Fouracre P. The New Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 1: c. 500-c. 700

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England in the seventh century 463

Germanic peoples inhabiting the various English kingdoms had acquired a

uniﬁed identity through their submission to a united church. They could all

be included under the single designation English, Angli. They were, moreover,

set in contrast to the British, whom Bede treated with active hostility, alleging

that they had failed in their Christian duty to bring the faith to the pagan

English.

Except as external enemies, the British are largely invisible in the

Ecclesiastical History.

The very few narrative sources, apart from Bede, are all quite brief and all

Lives of saints. In one instance only, Stephen of Ripon’s remarkable account of

the Northumbrian bishop Wilfrid, do they enable us to check up on the History.

The result is disturbing. It reveals that Bede’s treatment of a difﬁcult ﬁgure,

controversial and yet crucial to his conversion story, was highly selective and

discreet.

Other written sources – the laws, the few administrative documents,

the ecclesiastical penitentials – by their nature cannot provide a narrative and

have to be read in the light of the all-encompassing vision of Bede. Much the

same is also true of the material evidence provided by the surviving buildings

and by archaeology. Bede, then, is the lens through which we view seventh-

century England. And, to say the least, that lens is highly idiosyncratic.

the political landscape in the seventh century

Some dozen or so political units are named in Bede, the charters, and other,

later, sources, as ruled by English kings during the seventh century. The most

enduring units, those which survived throughout this period, each with their

own bishop or bishops, included in the north Bernicia and Deira (for much

of the century uneasily united as Northumbria), and in the midlands and the

south Wessex, Mercia, Kent, East Anglia, Essex and Sussex. From time to time

we read also of kings of the Hwicce, Lindsey, the Isle of Wight, Middle Anglia,

and, more dubiously, the Magonsæte and Surrey; among the South Gywre

we hear of a princeps.

(See above, map 8.) Embedded within this political

landscape, especially in the west, were the contemporary British kingdoms,

under increasing pressure as the century wore on. In Wales the kingdoms of

Gwynedd, Powys, Gwent or Glywysing, and Dyfed largely retained their inde-

pendence, despite victories in the north, which in the period up to 633 brought

Northumbrian kings temporary sway as far as the isles of Anglesey and Man.

In the south-west, the kingdom of Dumnonia, largest of British kingdoms,

was in the process of being absorbed into Wessex.

In the south Pennines we

Charles-Edwards (1983); Thacker (1996).

Vita Wilfridi.

Bassett (1989a); Yorke (1990); Kirby (1991); HE iv.19.

Davies (1982), 90–102; HE ii.5.

Yorke (1995).

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464 alan thacker

hear of a British kingdom, Elmet, conquered by Northumbria before the mid-

seventh century. In north-west England and south-west Scotland lay Rheged,

probably brought under Northumbrian lordship in the later part of the cen-

tury. In Scotland too in the late seventh century Northumbria extended its

rule over territories hitherto held by the Picts and the Scots of D

al Riada

(see map 5, above). At its apogee, therefore, in the third quarter of the cen-

tury, Northumbria, then the most powerful political entity, occupied vast ter-

ritories extending in the east from the Humber to the Firth of Forth and

in the west from Lancashire to beyond the Solway Firth.

The centre of grav-

ity of the English world lay then in York, Bamburgh and great monasteries

between Tyne and Wear, in a kind of middle kingdom, almost as much in later

Scotland as in England.

Bede tells us that in the seventh century the English kingdoms south of the

Humber (except, initially, Kent) acknowledged an overlord, in Old English

the bretwalda,ruler of Britain.

What, if any, authority resided in this title is

unknown. Almost certainly, it was of a personal nature and depended on the

resources and personality of the holder. There is evidence that most, if not all,

of those so named by Bede had inﬂuence outside the conﬁnes of their own

territories, even though they can in no sense be said to have ruled the whole

of southern England. At most the bretwalda may be interpreted as a kind of

high king, levying tribute on (temporarily) subordinated kingdoms.

After

the brief sway of the rulers of the south-eastern kingdoms of Kent and East

Anglia in the early decades, the high politics of the seventh century, south of the

Humber, were dominated by the struggles between Northumbria and Mercia

for supremacy. As David Rollason has recently emphasised, the stakes could

hardly have been higher. For much of his reign the pagan Mercian king Penda

(626 × 633–655) was a threat to the very existence of Northumbria, responsible

for the deaths of two of its most successful rulers and capable of mounting an

assault which enabled him to besiege the royal seat of Bamburgh itself. By the

same token, when he in turn met defeat and death at Northumbrian hands,

for a while Mercia itself ceased to exist as a politcal entity.

