Fouracre P. The New Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 1: c. 500-c. 700
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England in the seventh century 473
it has even been suggested that it was an expression of Merovingian over-
lordship.
56
Æthelberht’s son Eadbald also married a Frank, Emma, plausibly
identified in a late source as the daughter of the princely family of Erchinoald,
mayor of the palace of the kings of Neustria. Thereafter several members of
the Kentish royal family bore names closely related to or the same as their
Neustrian cousins, including Eadbald’s son King Earconberht (640–664), and
his granddaughter, Earcongota, who died in a Frankish nunnery.
57
By the mid-seventh century East Anglia, under King Anna, whose daugh-
ter had married Earconberht, was also included in this web of relation-
ships. Erchinoald not only patronised Irishmen coming from East Anglia,
he was probably also instrumental in bringing his half Kentish, half East
Anglian kinswoman Earcongota and her East Anglian relatives to the impor-
tant Neustrian monastery of Faremoutier-en-Brie. In this he was apparently
aided by his former slave, the Neustrian queen Balthild, probably herself of
East Anglian origin.
58
Anglo-Frankish links went far beyond these princely interchanges. Frankish
coins and items of dress and ornament are to be found at many high-status
sites in Kent and elsewhere in the south-east. We know too that in the middle
and later seventh century high-ranking Northumbrian ecclesiastics including
Benedict Biscop and Wilfrid went first to Kent and thence to Francia and
Rome to seek builders, books and the necessities of Christian worship.
59
The
Northumbrian bishop Wilfrid sought consecration in France and modelled
his episcopal style on that of Frankish peers.
60
Despite problems of commu-
nication, Frankish bishops officiated in Wessex and played a leading role in
the Northumbrian synod which ruled definitively on matters of ecclesiastical
discipline in 664.
61
In the 630s East Anglia, whose king Sigiberht had been in
exile in Gaul during Redwald’s reign, received the Christian faith through the
ministry of a Burgundian, Felix, founding bishop of the see of Dunwich.
62
At these high levels, then, England, Ireland and France formed in many
ways an interconnected world. Bishop Agilbert, for example, arrived in Wessex
in the mid-seventh century after a long period of study in Ireland. Wilfrid was
especially well connected. In the 650shewas allegedly offered the see of Lyons
and in 676 he brokered the return of the exiled Dagobert II from Ireland to
the Frankish kingdom of Austrasia, a role apparently of sufficient prominence
to earn him the homicidal enmity of the king’s opponent, the Neustrian maior
Ebroin.
63
There was much coming and going at a high level between all these
56
I. Wood, in Carver (1998), pp. 235–41.
57
Wood (1994), p. 177.
58
Fouracre and Gerberding (1996), pp. 97–114; Thacker (2002), pp. 58–9.
59
Bede, Opera Historica i, ed. Plummer, pp. 364–404.
60
Vita Wilfridi c.12.; HE iii.28.
61
HE iii.7, 18.
62
HE iii.15; Campbell (1986), pp. 49–84.
63
Vita Wilfridi c.28;Wood (1994), pp. 231–2.
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474 alan thacker
societies, and in the church at least foreign origin and speech were clearly no
bar to the highest office.
kings and kingship
Kingship was the key institution in sixth- and seventh-century English politics:
‘Peoples did not produce kings’, as Edward James has remarked, ‘kings pro-
duced peoples’.
64
Anglo-Saxon kingship in its seventh-century form was prob-
ably quite a recent development. The dominant royal families seem largely to
have emerged in the later sixth century. It is then, for example, that a rich
and distinctive ruling class is first evident in East Anglia, buried under the
opulently furnished barrows of which the most celebrated example was the
early seventh-century mound at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, with its outstanding
jewellery, silver, armour and weapons.
65
It is the early seventh century too that
sees the building of the great wooden complex at Yeavering in Northumbria
with its succession of enormous halls, the greatest able to accommodate over
300 people, and its strange rostrum, like the segment of an amphitheatre, prob-
ably designed for public assemblies.
