volume of scripture. Or perhaps they held more immediately obvious Christian symbols up before them, including either small altar crosses, capable of being held in the hand, or processional crosses, raised high aloft above the battle on long shafts. Bede’s account of King Oswald’s behaviour before the battle of Heavenfield (634) refers directly to the erection of a cross at the site of a battle. In a passage that depicts Oswald as a quasi-second Constantine, Bede recounted how Oswald himself had supposedly held the shaft of a hastily made wooden standing cross as it was positioned in a hole dug in the ground, while his men poured earth round it, to fix it into position. The king then called out to the whole army to kneel together and pray to the almighty and ever-living God to defend them in his mercy from the proud and fierce enemy; ‘for He knows’, Oswald asserted, ‘that we are fighting in a just cause for the preservation of our whole race’.Footnote 21
One item discovered among the Staffordshire Hoard (the ‘bling for warrior companions of the king’,Footnote 22 datable to c. 700 that was found in a field at Hammerwich, near Lichfield in Staffordshire in 2009) supports the suggestion that the members of early English Christian armies could have expected prayers to be said on the battlefield itself for the victory of their king and the defeat of his enemies. A small strip of gold alloy, perhaps torn from the crosspiece of a decorated cross, bears an inscription taken from a verse from the Old Testament book of Numbers: ‘When he had lifted up the ark, Moses said “Rise up, Lord, and may your enemies be dispersed and those who hate you flee from your face.”’Footnote 23 The designer of the inscription may also have had in mind the similar verse from Psalm 67: ‘Let God arise and his enemies be dispersed and those who hate him flee from his face.’Footnote 24 The familiarity of both verses is shown by their quotation in Felix’s Life of St Guthlac, written between 730 and 740.Footnote 25 On one occasion the saint used the psalm text to vanquish devils who had appeared to him in a vision, and on another he prophesied to the future King Æthelbald, using words from Numbers: ‘those who fear you shall flee from before your face.’Footnote 26 The 3,500 silver and gold pieces of broken and twisted war gear that make up the Staffordshire Hoard include not only a remarkable number of sword ornaments but also one complete cross (now twisted and folded) and various cross fragments, among them the inscribed strip.Footnote 27
Whether the items in the hoard had been torn from the bodies of the dead lying on a battlefield, gathered together in haste to pay a king’s ransom or collected from diverse sources over time to make up a king’s treasure chest remains unknown. Yet this assemblage of war gear does seem to point to the presence of Christian priests or monks at or near the sites of battle, just as Bede described them at the battle of Chester and as we might assume they attended Oswald’s successful engagement at Heavenfield, especially if we imagine that Oswald might have brought clergy with him from Dal Riata on his return to Northumbria from exile. In both those episodes we can readily envisage the use of the war-gear found in the Staffordshire Hoard, especially on those portions of the battlefield closest to the warring kings and their immediate retinues. But as well as imagining those swords, helmets and shields, we can also see the use to which the inscription on the now-folded piece of gold alloy would have been put and the place of prayer to the Almighty in invoking divine assistance in what the Christian protagonists believed to be just conflicts.Footnote 28 It clearly fell to these clerics to ask God to scatter his enemies and make those that hate him flee from before his face, taking on themselves the responsibility for divine intercession that the king could not perform himself in the heat of battle. I have chosen to begin this discussion of Bede’s views about kingship with the question of warfare because one could make the case that for most of the chronological period covered by Bede in his Historia, a key (if not the central defining) feature of good kingship lay in success in war. In many ways, the finding of the Staffordshire Hoard has served, at least in popular imagination, only to confirm such a view.
