The King in the North: The Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria by Adams Max

Author:Adams, Max [Adams, Max]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi
ISBN: 9781781854174
Publisher: Head of Zeus
Published: 2013-08-28T16:00:00+00:00

It is also a tradition which has become proverbial, that he died with a prayer on his lips. When he was beset by the weapons of his enemies and saw that he was about to perish he prayed for the souls of his army. So the proverb runs, ‘May God have mercy on their souls, as Oswald said when he fell to the earth.’176

Bede goes on to say that ‘the king who slew him ordered his head and hands to be severed from his body and hung on stakes.’ The defeat, then, was absolute: the army of Oswald utterly destroyed. His earthly ‘luck’, the luck of the pagan Anglo-Saxon kings, which was such a crucial and yet intangible element of kingship, had finally and irrevocably run out. His comitates, the close companions and veterans who had accompanied him into exile and in his triumphant return, must surely have perished with him. There was no-one left to guard his physical honour in death, to attempt retrieval of his body from the blood-soaked battlefield. If his passing marked the beginning of the next chapter in Oswald’s career as saint and martyr, the disastrous reversal of fortunes at Maserfelth spelled potential disaster for Bernicia and the Idings; it might also have spelled disaster for the Ionan mission to Lindisfarne, whose tender shoots had been protected by their king. It was in the natural order of things that Bernicia’s subject kingdoms should now regard themselves as free of all tributary obligations. Would Deira reassert its independence? Would rivals fight for the throne? For the next thirteen years Penda was the Dragon of the Island, the supreme warlord of English Britain. It was left in the hands of Oswald’s brother Oswiu, eight years his junior, to ensure that Bernicia survived to fight another day.

The circumstances of Oswald’s fatal campaign against Penda have been the subject of much spilled ink over the years. All judgements hinge on the identification of Maserfelth and any number of suggestions have been made to provide a definitive location. On the face of it, there is only one reasonable candidate. Since at least the twelfth century Oswestry, the otherwise unpretentious market town that nestles against the Welsh mountains a mile or so east of Offa’s Dyke between the rivers Severn and Dee, has been claimed as the place of Oswald’s death. The obvious derivation of the name from Oswald’s tree or cross—a reference to the wooden stake on which his severed head was impaled—is matched by the Welsh form Croesoswald. There is a church here dedicated to Saint Oswald which may well predate the Norman Conquest. There is also a holy well with the same dedication. Why, then, doubt Oswestry as the site of Oswald’s martyrdom?

The problem lies firstly with the fact that Oswestry lies in the historic kingdom of the Wrocansætan, well outside core Mercian territory, hard against the foothills of the Welsh mountains: what on earth was Oswald doing there? What, for that matter, was Penda doing there?*2 The

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