66
Such discoveries indicate rulers with con-
siderable wealth and aspiration and with international contacts. Sutton Hoo in
particular suggests a figure who could stand comparison with his Merovingian
contemporaries, possessed of highly sophisticated gold and garnet buckles,
clasps and purse-mounts, an exotic ceremonial whetstone or sceptre, a splen-
did helmet modelled on Roman parade armour, silver from the Roman East
and gold coins from Francia. Inevitably these indications of grandeur have been
read in the light of Bede’s narrative, and associated with the bretwaldas Edwin
and Rædwald. At the very least, such evidence shows that seventh-century Eng-
land contained rulers who sought to appropriate elements of Romanitas and
whose lives had a public dimension ‘that was to a degree ceremonious’.
67
Although by the later eighth century English kings were laying claim to
genealogies which established them as continental god-descended royalty, those
descents cannot be shown to contain historical figures before the sixth.
68
The
written record was presumably the final stage in a process of constructing origin
myths that began in the later sixth or early seventh century. Despite the inclu-
sion of Woden and other heathen gods in the genealogies, it is now generally
thought that they were the fabrications of Christian authors, using the pagan
past to confer prestige on their by then Christian royal patrons.
69
Recently,
64
James (1989), p. 47.For Anglo-Saxon kingship in the wider context, see Wormald, chapter 21 below.
65
Bruce-Mitford (1975–83).
66
Hope-Taylor (1977).
67
Campbell (1982), p. 58;Filmer-Sankey (1996).
68
Dumville (1976); Sisam (1953).
69
See now esp.North (1997), pp. 111–17.
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England in the seventh century 475
however, Charlotte Behr has argued that this may be too narrow and sceptical
a view. Using place-name evidence and the iconography of gold bracteates or
pendants discovered in a number of high-status, mainly female, graves in Kent
she has established that there was a cult of Woden in sixth-century England.
The occurrence of graves containing these bracteates at significant, probably
royal, estate centres has analogies in southern Scandinavia and, she suggests,
indicates that ‘the kings of the migration period attempted to connect their
ideals with the gods, especially the king of the gods, Woden, and to claim divine
descent’.
70
Kingship in seventh-century England was a fluid institution, and
kings were perhaps evolving new claims to special status, in contributing to
which pagan and Christian ideologies could interact.
71
A key problem is the matter of royal status. It is possible that, like Ireland,
England was full of kings, that every tribal grouping had its own native ruling
dynasty with attributes of regality. In the seventh century sources, however,
royal status is ascribed to a relatively restricted and interrelated group of fami-
lies, equipped with a genealogy of the kind that has just been described, such
as the Woden-descended Oiscingas of Kent or the Wuffingas of East Anglia.
72
Clearly, however, there were many families of lesser standing – those, for exam-
ple, whose members appear in the sources as reguli, duces regii or principes –
who were in some sense royal.
73
There are indications that some at least of these
lesser royal figures either descended from or claimed to descend from one of
the principal royal houses. The kings of Wight, for example, may have been
related to the kings of Kent;
74
the names of the kings of the Hwicce suggest that
they may have derived from members of the Northumbrian royal house estab-
lished there by Oswiu in the 650s after his temporary conquest of Mercia.
75
It is clear that there were ambiguities in royal status, degrees of kingship. One
explanation, already discussed, might be that dynasties formerly independent
had been degraded but still retained pretensions to regality. Another, more
evident in the sources, is that, as with the Merovingians, kingliness inhered in
all male members of a royal clan.
76
That would explain the instances of multiple
kingship in Wessex and Essex already discussed.
77
In such circumstances one
ruler might, so to speak, be the ‘main’ king, other members of his family
holding specially created subkingdoms or high-ranking official positions by
virtue of their kingliness. Although Penda made his son Peada king of the
Middle Angles, Bede could still also allude to the latter as princeps.