Bede’s narrative frequently mapped the rivalries between (and often within) the separate English kingdoms, explaining how those disputes often worked themselves out on the field of battle. In his Historia, the two kings mentioned so far – Æthelfrith and Oswald – both stood out for their military achievements, building successful realms (and extending their borders) on the back of martial victories. But there was also a sharp contrast between them, illustrated by the two vignettes that we have already considered: Æthelfrith’s reign predated the conversion of Northumbria to Christianity, and the pagan king’s willingness to slaughter 1,200 monks may stand as an index of his lack of respect for the religion of others.Footnote 29 Oswald, however, arguably came closest to Bede’s ideal of kingship, for Bede famously described him not just as ‘most holy and most victorious king of the Northumbrians’ and ‘most Christian king’ but also gave him the epithet conventionally reserved for monks and other religious: ‘soldier of Christ.’Footnote 30 Manifestly for Bede, the institution of kingship involved much more than military prowess; as the Christian faith took root among the English people, he judged rulers increasingly according to the extent of their commitment to the new religion and their generosity in its support; he also frequently emphasised the moral imperatives underpinning secular rulership.Footnote 31
Although the Historia ecclesiastica provides some of the most detailed available information relating to the exercise of kingship among the early Anglo-Saxon peoples and identifies and dates the rules of many individual kings, we should recall that Bede did not compose his history with the primary purpose of explaining the institution of kingship.Footnote 32 Those details merely provided the chronological framework for the wider narrative of the conversion of the English and the spread of the ‘catholic peace and truth of the universal Church’ among most of the other inhabitants of Britain,Footnote 33 which Bede depicted as the fulfilment of Christ’s injunction to his apostles to be his witnesses ‘in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and Samaria, and even to the uttermost part of the earth’.Footnote 34 Even so, as Bede traced the spread of missionary activity to the island of Britain (a place far from ‘the first part of the world’, ‘an island in the ocean’)Footnote 35 and recounted the creation of structures of ecclesiastical governance, he set the representatives of religious authority firmly within a framework of earthly power. Thus, at the midpoint of history when drawing attention to the importance of the archiepiscopate of Theodore of Tarsus, ‘the first archbishop whom the whole English church consented to obey’, Bede drew a direct relationship between success in the faith and wellbeing of the nation.Footnote 36 Similarly, when summarising the state of Britain at the end of book V, Bede listed the names of the bishops of each diocese, noting that all those south of the Humber (together with their various kings) were subject to Æthelbald, king of the Mercians, whilst the four Northumbrian bishops answered to King Ceolwulf.Footnote 37 For Bede, there was a clear connection between the material prosperity of a nation (which often depended upon its leaders’ martial prowess) and its standing in the eyes of the Almighty.Footnote 38 Oswald’s cause, which we have already considered, was just in Bede’s eyes because he was fighting for the protection of his people, not only for the faith; it was his willingness to work for the greater good of the whole nation that incurred divine favour. Other factors besides military ones, however, contributed to Bede’s broader visions of ideal kingly rule.
One could explore Bede’s view of the role and function of kings by looking at the qualities that he presented as typical of good kings – courage, wisdom, generosity, devotion and piety, learning, humility – and then contrasting them with those that would characterise bad rulers – cowardice, greed, jealousy, cruelty, injustice, faithlessness and apostasy, sinfulness, and so on. Alternatively, one might look at kings as ideal types: the warrior, the law-giver, the peacekeeper, the dynastic founder, the missionary, the church-builder, the benefactor or the pilgrim. Organising the kings about whom Bede wrote under either their functions or their attributes could be revealing. It would, however, have the major methodological disadvantage of starkly dividing Bede’s pantheon of champions into those whom he held up for emulation and imitation (almost exclusively the strong advocates for the Christian faith) and the ‘smaller retinue of demonized villains’,Footnote 39 those whose behaviour brought them the misfortune that Bede believed they deserved. This would not contribute significantly to our understanding of his views of kingship as an institution. More profitably, we might think about how Bede depicted kings under three rubrics, which traverse the chronology of their lives and careers and so neatly sum up the life cycle of a king from his first acquisition of the throne, through his behaviour while holding it, to his death. First, we shall consider kings in the contexts of their families, before moving onto the kingly ministerium, the exercise of royal rule over a king’s own subjects and in expansion of his realm;Footnote 40 finally, we shall touch on the ends of kings, looking at how their reigns concluded and at Bede’s understanding of the ultimate fate of their souls.
Dynastic Kings
Re-reading the Historia ecclesiastica in preparation for writing this chapter, I felt afresh the importance that Bede placed on locating rulers within their wider family contexts. In part, of course, this reflects the nature of Bede’s sources; others have commented on the way that Bede incorporated material from early annalistic sources and from king-lists or genealogies and on his skill in rationalising these diverse (and often contradictory) pieces of information into a coherent and seemingly sequential narrative.Footnote 41 On most occasions when Bede introduced the name of a new king into his narrative, as well as fixing that man’s rule on the arrow of chronological time elapsed since the Incarnation, he also located him in his immediate family context. So, for example, he noted that on the death of Cynegisl of the West Saxons in 643, his son Cenwealh came to the throne and that Sigeberht acceded to the East Anglian throne in 630 or 631, after the death of his brother Eorpwold, who had succeeded Raedwald.Footnote 42 This represented most obviously a means of demonstrating a king’s legitimacy, tacitly drawing attention to rulers who had usurped thrones from their rightful holders. Bede’s concern that only those of the right lineage should be elevated to the rank of king came across vividly when he recounted how Wulfhere, son of Penda, obtained sufficient support to oust from his kingdom those ealdormen who were not of the proper stock (eiectis principibus regis non proprii), who had been ruling Mercia since Penda’s defeat at the battle of Winwæd.Footnote 43 Yet one might go further and argue that Bede’s interest in the families of kings and in dynastic stability related to more than merely the issue of their entitlement to power and their suitability to perform the royal office.
Let us consider the short passage in the fourth book of his Historia ecclesiastica in which Bede recounted the death of Hlothhere, one of the few portions that in Wallace-Hadrill’s opinion had no bearing whatever on ecclesiastical history.Footnote 44 Bede reported that, on 6 February 685:Footnote 45
Hlothhere, king of Kent, died after a reign of twelve years, having succeeded his brother Ecgberht, who had reigned nine years. He was wounded in battle with South Saxons, whom Eadric, son of Ecgberht, had raised against him. He died while his wounds were being attended to. Eadric ruled for a year and a half after Hlothhere and, when Eadric died, various usurpers or foreign kings plundered the kingdom for a certain space of time until the rightful king [legitimus rex], Wihtred, son of Ecgberht, established himself on the throne and freed the nation from foreign invasion by his devotion and zeal.