Political narrative

The extreme and varying fortunes of the main kingdoms in seventh-century

England illustrate the instability and fragility of political authority during

Seenow Rollason (2003).

Campbell (1982).

HE ii.5; Anglo-Saxon Chronicle s.a. 827.

John(1966), pp. 1–63;Stenton (1970), pp. 48–66;Yorke(1981), pp. 171–200;Wormald (1983); Fanning

(1991); Rollason (2003), ch. 2; HE ii.5; Vita Wilfridi c.20.

Rollason (2003), ch. 2; HE ii.20; iii.9, 16–17, 24.

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England in the seventh century 465

this period.

At the opening of the century the main focus of English power

lay in the south-east. The acknowledged overlord of southern England was

Æthelberht, ruler of the rich kingdom of Kent (d. 616), who introduced

Christianity to his people. Kent, however, suffered in the political and religious

divisions which followed Æthelberht’s death, and by the 620s the overlordship

had passed to Rædwald, king of the East Angles (d. 616 × 627), who main-

tained altars to both the old gods and the new.

The wealth and power of the

East Anglian political establishment is reﬂected in the royal tombs at the burial

ground of Sutton Hoo, above all in the celebrated ﬁnds from the ship burial

in Mound One.

Even so, the East Anglians’ hold on political power proved

only brief, and after Rædwald’s death the overlordship passed to the recently

united Northumbria of King Edwin (616–633), a former refugee at Rædwald’s

court.

The bringing together of the two major English kingdoms north of the

Humber, Bernicia and Deira, was a gradual process, accomplished initially by

the Bernician king, the pagan Æthelfrith (d. 616) and continued by his con-

queror and successor, the Christian convert and Deiran Edwin. When, some

time after his defeat of the Bernicians at the battle of Idle in 616,Edwin assumed

the southern overlordship, he could be patriotically credited by the Northum-

brian Bede with rule over all four of the peoples of seventh-century Britain –

the English, British, Picts and Irish. Only Kent lay outside his power. Under

Edwin, in the mid-620s, the Roman missionary Paulinus set up new Christian

institutions in Northumbria, but this initiative foundered with Edwin’s defeat

and death in 633 at the hands of the British (and Christian) king Cadwallon of

Gwynedd, and his pagan ally, the Mercian king Penda.

As elsewhere, Edwin’s

defeat inaugurated a pagan reaction, and for a year the new Northumbrian

kingdom dissolved into its constituent parts under his apostate successors. By

634,however, the union had been restored under a new Bernician overlord,

King Oswald (d. 642), characterised by Bede as christianissimus rex and one of

the heroes of his History.Oswald defeated his British enemies at the battle of

Heavenﬁeld (Hefenfelth) far in the north near Hadrian’s Wall. He re-established

the Northumbrian supremacy in the south and maintained Northumbrian

overlordship of the British, Picts and Irish in the north. But his achievements

also collapsed with his defeat and death in 642 at the hands of Penda and his

allies at the battle of Maserfelth, usually said to be Oswestry in Shropshire.

After a period of more than usual confusion, the Northumbrian supremacy

was reasserted under Oswald’s successor Oswiu (642–670). With the defeat and

Best discussion, Campbell (1982).

HE ii.15;Yorke (2003), pp. 243–57, esp. 244–5.

Bruce-Mitford (1975–83); Carver (1992) and (1998).

HE ii.9.12.

HE ii.5, 9–20.

HE ii.5; iii.1, 6, 9;Stancliffe and Cambridge (1995).

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466 alan thacker

death of the Northumbrians’ longstanding political rival, Penda of Mercia,

at the battle of the Winwaed (near Leeds) in 655,Oswiu took much of the

Mercians’ territory under his direct rule and set up Penda’s son the Christian

Peada as his under-king in south Mercia. In 658,however, the Mercians expelled

the Northumbrians from their heartlands and established a new regime under

Penda’s son, the Christian Wulfhere (d. 674).

Even so, for a while they appar-

ently continued to render tribute.

Similar claims were made for Oswiu’s

supremacy over the Irish and Picts as for his two great predecessors.

Under

Oswiu’s son and successor, Ecgfrith (670–685) the Northumbrians retained a

degree of political dominance in the south until they were defeated by Æthelred

at the battle of the Trent in 679.