78
In Wessex
70
Behr (2000).
71
See further on the church and the role of kings, pp. 484–5.
72
Dumville (1976).
73
Campbell (1979); Thacker (1981).
74
Yorke (1989).
75
Finberg (1972); Pretty (1989), p. 176.But cf. Bassett (1989b), p. 6;Sims-Williams (1990), pp. 16–53.
76
Halsall, unpublished paper, 1997.
77
Wood (1977), pp. 17–23;Yorke (1990), pp. 52–7, 142–6, and (1995), pp. 79–84.
78
Campbell (1979).
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476 alan thacker
the ealdormen of King Ine’s laws, who in some sense were clearly officials, are
probably to be equated with reges or subreguli of the royal clan.
Royal government
What did seventh-century English kings do and what was the nature of their
power?Aboveall they werewar-leaders. On theircharisma andpersonal prowess
depended the survival of the newly constructed gentes that they embodied. Bede
himself, ever prone to emphasise the virtues of the monastery, was well aware of
this. The Northumbrian Oswald (634–642), his ideal king, is admired for his
war-like virtue, his pugnacity in defending his people from attack and indeed
in extending their power. A monk-king like Sigiberht of East Anglia (630/1–
early 640s?) is extolled for his personal piety, but is not held up by Bede as a
model of specifically kingly virtue.
79
The dynamics of power in this world, as
James Campbell has persuasively argued, are well illustrated by the celebrated
poem Beowulf,even though the date of the poem remains uncertain. The king
lives surrounded by his company of personal retainers, who are expected to
be ready to die for him and whose loyalty is ensured and enriched by gifts of
treasure in the form of gold and fine weapons. It is an unstable world that can
only end in defeat and death, since the seizure of treasure, essential to success,
is bound to build up enemies driven by the ideals of the bloodfeud.
80
All this, as Campbell eloquently points out, finds its echoes in the treasure of
Sutton Hoo, the great halls of Yeavering and the violent deaths of so many suc-
cessful seventh-century English kings. There was, however, another and more
public side to this highly personalised world. While military activity probably
depended in the first instance on royal companions (comites, gesithas), who,
if young, lived in the king’s presence at court, it undoubtedly also involved
older more settled men who might be summoned to serve from their estates.
Beyond this lay a wider obligation on the part of the free to obey the summons
to fight beside the king. In the laws of Ine, for example, heavy penalties were
laid down for neglect of military service by the noble (gesithcund man) hold-
ing land, by the unlanded noble and by the non-noble free man, the ceorl.
81
This ruling must relate to the celebrated threefold obligations referred to in
the early charters, of military service, fortification and bridge-building, which
presumably provided the means to realise the large-scale frontier earthworks
dating from this period, such as the East Wansdyke.
82
The king also had a public role at the apex of quite complex governmental
institutions. He was expected to consult his ealdormen and ‘other distinguished
79
HE iii.18;Wallace-Hadrill (1971), esp. pp. 72–97.
80
Campbell (1982), pp. 53–6.
81
Laws of Ine 51.
82
Cunliffe (1993).
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England in the seventh century 477
councillors’ (gethundene witan).
83
His territory was organised into administra-
tive units, such as the Kentish lathe or the West Saxon shire (scir), governed by
an official, an ealdorman, who might well be a relative but whose appointment
was revocable, not hereditary. Such units have been characterised as ‘small
regions’ and are perhaps exemplified by some of the lesser units of the Tribal
Hidage as well as by the early shires mentioned in the West Saxon laws.
84
Through them the king could operate an elaborately organised and standard-
ised system of assessment, valued in hides (a unit representing sufficient land
to support a single free household), arrangements which can be regarded as
‘landscapes of obligation rather than ownership’.