Readers of the Historia had, of course, already encountered Ecgberht, Hlothhere’s predecessor as king of Kent (the figure to whom all these individuals were related) before they reached this chapter.Footnote 46 Oswiu of Northumbria had consulted with Ecgberht about the state of the English Church before sending the unfortunate Wigheard to Rome to be consecrated as archbishop (his death in the Holy City leading to the decision to send the Greek-born Theodore to Canterbury instead).Footnote 47 Ecgberht and Hlothhere were the sons of Eorcenberht of Kent, the first king to order the destruction of pagan idols in his realm, who had also tried to enforce the keeping of the Lenten fast.Footnote 48 Eorcenberht’s wife, Ecgberht’s mother, was Seaxburg, daughter of Anna of the East Angles, who in widowhood became abbess of the monastery at Ely founded by her sister Æthelthryth.Footnote 49 While Wallace-Hadrill noted correctly that this passage about the confused succession in Kent following Hlothhere’s death makes no direct reference to Church matters, the connection (and close involvement) of this royal family with the initial establishment and later flourishing of the Church in both Kent and East Anglia is unquestionable.
Bede’s careful recitation of the familial relationships between Hlothhere, his brother Ecgberht and Ecgberht’s sons – Eadric and Wihtred – reinforced in his readers’ minds a fundamental point about the stability of the Kentish royal family. All of these claimants were close members of the stirps regia; all descended directly from Æthelberht, whose son and successor, Eadbald, was the father of Eorcenberht. Each in his turn sought to follow the advice Pope Gregory had given to their ancestor, Æthelberht, to promote the faith among all those subject to them.Footnote 50 This passage thus concerns more than the legitimate claim of any single man, or even a succession of men, to rule; it draws attention to the role of kings as fathers, both begetters of sons to succeed them and simultaneously fathers to their own people. In a celebrated passage, Bede characterised Æthelberht as ‘the third English king who ruled over the southern kingdoms, which are divided from the north by the river Humber and the surrounding territory, but he was the first to enter the kingdom of heaven’.Footnote 51 Æthelberht’s own lineage gave him the right to rule, but in not just accepting but promoting the Christian faith, he created a model for a sort of rulership previously unknown among the Anglo-Saxons, one based securely on biblical teachings. Bede quoted a letter from Pope Gregory in which the pope wrote to Æthelberht, ‘Almighty God raises up certain good men to be rulers over nations in order that he may by their means bestow the gifts of his righteousness upon all those over whom they are set. We realize that this has happened to the English race over whom your Majesty is placed, so that, by means of the blessings granted to you, heavenly benefits may also be bestowed on your subjects.’Footnote 52 Gregory may have called Æthelberht his son, but he also gave him a clearly defined role as father over his own people.Footnote 53 And the ultimate role model for the kingship that he exercised on Earth was of course God the Father, the king of kings.
Some support for the suggestion that Bede placed particular weight on the paternal role of kings may be found in his treatment of kings whose bad behaviour he described as a warning to his readers. Among these were several who subverted the stability of their own families either by rejecting their father’s religious choices or by acts of rebellion. For example, after the death of Æthelberht in 616, his son Eadbald took over the realm and there followed what Bede described as ‘a severe setback to the tender growth of the church’. The ‘apostate king’ received an appropriate reward, however, being punished by frequent fits of madness and an unclean spirit.Footnote 54 Similarly, the three sons of Sæberht of the East Saxons had also all remained heathen during their father’s lifetime; after his death in 616 or 617, they openly worshipped idols, a decision which in Bede’s narrative led to their military defeat at the hands of the Gewisse (the people of Wessex).Footnote 55 More famously, following the death of Edwin, when Edwin’s cousin Osric (son of his uncle Ælfric) became king of Deira and Æthelfrith’s son Eanfrith ruled in Bernicia, both kings abandoned their Christian faith and, in Bede’s words, ‘returned to the filth of their former idolatry’. Therefore, Cædwalla of the Britons ‘executed a just vengeance on them by killing them, although with unrighteous violence. And so those who compute the dates of kings have decided to abolish the memory of these perfidious kings and to assign this year to their successor, Oswald, a man beloved of God’.Footnote 56 On each of these occasions Bede made his moral point explicit: the stubbornly pagan rulers all suffered for their failure to embrace Christianity. While we must assume that Bede disapproved as strongly of royal princes who rebelled against legitimate kings – for example, the