That battle ﬁnally settled the issue of the con-

trol of the province and former kingdom of Lindsey (in modern Lincolnshire),

long disputed between the Deirans, Northumbrians and Mercians; henceforth

it lay ﬁrmly within the Mercian sphere of inﬂuence.

Ecgfrith’s reign initially saw the conﬁrmation of Northumbria’s continued

dominance in the north. In the early 670shebrutally crushed a Pictish revolt,

and in 684 launched an ambitious military expedition against the Scots in

northern Ireland. A further campaign against the Picts ended in his defeat

and death in 685, and thereafter, as Bede noted, the power of the Northum-

brian kingdom began to ‘ebb and fall away’. The Picts regained the land

they had lost, while the Scots in the mainland kingdom of D

al Riada and

some at least of the conquered Britons recovered their independence.

The

defeat of Ecgfrith marked the end not only of Northumbrian expansion in the

north but of any further pretensions to overlordship of England south of the

Humber. Henceforth King Æthelred of Mercia was the dominant ﬁgure in the

south.

Mercia, the midland kingdom, whose heartlands lay around Lichﬁeld,

Tamworth and Repton in Staffordshire and Derbyshire, was late in emerg-

ing as an effective political unit and late in adopting Christianity.

Although

the pagan Penda had acquiesced in the conversion of his son Peada upon

his marriage to Oswiu’s daughter, the ﬁrst bishop was only established by

the conquering Oswiu himself in the mid-650s. Temporarily halted during

its subjugation in the mid-650s, Mercian expansion resumed after it regained

its independence in 658.Penda’s work was consolidated and continued by his

sons Wulfhere (658–675) and Æthelred (675–704), and after the Mercians’ deci-

sive victory in 679 most of the kingdoms and provinces of southern England

were brought under their supremacy. When the Ecclesiastical History was being

HE iii.24.

Vita Wilfridi c.20.

HE ii.5.

HE iv.21–2.

Eagles (1989); Vince (1993).

Vita Wilfridi c.19.

HE iv.26.

Dornier (1977); Brown (2001).

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England in the seventh century 467

ﬁnished in 731 the Mercian king Æthelbald (716–757) was overlord of the

southern kingdoms ‘right up to the Humber’, in effect bretwalda, although he

is not so named by Bede.

By the late seventh century the most powerful kingdom apart from

Northumbria and Mercia was Wessex. Although it was named as one of the

tributary kingdoms in the document known as the Tribal Hidage (discussed

below), its enormous notional assessment, 100,000 hides – more than three

times any of the others – is sufﬁcient indication of its importance. Its rivalry

with Mercia was already evident by 628, when its kings fought with, and

were defeated by, Penda at Cirencester; King Cynegils’ adoption of Christian-

ity under the sponsorship of Oswald of Northumbria was probably part of

a search for new and powerful allies in response to this. While its expansion

eastwards was blocked by Mercia, it seems to have been growing westwards

at the expense of the British throughout the seventh century.

In the 680s

King Cædwalla achieved the brutal conquest of the still pagan Isle of Wight,

suppressing the kingdom and eliminating the royal family. Before he became

king he had also slain Æthelwealh, king of Sussex, an ally of Mercia, and after

685 for about twenty years that kingdom was subject in ecclesiastical matters

to the West Saxon bishops of Winchester.

The dynamics of political development

It is now widely assumed that most if not all of the English kingdoms came

into being in the late sixth century. Their emergence has been seen as the

product of a competitive process in which the successful groupings absorbed

or subjugated formerly independent tribal units represented by the regiones

or provinciae of the Latin sources or by place-names in -ingas,acontinuing

dynamic which dominated the politics of the seventh century.

There are,

however, difﬁculties with this tidy model.

In the ﬁrst place, despite the varying fortunes of its components, the

English political framework in the seventh century could be regarded as rel-

atively stable. A considerable number of the kingdoms known to have had

an independent existence in the early seventh century stayed the course. The

major loss was Deira, subsumed into Northumbria, its kings after 634 being

usually drawn from the ruling Bernician dynasty. It is also possible, though by

no means proven, that the kingdom of Wight, suppressed in the 680s, was a

HE iii.24, 30; iv.12; v.23; Vita Wilfridi c.20.

HE iii.7;Yorke (1995), pp. 57–60.

HE iv.15–16.

See esp. Bassett (1989b).