85
The royal adminstration
was focussed on centres, often at or near important Roman and pre-Roman
sites, at which recognised authorities received tribute in the form of rent or
goods and services and where the disputes were settled and social or religious
events involving the whole area took place.
86
The economic foundation of royal authority in seventh-century England was
the king’s ability to exact tribute in the form of a food render (feorm)fromall
those holding or working the land within his kingdom. Some indication of the
substantial and highly organised nature of these dues is obtained from the laws
of the seventh-century West Saxon king, Ine (688–726): every ten hides of land
owed annually ten vats of honey, three hundred loaves, twelve ambers of Welsh
ale, thirty ambers of clear ale, two full-grown cows or ten wethers, ten geese,
twenty hens, ten cheeses, a full amber of butter, five salmon, twenty pounds
(in weight) of fodder and a hundred eels.
87
Such renders were collected at royal
estate centres, around which the king journeyed with his retinue, either con-
suming the royal dues in kind or receiving their equivalents in commuted form.
Seventh-century English kings were thus generally peripatetic.
88
Although a
powerful king such as Edwin of Northumbria might establish grand structures
such as his great wooden complex at Yeavering, in general rulers did not have
a single capital. Even a complex as palatial as Yeavering seems to have had a
relatively short life, and with the death of Edwin to have been abandoned for
a nearby site after no more than perhaps fifty years.
89
Lawmaking and the administration of justice
Kings played an important role in the administration of justice and in dispute
settlement. They were, for example, undoubtedly involved in the making of
83
Laws of Ine 6.2.Cf.the ieldestan witan of the preface. On consent see Wood (1977), pp. 4–29.
84
E.g. Laws of Ine 36.
85
Faith (1997), p. 10, quoting J. Bossy.
86
Forarecent assessment of the subject see Faith (1997), esp. pp. 8–11.
87
Laws of Ine 70.1.
88
Stenton (1971), pp. 286–9; Charles-Edwards (1976); Campbell (1979); Yorke (1990), pp. 162–7.
89
HE ii.14;Hope-Taylor (1977).
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478 alan thacker
law. In a famous passage Bede records that after his adoption of the Christian
faith, King Æthelberht of Kent (d. 616)‘thoughtfully established ...enacted
judgements’ for his people.
90
These dooms (domas) that Æthelberht put in
writing for the first time were almost certainly not innovatory but derived from
established custom (
þæw), to the determination of which (as Bede makes clear)
Æthelberht’s advisers, his sapientes, also contributed.
91
Æthelberht’s pioneering
code was followed in Kent by those of his immediate successor Hlothere (673–
685) and of Wihtred (690–725), the prefaces to which make it plain that
they were an extension of customary law. The nature of the process is defined
especially clearly in Wihtred’s code, in which the king is characterised as adding
to the legal usages of the people of Kent decrees that had been drawn up by
the notables (eadigan) with the consent of all.
92
The purpose of these early laws has been much discussed. If they are impor-
tant indicators of Romanitas,why are they written in English? What is the
basis of the selection of what can only have been a representative sample of the
customary judgements and penalties? Clearly they may have been intended
to amend existing law; the church in particular had an obvious interest in
ensuring that its newly won position was properly enshrined in the native law
and custom. Æthelberht’s code is well organised. It opens – significantly –
with rulings protecting the church, and then moves on to similar groupings
relating to kings, earls, ceorls, enclosures, injury, women and slaves.
93
It is
highly unlikely that all this matter represented amendment or innovation.
Patrick Wormald has recently and convincingly suggested that these subjects
were selected primarily because they were subjects upon which Frankish leg-
islators had pronounced. In other words, the committing of laws to writing
was a function of kingship and good government as displayed in Kent’s nearest
and most powerful Christian neighbour, and the subject matter was configured
accordingly.
94
By the late seventh century the Kentish example had been followed in at
least one other kingdom, the Wessex of Ine (688–726).