two Deiran kings Alhfrith, son of Oswiu, and Oethelwald, son of Oswald, both of whom rebelled against Oswiu of BerniciaFootnote 57 – he remained silent about the fate of Alhfrith, who disappeared from his narrative after the Synod of Whitby, presumably having lost power.Footnote 58 Less clear-cut is the position of Ecgfrith, son of Oswiu, and king of Northumbria after his father’s death in 670 until 685. Bede described him in his Historia abbatum as ‘a venerable and most pious king’ because of his friendship with Benedict Biscop and his generosity to Wearmouth and Jarrow as well as his support of Cuthbert’s ministry.Footnote 59 But Bede represented the same king in the Historia ecclesiastica in more muted tones.Footnote 60 As he noted, Ecgfrith’s first wife, Æthelthryth (daughter of Anna, king of the East Angles, and widow of Tondberht, princeps of the South Gyrwe), had always lived as a virgin and refused to consummate her marriage to Ecgfrith; in the end she retired to live as a nun at Coldingham before returning to her native East Anglia to become abbess of Ely.Footnote 61 Bede so admired Æthelthryth that he composed a poem in honour of her virginity that he included in the Historia.Footnote 62 Yet her insistence on remaining chaste through twelve years of marriage to Ecgfrith prevented him from fulfilling his proper duty of fathering princes to rule after him; no issue is recorded from Ecgfrith’s second marriage (to Iurminburg) either, and he was succeeded by his (half-) brother, Aldfrith, who, according to Bede, was illegitimate (although also noted for his learning).Footnote 63
Bede consistently advocated the importance of stability and unity throughout his Historia; indeed, various modern scholars have argued that he did much to exaggerate the historical unity of Northumbria – originally two separate kingdoms – in order to promote an ideal of a single Northumbrian realm. He showed particular approval for the period between the accession of Oswald in 634 and the early eighth century, the time when the two kingdoms together were ruled by the same line of Northumbrian royal family to which Oswald belonged.Footnote 64 Equally, he observed with regret that the political dominance once enjoyed by the Northumbrian realm began to diminish because of the rash military ventures undertaken by Ecgfrith in 685, culminating in his death in battle with the Picts at Nechtansmere.Footnote 65 Despite his positive attributes (notably his generosity to the Church), Ecgfrith did not ultimately live up to Bede’s ideals in the public sphere any more than he had done in the domestic. Various factors can explain why Bede laid such importance on political stability, among them obviously his familiarity with biblical narratives about the fate of the people of Israel and his awareness of how closely their well-being related to the quality of their kings.Footnote 66 Bede had no doubt that the history of the chosen people in both spiritual and political terms depended, under God, on the influence, ability and military strength of its leaders. His own reading and reflection, including his commentary on the first book of Samuel, revealed all too clearly how the disputes between kings and feuds within the families of Saul and David affected the fate of Israel; they also offered direct parallels for the royal families of Bernicia and Deira of Bede’s own day.Footnote 67 When Bede wrote in his account of the reign of Oswald, ‘By the efforts of this king, the kingdoms of Deira and Bernicia which had up to this time been at strife with one another, were peacefully united and became one people’, he intended his readers to hear a moral message, one that commended unity.Footnote 68
Similar promotion of the advantages to a secular realm of having a single strong ruler occurs more surprisingly in a passage in Bede’s Historia abbatum about the succession to the abbacy of the joint monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow:
Benedict [Biscop] thought it would be very salutary in every way for maintaining the peace, unity, and harmony of the two places if they had one father-abbot and ruler in perpetuity, often calling to mind the example of the kingdom of Israel, which always remained undamaged and unconquerable by foreign nations so long as it was ruled by a single leader, and he from that same people; but after it was split apart in a hateful internal struggle because its sins overtook it, it perished little by little, and struck down from its position of security it became extinct.Footnote 69
Bede clearly intended to draw a parallel between the familial model of a monastery – a community of brothers in Christ gathered together under a father, the abbot, to whom they owed obedience – and a kingdom, specifically, it seems, the united kingdom of Northumbria (for the abbey of Wearmouth-Jarrow enjoyed good connections with both Deira and Bernicia). Let us move our conspectus out more widely and look in more general terms at the ways in which Bede depicted the rule of kings. Does our understanding of his views change if we focus our gaze through the lens of fatherhood?