Iammuch indebted to Dr G. Halsall for discussion of what follows and for generously making avail-

able a copy of his unpublished paper, ‘The origins of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms: a Merovingianist

speaks out’, delivered at the Institute of Historical Research in 1997.

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468 alan thacker

well-established independent political entity.

On the other hand, there were

also new kingdoms. Some of these were of a temporary nature – ﬂeeting ad

hominem creations for members of existing royal lines. The kingdoms of the

Middle Angles and of south Mercia created for Peada by Penda and Oswiu

in the 650s and the kingdom of Surrey created for Frithuwold in the 670s

are notable examples.

Other longer-lasting units, such as the kingdoms of

the Hwicce and the Magonsæte, may actually have been late seventh-century

creations (like their bishoprics). The existence of the kingdom of Lindsey is

perhaps the most difﬁcult to explain. Although its royal genealogy suggests

that at some stage it may have been independent, there is no evidence that

in the seventh century it ever was so. It seems always to have been ruled by

Mercia or Northumbria, through men whom they termed ofﬁcials (ealdormen

or praefecti) but who in the province itself may have been regarded as kings.

In Wessex there were multiple kings throughout the seventh century. In some

instances close relatives shared the kingship, usually brothers inheriting from

their fathers. But there were also numerous under-kings. While these may be

interpreted as descendants of the ruling families of subordinated provinces or

kingdoms, they are just as likely to represent collateral lines of the royal house.

There is no reason to assume that Wessex expanded through an aggregation of

pre-existing smaller kingdoms. The subkingships may have been new creations

within annexed territory, assigned to members of the royal clan.

A key document for considering these issues is the Tribal Hidage, generally

regarded as a tribute list of dues payable to a Mercian or perhaps Northumbrian

bretwalda and probably dating from the seventh century.

It omits Northum-

bria but ascribes assessments in terms of hides to a wide range of other political

units beginning with the Mercian heartlands (assessed at 30,000 hides) and

concluding with East Anglia (30,000), Essex (7000), Kent (15,000), Sussex

(7000) and Wessex (100,000). In between are twenty-eight other units assessed

at hideages ranging from 7000 (Lindsey, the Hwicce, the Magonsæte, and the

Wreocensæte) to a mere 300. The political situation implied by this is complex

and will never be fully known. Sufﬁce it to say here that the entities listed after

Mercia itself have often been taken to be its subkingdoms and dependencies.

Even if this is allowed to be the case, there is, however, no reason to suppose

that all or even most of these units were ever independent entities. Even the

largest of these presumed dependencies, which have assessments equal to lesser

kingdoms known at some stage to have been independent, may always have

been subordinate units of a greater power. Indeed, it is not even necessary to

Yorke (1989).

Blair (1989) and (1991); Dumville (1989); Sims-Williams (1992), pp. 16–53.

Thacker (1981); Vince (1993).

Yorke (1995), pp. 79–84.

For text and important analyses see Davies and Vierck (1974); Brooks (1989); Dumville (1989);

Higham (1995).

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England in the seventh century 469

suppose that all these groupings were tribal; some at least of the smaller units

may have been primarily administrative – governmental areas, created by their

overlord in an area where there had long been confusion and instability.

A further factor in the politics of the seventh century was the shift in political

dominance away from the kingdoms of the south-east to the midlands and the

north, away from Kent and East Anglia to Northumbria and Mercia. One

explanation of this shift is that the latter (together with Wessex, also by the

late seventh century a rising power) all had a frontier with the British, offering

them greater opportunity to expand. Such expansion, with the concomitant

ﬁghting and looting, provided the kings who conducted it with the prestige

and the wherewithal, in the form of treasure and land, to attract the personal

followings upon which political power was primarily based. Since there is

plenty of evidence that the English were prepared to ﬁght one another, this

change in the balance of power presupposes that the British kingdoms in the

west were in some way a softer target. For reasons probably both political and

economic they appear to have been in decline during this period.

Ethnic identities

Consideration of the role of the British requires us to assess the nature of ethnic

identities within the British Isles in this period.

It is clear that the ruling elites

of the English kingdoms, whatever their early origins, no longer distinguished

themselves (if they ever had) on the basis of ethnic and political identities

determined on the continent.

Although some kingdoms incorporated the

words Angle and Saxon into their nomenclature, it is difﬁcult to discern any

thoroughgoing consistency in the use of the terms. Indeed, it has recently been

argued that in the seventh century, if they thought of themselves generically,

even those eventually labelled Angli, such as the Northumbrians, regarded

themselves as Saxons, the ethnic nomenclature they had preferred since late

Roman times.