95
Ine’s law-code is less
well organised than those of his Kentish predecessors and does not look so
preplanned. As Wormald points out, his rulings often give the impression that
they are responses to individual cases. The code consists of an original core
added to successively, perhaps over many years. Presumably, therefore, making
law and causing it to be written down had by then become ‘part of the king’s
job’.
96
Although Ine acknowledges the role of his advisers, his ealdormen, and
makes explicit the contribution of the church in the persons of his bishops
90
HE ii.5,astranslated by Wormald (1999), p. 29.
91
Wormald (1999), pp. 94–6.
92
Laws of Wihtred,preface.
93
Laws of Wihtred;Wormald (1999), p. 96.
94
Wormald (1999), pp. 100–1; also Wormald, chapter 21 below.
95
Laws of Ine;Wormald (1999), pp. 103–6.
96
Wormald (1999), pp. 104–5.
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England in the seventh century 479
Hædde (of Winchester) and Earconwald (of London, d. 694), there are signs
that the royal grip over law-making had intensified.
97
By contrast with the
Kentish kings, Ine issued his laws as his personal commands, expressly to ensure
that no official or subject should pervert them. His preface assumes that all law –
both existing and newly codified – was his business.
98
This had important
practical effects. Above all, for many offences those responsible were obliged to
pay a fine (wite)tothe king.
99
The ultimate sanction to exact recompense for
wrongdoing was of course the feud, which rested with the kin. The tariffs of
blood-prices, laid down by the laws, were intended as a substitute to guide the
parties to settlement. They do not envisage that royal officers will intervene in
such transactions. Nevertheless, the king still had a major role. Besides cases
involving men in his service, to him fell the ‘marginal cases’, those involving
the kinless or the foreigner or the merchant. Although it is clear that private
individuals also had a financial interest in justice, the lion’s share of the profit
went to the king. By the late seventh century English rulers had learned from
Roman example to generate income as well as to derive status from their role
in making law.
100
the impact of the church
Introduction: narrative of events
There were already Christians at the court of King Æthelberht when in the
590s, after his encounter with Anglian slave boys in Rome, Pope Gregory
the Great conceived his project for the conversion of England. Æthelberht had
married Bertha, daughter of the Merovingian king Charibert, who had brought
with her from Tours a bishop, Liudhard, and established Christian worship in
Æthelberht’s capital, Canterbury, in a British church dedicated to St Martin,
the celebrated confessor-bishop of Tours.
101
The Italian monk Augustine and an
initial band of missionaries were sent from Rome in 596 and the Gallic bishops
of Arles, Toursand Marseilleswere asked to assist them en route with necessaries,
including interpreters.
102
The missionaries arrived at Thanet in eastern Kent
in 597,preached before Æthelberht and his gesiths and were invited to establish
themselves in Canterbury. By 598 the pope could claim that 10,000 English
had been converted. Whether at that stage the king himself was included
in their number is uncertain, but he had certainly been baptised before his
death in 616.In597 or 598 Augustine was consecrated bishop, probably by the
97
Laws of the Earliest English Kings,p.36;Wormald (1999), p. 104.
98
Laws of the Earliest English Kings,p.36.
99
E.g. Laws of Ine 3.1–2, 6.2–5, 7, 9, 10, 13, 14, etc.
100
Laws of Ine 23, 50; Campbell (1982), pp. 98–9;Wormald (1999), p. 105.
101
Wood (1999).
102
HE i.23–33;Mayr-Harting (1991).
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480 alan thacker
Gaulish metropolitan, the bishop of Arles.
103
A second band of missionaries,
led by the monks and priests Mellitus, Justus and Paulinus, was sent out from
Rome in 601, with all that was necessary for the ministry of the new church,
including liturgical vessels and and relics. At the same time Gregory announced
his plan for its organisation. Augustine was to receive the pallium as a sign of
his authority as metropolitan. He was to set up his see in London and to
consecrate twelve suffragan bishops for the south. A second metropolitical see,
to be fully independent of London after Augustine’s death and with another
twelve suffragans, was to be established for the north, in York.