Kingly Ministerium
One of the primary obligations owed by a king to his own people directly reflected the role that a father should perform for his own blood family. It fell to a king to provide for the needs of his people, to bring them peace and prosperity in the form of freedom from danger and external threat and to secure sufficient resources to shelter and provide materially for his people and their own households. The military side of that role – the achieving of peace by victory in war – we have already considered, and I will offer just one further example here, that of Æthelfrith, father of Oswald and Oswiu, whom we encountered earlier.Footnote 70 He clearly met with Bede’s approval despite his adherence to paganism. Bede described Æthelfrith as ‘a very brave king and most eager for glory’, asserting that no other king or ruler subjected more land to the English race or settled it. Thus he could be likened to the character of Saul and the words used of Benjamin (to whose tribe Saul belonged) in the Old Testament: ‘Benjamin shall ravin as a wolf; in the morning he shall devour his prey and at night shall divide the spoil.’Footnote 71 As Tugene has explained, this allusion rests upon an understanding that it might also be applied to the apostle Paul (called Saul before his conversion): the wolf that devours in the morning by persecuting Christians distributes his prey in the evening by preaching the gospel to the gentiles.Footnote 72 The whole chapter does more than celebrate Æthelfrith’s military power and his role in punishing the Britons; it also prepares the reader for the future missionary role of the English and the fulfilment of Augustine’s prophecy to the British that if they would not accept their duty of preaching the gospel to the English, then they should anticipate the vengeance of death at their hands, as Æthelfrith duly delivered at the battle of Chester.Footnote 73
The capacity of a king to provide in this way for his people depended significantly upon the nature of his relationship with God. Thus, as we have already seen, Oswald prayed with his army at Heavenfield, and before the battle of Winwæd, Oswiu made a bargain with God that if he were successful in the fight, he would dedicate his young daughter to God.Footnote 74 St Augustine may have warned against worshipping the Christian God merely in hope of obtaining good fortune (making specific comparison with the prosperity, happiness and military success enjoyed by the emperor Constantine as a direct result of his favour in God’s eyes), stating that ‘every man should be a Christian only for the sake of eternal life.’Footnote 75 Yet it is hard not to agree with Wallace-Hadrill’s reading that Bede attached a rather higher value than did Augustine to the prosperity and victory that were the material consequences of good rule.Footnote 76 The celebrated passage in which Bede described the proverbial peace of Northumbria in King Edwin’s day, when it was said that a woman might safely carry a babe in her arms from shore to shore without harm, touches both on the king’s paternal care for his people (setting up stakes with bronze drinking cups on them near wayside springs so that thirsty travellers could refresh themselves) and on the splendour of his own majesty, marked out by the standards that he had carried before him wherever he went.Footnote 77 The peace of Edwin’s realm paralleled that of the Old Testament King Solomon, son of David, who enjoyed dominion over a huge area, and over all its kings, and had peace on all his frontiers.Footnote 78 In a homily on the Incarnation, Bede also laid great stress on the peace achieved in the time of the Emperor Augustus (in whose day Christ was born, at the time when the emperor had sent out an edict ‘that the whole world should be enrolled’)Footnote 79: ‘[W]hat could be a greater indication of peace in this life than for the entire world to be enrolled by one man and to be included in a single coinage.’Footnote 80
King Edwin’s capacity to provide such a safe and prosperous environment for his people to flourish resulted obviously from his military capacity to ensure the peace of his borders for the brief duration of his reign but more in Bede’s eyes because of his decision to bring his people to the true faith and to support the work of Christian missionaries in his realm.Footnote 81 In that same Christmas sermon, Bede reminded his hearers that ‘we must not pass over the fact that the serenity of that earthly peace at the time when the Heavenly King was born, not only offered testimony to his grace, but it provided a service, since it bestowed on the preachers of his word the capability of travelling over the world and spreading abroad the grace of the gospel.’Footnote 82 Bede also quoted a letter of Pope Vitalian to Oswiu of Northumbria: ‘[T]hat race is indeed blessed which has been found worthy to have so wise a king and one who is a worshipper of God’; quoting Isaiah, the pope compared Oswiu to a root of Jesse ‘which shall stand for an ensign of the people, to which the Gentiles shall seek’.Footnote 83 Manifestly, a range of factors was at play here, but paternal imagery does not seem inappropriate. Here we have examples of kings treating their subjects as extended family, taking upon themselves a role for their material and also their spiritual wellbeing that extended beyond their immediate locality to the very bounds of their shores. Like bishops, kings were fathers and shepherds with responsibilities not only to their own households but also over the larger flock entrusted to their care.Footnote 84
A variety of models was available to Bede in his search for definitions of good kingship in addition to the Old Testament exemplars already mentioned, including both Roman and early Christian statements of political theory as well as the traditions of leadership in Germanic society. Whatever conceptions of rulership the various Anglo-Saxon peoples had brought with them from their native homelands in Europe, these will have undergone considerable adaptation during the migration process and after the settlement and formation of the first English kingdoms. While warfare remained a central kingly duty (indeed, the Old English word for a lord or ruler, dryhten, meant ‘warband leader’, as Wormald noted),Footnote 85 other obligations attached themselves to the role, including those of judge and law-giver, even before the more significant adaptations that followed from conversion to Christianity.Footnote 86 Fundamentally, Bede considered secular rule to have a firm moral basis and clearly defined Christian objectives.Footnote 87 The decrees of God’s law specified the manner in which kings ought to live and taught them what they should do. As Bede wrote to Nothhelm in his Thirty Questions on the Book of Kings, ‘[H]e who sees himself as exalted to rule over the people must remember that he himself is to be ruled and subject to divine laws.’Footnote 88 Here he echoed the sentiments expressed in Isidore’s Etymologies, where kings are said to be ‘so called from governing … But he does not govern who does not correct. Therefore the name of king is held by one behaving rightly (recte) and lost by one doing wrong … The royal virtues are these two especially: justice and mercy, but mercy is more praised in kings because justice in itself is harsh.’Footnote 89 In Isidore’s thought, P. D. King has argued, the king was ‘the predestined appointee of God, set at the summit of society in the same way that the head is set over the body, and for the same purpose, to rule the “subject members”’. The king was God’s minister, the agent through whom God worked; the most useful tool at his disposal for ensuring wellbeing of society was the law.Footnote 90 All of these principles also find expression in Bede’s representations of kingship.