That usage ﬁnds its parallel among the British who, Bede tells

us, also had a word for the English as a single grouping: ‘Germans’, Garmani.

The existence of such collective designations raises the whole issue of the

degree to which the English elites identiﬁed themselves as members of a single

English people, those who in the eighth century came to be known as the

gens Anglorum.Bede, of course, is the most famous exponent of this emerging

Englishness, and as Patrick Wormald has argued, it is essentially the view of

a churchman, who lived in Northumbria but whose world was also focussed

on an archbishop based in Canterbury.

In his History Bede was keen to

Cf. Campbell (1982).

Forrecent discussion see Frazer and Tyrrell (2000).

SeeHamerow, chapter 10 above.

Brooks (1999).

HE v.9.

Wormald (1983).

470 alan thacker

stress the common culture of the English, their shared language and their

religious unity. He was not, however, the ﬁrst to express such sentiments.

As Nicholas Brooks has argued, the story of Gregory the Great’s punning

allusions to the Angli, pagan captives in Rome whose people were to be delivered

from God’s wrath (de ira Dei), related around 700 byaDeiran text, clearly

indicates that educated clerical Deirans could think of themselves as part of a

larger people.

In so doing, like Bede himself, they were following an agenda

probably set by Canterbury. In particular, the promotion of the designation

Angli, which superseded the earlier collective ‘Saxons’, probably reﬂected a

Canterbury preference based on the usage of Pope Gregory himself.

How far such sentiments ever translated into political action is, of course,

quite difﬁcult to determine. As Barbara Yorke has pointed out, Bede himself

neither believed in nor sought to promote a concomitant political unity.

As opportunity offered, the English kingdoms made ruthless war upon one

another, and it is clear, for example, from the case of Penda that they did not

scruple to ally with the British in such encounters.

In any case, new and more

focussed identities were being forged in Britain itself, as the ruling dynasties of

the newly established kingdoms constructed their own past through genealogies

and origin myths. In some cases at least, such as Kent, the construction of such

myths, including the link with southern Scandinavia, goes back at least to

the sixth century, even if it achieved renewed and revised expression in the

eighth.

In East Anglia a new political culture had developed by the later sixth

century, focussed upon a kingship with strong links with Scandinavia.

These

relatively new groupings clearly commanded important loyalties. Bede’s story

of the treatment of the Northumbrian King Oswald’s remains by the monks of

Bardney is revealing here: because he ‘had sprung from another province and

had taken possession of the kingship over them, they pursued him even when

dead with their former hatred’.

Bardney lay in the disputed province of Lindsey, immediately south of the

Humber, an area where there is reason to think that ethnic loyalties may have

been particularly complex. The anonymous Life of Pope Gregory,towhich

we have already referred, tells of the translation of the Northumbrian king

Edwin’s body from Hatﬁeld Chase in Lindsey, where he was killed, to the royal

monastery of Whitby, ruled by women of his kin. The transaction involved a

royal monastery lying well to the north of the Humber, a priest in a monastery

of the ‘southern English’, and a ceorl (maritus) living near Hatﬁeld Chase.

Signiﬁcantly the Whitby author alludes to Edwin as ‘the king of our people,

Brooks (1999), p. 19.

Yorke (2000), pp. 71–6.

HE ii.20; iii.1.

Behr (2000).

J. Hine, in Carver (1992), pp. 315–29;Yorke (1990), p. 61.

‘quia de alia provincia ortus fuerat et super eos regnum acceperat, veteranis eum odiis etiam mortuum

insequebantur’: HE iii.11.

England in the seventh century 471

known as the Humbrians’ (gens nostra quae dicitur Humbrensium);insodoing

he seems to be thinking of the inhabitants of an interlinked world on either

side of the Humber. A river like the Humber was not necessarily a source of

division; it may have connected. When the monks of Bardney rejected Oswald

they may have done so not as a Northumbrian tout court, but as a Bernician,

a member of the dynasty which had destroyed Edwin, who had commanded

trans-Humbrian loyalty – in their province as in his own Deiran kingdom.

The story of Imma, a young Northumbrian nobleman (iuvenis de militia

regis) captured by a Mercian gesith, after the Mercians’ victory at the battle

of Trent (679), suggests that, as we might expect, these new identities were

strongest among the ruling elites.