104
Although this
plan was never fully implemented and indeed was probably never practical,
in the short term the mission achieved some striking successes. Following the
example of Rome itself, Augustine founded a cathedral church in Canterbury,
dedicated to the Holy Saviour, and an extramural burial church, dedicated to
Saints Peter and Paul. He consecrated Mellitus and Justus as his first suffragan
bishops, the former for the East Saxons, the latter for western Kent. The East
Saxon king, Æthelberht’s nephew, quickly followed the example of his overlord,
and in 604 Æthelberht established a see at London.
After the death of their protector, Æthelberht, in 616 and of his nephew
Sæberht of Essex shortly afterwards, there was a reaction against the new reli-
gion. Æthelberht and Saeberht’s successors were pagans and Mellitus and Justus
fled from their sees to Gaul. In Kent the reaction was short-lived, but Essex
was to remain without a bishop until the 650s.
105
Meanwhile, the missionaries
had scored a notable success, in the conversion of the bretwalda,Edwin of
Northumbria, after his marriage to Æthelberht’s daughter Æthelburh in 625.
Bede depicts the king as taking this decisive step after consultation with his
chief councillors and ealdormen, and gives a dramatic account of the apostasy
of the pagan priest Coifi, who personally profaned and burned the precinct and
idols of the important shrine of Goodmanham. In 627 the king was baptised at
York with his sons, his nobles and many of the common people. Further mass
conversions took place in Bernicia while the king was residing at his palace of
Yeavering, and in Lindsey at Lincoln. Paulinus himself was consecrated bishop
of York by Augustine’s third successor, Justus. These successes were short-lived.
With Edwin’s destruction at Hatfield in 633, the Northumbrian kingdom fell
apart and its rulers apostasised. When their successor, the Christian Oswald,
re-established the church in Northumbria, he looked not to Canterbury, but
to the Dalriadic Irish monastery of Iona where he had himself been a refugee
during the reign of Edwin.
106
103
It is uncertain whether he was consecrated on his initial journey through Gaul, as Bede thought,
or on a later visit (HE i.27).
104
HE i.29.
105
HE ii.2–8.
106
HE ii.9–20; iii.1–3.
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England in the seventh century 481
The collapse of the Roman mission in Northumbria concludes the first
phase of the English conversion. In the middle decades of the century the
initiative lay with the Ionan monks. That mission, led by the Irishman Aidan,
established itself not in Deiran York but in Bernician Lindisfarne and is
the subject of some of the most famous chapters in Bede’s History.
107
Bede
idealised the community of Lindisfarne, depicting it as a model monastery
along the lines recommended by Gregory the Great. Its priests and clergy, he
asserted, lived and dressed simply and, fired with evangelical zeal, travelled out
into the surrounding country to preach the word to the common people.
108
Under Aidan and his successors, a strongly monastically based Christianity
was firmly established in Northumbria and with the aid of the Northum-
brian bretwaldas was also introduced into Wessex in the 640s and Mercia
and Essex in the 650s. When the great plague swept through England in the
660s, taking with it bishops Deusdedit of Canterbury and Tuda of Northum-
bria, the effective jurisdiction of the former was probably largely confined to
Kent.
109
The fracture in missionary activity introduced by Paulinus’ expulsion from
Northumbria brought with it problems of church discipline and observance.