Like Isidore, Bede had an essentially ministerial conception of kingship, as Tugene has shown; in his eyes, kings had obligations to render service to God, the Church and to the Christian people. They performed that role most obviously when they took it upon themselves to promote the Christian faith, not just by encouraging missionaries and promoting conversion but also by providing for the material support of the Church by endowing cathedrals and monasteries with lands and moveable wealth.Footnote 91 Bede acquired much of the underpinning of this understanding from the writings of Gregory the Great, whose political vocabulary tended to merge the secular and ecclesiastical worlds into one, making secular governance as much a ministerium as was ecclesiastical rule.Footnote 92 Some of Gregory’s notions concerning authority reflected Benedict of Nursia’s image of the abbot, which provides a deeply paternalistic view of authority.Footnote 93 Gregory also observed, however, that those who were placed in authority needed to deserve their position by merit and to remember the fundamental equality of humans while performing their ministry. Pope Gregory spelt out these obligations in a letter to King Æthelberht that Bede quoted in full: ‘[S]o my illustrious son, watch carefully over the grace you have received from God and hasten to extend the Christian faith among the people who are subject to you. Increase your righteous zeal for their conversion, suppress the worship of idols, overthrow their buildings and shrines, strengthen the morals of your subjects by outstanding purity of life, by exhorting them, terrifying, enticing and correcting them, and by showing them an example of good works.’Footnote 94 Thus Bede’s ideal kings were those who most closely embodied those virtues, who could unite their own personal Christian attributes of faith and humility with a concern for the wellbeing of others, just as a father would do for his children.Footnote 95
Humility might seem an unlikely virtue for a king, especially if we continue to hold in mind the imagery of the warrior kings suggested by the Staffordshire Hoard. But in Bede’s account this was one of King Oswald’s key attributes, a mark of the strength of his kingship and of his claim to sanctity.Footnote 96 He declared that Oswald was always wonderfully humble, kind and generous,Footnote 97 and the young Deiran king, Oswine, also stood out for his humility. Bishop Aidan declared of the latter that he had never seen such a humble king, yet this led him to prophesy that the king would not live long ‘for this nation does not deserve to have such a ruler’.Footnote 98 That humility – and obedience – were kingly virtues Bede made clear in his commentary on the First Book of Samuel. He commented on Saul’s humility after he had been anointed by SamuelFootnote 99 and commended his humility in adhering to God’s teachings, listening to his voice and walking in the ways in which the Lord had sent him.Footnote 100 But he was also highly critical when Saul’s pride and independence of mind got the better of him so that he ceased to listen to God’s word.Footnote 101 Gregory had advised those who rule of the need for humility, also drawing attention to Saul and pointing to the dangers of pride, but he was equally clear that while a ruler should be humble in his heart, in governing he should not fear to use discipline when necessary.Footnote 102 Oswald (and Oswine) stood in stark contrast to Edwin, whose pride baulked at the humility of the Christian cross; Bishop Paulinus recognised how hard it would be for King Edwin’s ‘proud mind to turn humbly to the way of salvation’.Footnote 103 The humility that so characterised Oswald found its strongest articulation in his obedience to the Church, something of which Pope Gregory would certainly have approved.Footnote 104
The paternal role of a king to bring his own people to faith takes on a different perspective when kings made use of alliances with the rulers of other realms to advance the Christian religion. Consider, for example, the spiritual relationship that Oswald supposedly had with Cynegils of Wessex, a complicated arrangement involving his standing as godfather to the West Saxon king at the font but also marrying his daughter. The two kings together are credited with having helped Birinus to establish an episcopal see at Dorchester (the site of a former Roman fort).Footnote 105 One might express some doubts about the extent of the political realities that underpin this story – particularly its implication that the land at Dorchester could have been in Oswald’s gift – but what is relevant here is the significance of the extension of an understanding of family to include parents and children bound through the sacrament of baptism as spiritual kin. Bede portrayed Oswald as extending his own family by marriage and taking an active evangelising role with his in-laws.Footnote 106 Aldfrith, son of Oswiu, did the same for his brother-in-law Peada, son of Penda, king of the Middle Angles.Footnote 107 No family connection linked Oswiu and Sigeberht of the East Saxons; rather, Oswiu appears to have been the East Saxon king’s overlord, yet Bede showed how the Northumbrian king used religious arguments about the nature of the Almighty and his promises of eternal reward to teach Sigeberht about the Christian religion, until the pagan king came to believe. He was baptised by Bishop Finan on a Northumbrian royal estate near Hadrian’s Wall.Footnote 108 Despite the apparent evidence of this last anecdote that Oswiu had enough grasp of the principles of the Christian faith to be able to use some theological understanding and biblical knowledge in his efforts to persuade the East Saxon king, few of the kings found in the pages of Bede’s history receive praise for their learning.Footnote 109 A reputation for learning would not have conflicted with the paternalistic role of kings that we have been describing, but neither was it self-evidently a major part of Bede’s conception of ideal kingship.