Bede makes it plain that Imma is afraid

to disclose his noble status lest he be put to death in compensation for the

deaths of his captor’s kinsmen. To escape his fate he asserts that he was a poor

peasant (rusticus pauper) who had brought food to the noble milites of the

Northumbrian army. As such, he could be spared the ultimate penalty. The

implication is an obvious one: the dependent peasant was less identiﬁed with

the gens than a noble warrior. The killing of a Northumbrian rusticus was no

satisfaction for deaths of the kinsmen of a Mercian noble.

The difﬁculty is

where we draw the line. The story of the recovery of Edwin’s body suggests

that a non-noble but free husbandman might feel a sense of involvement with

the gens; that of Imma suggests that the more subordinated peasantry might

not.

Alongside these emerging English identities, focussed on new kingships and

aristocracies, we have to set those who identiﬁed themselves as British or Irish.

ForBede the British lay outside the English kingdoms. They were deﬁned as for

the most part opposing the English through native hatred (odium domesticum),

and were said to be partly their own masters and partly under English rule.

Are we to assume, then, that in general in the English kingdoms (with the

exception, as we have seen, of Wessex) there were few if any who thought

of themselves as British? Bede’s viewpoint is to a degree conﬁrmed by the

archaeological and linguistic invisibility of the British within those kingdoms.

One plausible explanation is that we are looking primarily at the disappearance

of an elite, and that those of modest status who remained had never identiﬁed

very closely with that elite and adapted without difﬁculty to the world of their

new rulers.

Earliest Life of Gregory, cc.12–19.

HE iv.22.

Cf. Higham (1995), pp. 225–6;Moreland (2000), pp. 47–8.

HE v.23.Particularly interesting is Bede’s treatment of the apparently mixed visiting of Oswald’s

death site at Maserfelth, which included one whom he identiﬁes as a Briton. The location of the site

has not been certainly established; probably it was in a liminal, marcher area, where there could be

such a mixing of residents. In any case the Briton was described as a traveller (HE iii.10).

472 alan thacker

It has recently been argued, however, that in Northumbria at least we may

construct a different scenario and that Bede’s hatred of the British may reﬂect

an outlook which is speciﬁcally Northumbrian. There is considerable evidence

not just of Northumbrian military activity against the British but of unusually

bitter hostility between the two peoples. An ingrained hatred seems to lie at the

root of Bede’s gloating account of the Northumbrian Æthelfrith’s slaughter of

hundreds of British monks at Bangor on Dee in 616,orhis intemperate denun-

ciation of Cadwallon of Gwynedd as a savage tyrant and infamous ruler.

The

English conquest of what was to become Northumbria may have entailed par-

ticular violence, involving a ruthless destruction, degradation or driving out

of the resident British. In this scenario, the place-name and other linguis-

tic evidence could be interpreted as suggesting that it was more than simply

an elite among their seventh-century successors who regarded themselves as

English.

The relations between the English and the Irish are much less problem-

atic. In the seventh century the Irish had their own language and some at

least had distinctive religious customs, including the way they were tonsured

and the calculation of the date of Easter. They were clearly present in consid-

erable numbers in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and did not pose a problem.

Bede clearly generally regarded the Irish with affection; for him they were ‘a

harmless people (gens innoxia) always most friendly towards the English nation

(natio Anglorum)’. Although he disapproved of Iona’s idiosyncratic traditions,

he revered the community as the Northumbrians’ mother church and the com-

munity’s conversion to the orthodox Easter is a high-point in his History.

rarely fails to give the Irish their due. A notable exception, his deprecation of

the Irish community at Bosham in Sussex as ‘a very little monastery’ (monas-

teriolum permodicum) which made no impact on the pagan South Saxons, is

perhaps dictated by a desire to emphasise the Northumbrian contribution to

the conversion of that kingdom.

The English and the Franks

The nearest continental neighbour ofthe English,Merovingian France, enjoyed

especially close relations with the kingdoms of the south-east in the earlier sev-

enth century. Before 580 King Æthelberht of Kent had married Bertha, the

daughter of Charibert I, king of Paris (d. 567), who brought with her a Frankish

entourage.

The marriage provides secure evidence that Franks were a highly

visible and accepted element within the highest levels of Kentish society, and

HE i.34; ii.20; iii.1.

Rollason (2003), ch. 3.

Thacker (1996).

Wood (1999), pp. 70–4.