The Ionan missionaries followed distinctive Irish customs in certain matters
of appearance, such as the form of tonsure, and, most importantly, in the
calculation of the date of Easter. As a consequence, they did not necessarily
celebrate the principal feast of the church at the same time as the heirs of the
Roman mission in Kent, a particular problem for the Northumbrian court,
which during the reign of Oswiu (655–670) had a Kentish queen who followed
Roman custom. These issues, of importance to contemporaries, but of especial
significance for Bede as an accomplished computist and exegete,
110
were settled
in 664 at the Synod of Whitby. At that famous meeting, convened and presided
over by King Oswiu, Bishop Agilbert and his prot
´
eg
´
eWilfrid represented
the pro-Roman party and Bishop Colman of Lindisfarne and Abbess Hild
of Whitby spoke for the Ionan observance. Oswiu gave his support to the
Roman party, and the defeated Colman left Northumbria with the dissentients
among his monks. The victor, the pugnaciously pro-Roman Wilfrid, gained
the Northumbrian see, after the death of Tuda, Colman’s successor, in the same
year. His appointment, however, was controversial, and during his prolonged
absence in Gaul, whither he had gone to seek consecration, Ceadda (Chad),
who had been trained at Lindisfarne but accepted the ruling of Whitby, was
intruded into the see. After Wilfrid’s return c.665, the situation remained
unresolved for several years.
107
HE iii.3, 5–7, 14–17.
108
HE iii.26.Cf. Bede, Vita Cuthberti.
109
HE iii.21–4, 27; iv.1.
110
Bede, Opera de Temporibus, ed. Wallis (1999).
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482 alan thacker
A third phase in the spread of Christianity among the English was inau-
gurated in 669, when, after the death in Rome of the English bishop-elect of
Canterbury, the pope nominated an elderly Greek-speaking monk, Theodore
of Tarsus, as his successor. The unlikely appointment was a notable suc-
cess. Theodore energised the failing church of Canterbury, and reshaped
its metropolitical status along the lines of his native church. By 679 he no
longer styled himself metropolitan bishop of Canterbury, but adopted instead
the title archbishop of Britain. At the same time, he promoted the cult of
Gregory the Great as apostle of the English, in conjunction with the monastery
of Whitby, burial place of Paulinus’ patron Edwin. Paradoxically, therefore,
Theodore enlisted Gregory’s prestige to subvert the pope’s plan for two inde-
pendent metropolitans in favour of, so to speak, an autocephalous church of
the gens Anglorum as a whole, under a single head. He used his authority to
introduce another major change: he sought to divide up the very large English
sees, hitherto organised on the principle of one, or at most two, bishops for
each major kingdom or province. This policy was facilitated by the fact that
after the plague there were only two bishops with unimpeachable credentials in
all the English kingdoms.
111
It brought Theodore, however, into conflict with
Wilfrid, whose appointment to the great Northumbrian see he had confirmed
on his arrival in England.
Wilfrid, apart from Theodore himself, was the most influential churchman
of his day. Patron of the arts, friend of kings, founder of a family of monasteries
spreading from Bernicia in the north to Mercia (and ultimately to Sussex) in the
south, he was wedded to notions of episcopal grandeur formed from his early
visits to Gaul. As bishop of York, which he made the seat of the Northumbrian
diocese, in the 670shewas at the apogee of his career, the friend of Ecgfrith’s
queen Æthelthryth with whose support he established the great monastery of
Hexham. In 678,however, after quarrelling with Ecgfrith, he was expelled from
Northumbria, and Theodore seized the opportunity to divide his diocese into
three. Wilfrid forcefully resisted the move, and journeyed in person to Rome
to seek papal support in overturning it. On his return, after a brief period of
imprisonment, he went south to work on the conversion of the still pagan
kingdoms of Sussex and the Isle of Wight, where he became involved in the
West Saxon Cædwalla’s violent conquest. With the death of Ecgfrith Theodore
determined to make peace, invoking the aid of the Mercian King Æthelred and
Ecgfrith’s sister Ælfflæd of Whitby. Accommodation was finally reached with
Ecgfrith’s successor Aldfrith in 686 and Wilfrid was restored to a curtailed see
of York. He continued, nevertheless, to work for the restoration of his see, and
in 690 was again expelled from Northumbria, taking refuge with Æthelred of
111
HE iv, cc.1–2, 5–6, 17; Thacker (1998).