The Ends of Kings’ Reigns
Bede’s accounts of the deaths of kings often reveal his views about the institution of kingship most clearly, demonstrating which individuals had best conformed to an ideal that saw the king as the predestined appointee of God, set over the body to rule its members. Kingship was certainly inheritable, but Bede obviously also believed that kings were appointed by God and that God could – and did – determine when to take the rulership away from a king who did not meet his standards. We have already encountered the sons of the earliest Christian kings in the south of England whose reversion to paganism incurred divine displeasure.Footnote 110 Ecgfrith of Northumbria similarly provoked the Almighty’s wrath by undertaking a military expedition against the blameless Irish and the following year ‘rashly took an army to ravage the kingdom of the Picts, against the urgent advice of his friends’ and especially that of Bishop Cuthbert. He died in that battle, and Bede remarked that having failed to heed the guidance he had been given not to attack the Irish who had done him no harm, ‘the punishment for his sin was that he would not now listen to those who sought to save him from his own destruction.’ It was from this time on, Bede believed, that the ‘hopes and strength of the English kingdom began to “ebb and fall away”’.Footnote 111
Death in battle or in violent circumstances did not have to serve as a mark of God’s lasting disfavour, however; quite the contrary. In a short chapter describing the spread of Christianity to the last area of English occupation to receive missionaries – the Isle of Wight – Bede recounted the execution of two newly baptised princes on the island, who, in dying, were assured that they would pass to the eternal life of the soul. Their death reflected the West Saxon king Cædwalla’s determination to wipe out the local population and replace it with his own followers. Although not technically martyrs for their faith (for it was their identity as sons of the island’s king that necessitated the princes’ death in Cædwalla’s eyes, not their religious affiliation), the neophytes were able to receive the grace of baptism as the first fruits of the conversion of the island and so were specially crowned with God’s grace.Footnote 112 Edwin, Oswald and the unfortunate Oswine (who was murdered on the orders of Oswiu) could all be shown to have fulfilled Bede’s image of ideal Christian kings, and yet all three met violent deaths in circumstances that could give them a claim to sanctity in martyrdom.Footnote 113 Cults of all three did indeed ensue, even if Bede did not choose to reveal in his Historia anything about the cult of Edwin at Whitby or that of Oswine, just across the river from Jarrow at Tynemouth.Footnote 114 Even in death these kings continued to act for the protection and support of the living by interceding on their behalf with the Almighty. Bede argued that ‘it is not to be wondered at that the prayers of this king [Oswald] who is now reigning with the Lord should greatly prevail, for while he was ruling over his temporal kingdom, he was always accustomed to work and pray most diligently for the kingdom which is eternal.’Footnote 115 And it was not only for his own flock that Oswald apparently prayed in heaven. Bede narrated an episode about an outbreak of plague at the South Saxon monastery of Selsey from which the majority of the monks were apparently saved by the intercession of King Oswald, ‘who prayed to the Lord for them as if of his own race though [they were] strangers’.Footnote 116
Bede revealed himself to be more ambivalent about kings’ behaviour and the fate due to them in the circumstances in which, to use Clare Stancliffe’s phrase, they ‘opted out’. His hesitations related to those kings whose commitment to the new religion conflicted with their duties to rule and guide their people, including that of leading them in battle. Sigeberht, king of the East Angles, was the first of six Anglo-Saxon kings who abdicated their thrones in order to enter monasteries; he was dragged out by his people and forced to face an invading Mercian army; refusing to bear arms, he was killed and his army defeated.Footnote 117 Five others resigned to go to Rome on pilgrimage, and others such as Oswiu wanted to do so but died before they could. The first to make the journey was, somewhat ironically given the tale I just told about the princes of the Isle of Wight, the West Saxon Cædwalla, who went to Rome in 689 with the intention of receiving baptism there but died soon after.Footnote 118 Bede seemed to approve the decision of Cenred of Mercia, who had ‘reigned very nobly but renounced his kingdom with still greater nobility’.Footnote 119 But he expressed distinctly more ambivalence about the decision of Offa, son of a king of the East Saxons, ‘a youth so lovable and handsome that the whole race longed for him to have and to hold the sceptre of the kingdom’ to travel with Cenred to Rome; he left his wife, lands, kinsmen and fatherland for the gospel to inherit one-hundred-fold in the life to come.Footnote 120 It is hard not to feel that Bede had some hesitations about the virtue of such behaviour, however admirable it might have seemed on religious terms. If he shared with Pope Gregory a vision of rulership as a ministerium, as a form of service, he will also have subscribed to the pope’s belief that religious leaders needed to sacrifice their own desire for peace and contemplation in order to serve the needs of others.Footnote 121 Kings who opted out of the task placed on them by God were not fulfilling the divine will. Their path to salvation, as Gregory spelt out clearly in the advice he gave to Anglo-Saxon kings, was in ensuring the salvation of their own flock.Footnote 122 This represents another respect in which kings exercised a paternal role. Those who failed to bring that responsibility to completion – by persisting in it until the end of their natural lives – not only left their realms potentially leaderless, but they also contrived to make orphans of their subjects.
Conclusion
These reflections on Bede’s attitudes towards the kings about whom he wrote in his Historia form part of a wider project of mine to write an intellectual biography of Bede; in that endeavour I shall seek connections between the ideas that Bede articulated in different contexts and attempt to identify some of the coherent themes that underpinned his wider worldview. It is not coincidental, therefore, that I found myself focusing particularly on the responsibilities of kings to act as fathers to their people, because I think that this spoke particularly to Bede’s personal circumstances.
Commenting on a verse in Proverbs – which warns against removing the boundary stones of little ones or entering into the lands of orphans because their kinsmen are powerful and can argue their case against one – Bede pointed out that God can be considered the near kin of little ones and orphans and the protector of all who call upon him.Footnote 123 Given what we know about Bede’s own background – that he was given by his propinqui (by which he might have meant his mother and father but could equally have referred to some more distant relatives or kinsmen) to the care of the monastery at Wearmouth at the age of seven – one might wonder whether he were in fact an orphan.Footnote 124 Clearly, this is a speculative idea, but let me push the speculation a little further by drawing attention to the close relationship that Bede appears to have made with Ceolfrith, abbot of the monastery of Jarrow.Footnote 125 Might that closeness have arisen because Bede had never known his own father, with the result that Ceolfrith came to fulfil that emotional need in the young oblate’s life? If so, this would put into better context Bede’s apparent complete emotional collapse when Ceolfrith left for Rome in 716, a collapse that he movingly described in the Prologue he wrote to the fourth book of his commentary on Samuel: ‘Having completed the third book of the commentary I thought that I would rest a while, and, after recovering that way my delight in study and writing proceed to take in hand the fourth. But that rest – if sudden anguish of mind can be called rest – has turned out much longer than I intended owing to the sudden change of circumstances brought by the departure of my most reverend abbot.’Footnote 126 Clearly Bede’s mental distress caused him to be unable to work for some while; only with the return of quieter times did he regain both the leisure and the delight for searching out the wondrous things of Holy Scripture carefully and with his whole soul.Footnote 127 Others have commented on the seemingly disproportionate nature of this response to Ceolfrith’s departure and Bede’s articulation of a level of emotional distress that one would not necessarily have anticipated.Footnote 128 But if Ceolfrith had effectively been the only father Bede had ever known, it might be more explicable. Would it stretch imagination too far to wonder whether Bede’s particular view of the paternal role of kings might also have owed something to his own insecure early childhood and his search for a father?
Bede manifestly valued uniformity and unity of observance not only in the Church but also in the secular realm. He approved of stability within individual royal houses and believed that Northumbria functioned better when united into a single kingdom. Further, he looked for opportunities to point out how much the separate English kingdoms shared through language, culture, social organisation, history and above all their common faith. Ultimately, it was that faith in the gospel and in the saving power of Christ that seems to me to underpin Bede’s worldview. As Wallace-Hadrill argued in a memorable passage, Bede saw kings on Earth essentially as reflections of the majesty of the heavenly king. Kings exercised their temporal power ‘by God’s authority and for his purposes, namely the furthering of religion by protecting his priests and monks, encouraging their work, exhorting the faithful by personal example, and by carrying the Gospel, by fire and sword if necessary, into neighbouring territories where it was unknown or misunderstood. It is this that binds together a people into a Populus Dei after the manner of the Israelites.’Footnote 129 While Bede may indeed have attached himself emotionally to the fathers who served as abbots of his monastery, he knew of course that his real father was the father he would ultimately meet in heaven. While acknowledging him as god of gods and king of kings, the righteous judge, Bede also saw him as the loving father who, when humanity, like the prodigal son, was still far off, met his children in his son and brought them home.Footnote 130 It seems reasonable to suggest that Bede himself had only the most limited personal experience of how effective familial relationships worked themselves out on a daily basis in a secular household; his whole experience of father/son and brotherly relations was forged in the quite different context of the cloister. In making his ideal kings into perfect fathers, Bede consciously echoed a well-defined line of patristic thought. He may also unconsciously have been answering a more personal, unspoken desire to be fathered himself. As his own end drew near – on the eve of the feast of the Ascension of the risen Christ to heaven – the monk Cuthbert who witnessed his death said that Bede apparently struggled to say the words of the antiphon: ‘Leave us not comfortless’ (literally, ‘orphaned’: ne derelinquas nos orphanos). But once he knew that it was time to be released from his body and return to his creator, Bede could say confidently, ‘[M]y soul longs to see Christ my King in all his beauty.’ He therefore asked to be held as he sat where he had always been wont to pray, in order that he might call upon his Father. And so upon the floor of his cell, singing the words of the Gloria patri, ‘he breathed his last.’Footnote 131
