Northumbria and the Ionan Mission

When King Oswald of Northumbria asked Iona for a bishop in or around 635, he was choosing between two Christianities that had already touched his kingdom: the Roman mission from Canterbury, which had baptized his predecessor Edwin and then collapsed, and the Irish Christianity of Iona, which had formed Oswald himself during his years of exile. This file sets the seventh-century Northumbrian scene, traces the failure of the first Roman mission under Paulinus, and follows Oswald from his exile and baptism among the Irish to the victory at Heavenfield that put him on the throne and turned him toward Iona — the decision that brought Aidan to England.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Celtic; apostle of Northumbria)

A Kingdom on the Northern Edge

Seventh-century Northumbria was the great northern Anglo-Saxon kingdom, formed from the union of two earlier realms — Bernicia, reaching up the coast toward the Forth, and Deira, to the south around the Vale of York — under a single, often contested, royal house. It was a frontier power, pressing against the British kingdoms of the north and west and against the still-pagan Mercians to the south, and its kings rose and fell by the sword. Into this world Christianity came late and insecurely. Bede, writing his Ecclesiastical History at Wearmouth-Jarrow in 731, makes the conversion of Northumbria one of the central dramas of his book, and it is from him that nearly the whole story must be drawn (Bede, Ecclesiastical History [hereafter HE] II.9–20, III.1–6; ed. Colgrave and Mynors 1969).

The first Christianity to reach the Northumbrian throne came from the south, from the Roman mission that Pope Gregory the Great had sent to Kent in 597 under Augustine of Canterbury (on which see St. Gregory the Dialogist). When the Deiran king Edwin married the Christian Kentish princess Æthelburh, a Roman missionary bishop, Paulinus, came north with her, and after Edwin’s conversion — which Bede stages as a great deliberation in the royal council — Paulinus baptized the king and many of his people at York in 627 (HE II.13–14; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). For a few years it seemed that Northumbria would be a Roman Christian kingdom on the Kentish model.

The Collapse of the First Mission

It did not hold. In 633 Edwin was defeated and killed at the battle of Hatfield Chase by an alliance of the pagan Mercian king Penda and the British (and nominally Christian) king Cadwallon of Gwynedd, and Northumbria fell apart into a year of slaughter and apostasy that Bede recalls with horror (HE II.20; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). Paulinus, judging the mission untenable, fled south by sea with Queen Æthelburh, taking the surviving Roman clergy back to Kent; he ended his days as bishop of Rochester (HE II.20). The Roman mission to Northumbria had, in effect, failed: it left behind the deacon James, who held on near Catterick, but no working episcopate and no king to protect it (HE II.16, II.20).

Bede’s verdict on this first conversion is severe and revealing. He suspected that Edwin’s people had been Christian more in form than in conviction, and that the swift collapse exposed a faith that had never gone deep (HE II.20; cf. Mayr-Harting 1991). It is against this background of a Roman mission that had come from above, through a king’s marriage and a king’s policy, and had evaporated when the king fell, that the second and more durable conversion of Northumbria must be read — for it would come from a different source, by a different method, and would prove far harder to dislodge.

Oswald in Exile

The man who would bring it was Oswald, a prince of the Bernician royal house. When his father Æthelfrith was killed and Edwin seized the throne (c. 616), the young Oswald and his brothers fled into exile among the Irish-speaking peoples of the north — the kingdom of Dál Riata, which straddled the sea between northeastern Ireland and western Scotland, and within whose orbit lay the island monastery of Iona, founded by Columba in 563 (on which see St. Columba of Iona). There, Bede tells us, Oswald and his companions “received the sacrament of baptism” and were instructed in the faith during the long years of their exile (HE III.1–2; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). The crucial fact for everything that follows is that the Christianity Oswald received was not the Roman Christianity of Canterbury but the Irish Christianity of Iona — a monastic, ascetic, Columban tradition with its own customs, including its own reckoning of Easter.

The length and exact circumstances of Oswald’s exile are not recorded in detail, and the chronology of his early life is reconstructed rather than securely dated [Disputed: the precise span of Oswald's exile and the year of his baptism are not given by Bede and are estimated from the regnal chronology; modern reconstructions place the exile c. 616–633/634 (Stancliffe, in *Oswald*, 1995; Mayr-Harting 1991), but the figures are inferential]. What Bede makes unmistakable is the formative result: Oswald returned to Northumbria a convinced Christian of the Ionan school, who would seek his church from Iona and not from Kent.

Heavenfield

In 634 Oswald returned to claim his inheritance and met Cadwallon — the British king who had devastated Northumbria after Edwin’s death — in battle at a place near Hexham that Bede calls Hefenfelth, “Heavenfield” (HE III.1–2; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). Bede’s account of the eve of the battle is one of the set-pieces of his history: Oswald, he says, set up a great wooden cross, held it upright with his own hands while the soldiers packed earth around its base, and then called his whole army to kneel and pray to the living God for deliverance (HE III.2; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). In the battle that followed, Cadwallon was killed and his army destroyed, and Oswald took the Northumbrian throne. Bede reports that the cross of Heavenfield became a place of pilgrimage and healing, with miracles attributed to splinters cut from it — a claim he gives as the local tradition of the monks of Hexham, not as his own independent finding (HE III.2; pinned to Bede per METHODOLOGY §3.5).

For our purposes the theological meaning Bede attaches to Heavenfield matters as much as the event. He presents Oswald’s victory as won under the sign of the cross by a king who had learned his faith in exile, and he makes Heavenfield the threshold of the true conversion of Northumbria — the conversion that would now be carried out not by Canterbury but by the church Oswald had come to love (HE III.2–3; Mayr-Harting 1991).

The Turn to Iona

With the kingdom secured, Oswald acted at once on his formation. Bede records the decision plainly: the king, “wishing that all his people should receive the Christian faith,” sent to the elders of the Irish (maiores natu Scottorum) — that is, to Iona and its community — “asking that they would send him a bishop by whose teaching and ministry the English people over whom he ruled might learn the privileges of faith in the Lord and receive the sacraments” (HE III.3; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). The request is the hinge of the whole story. A Northumbrian king, restored to a kingdom that had once been baptized by a Roman bishop, deliberately bypassed Canterbury and turned to the Irish island that had made him a Christian. From that request would come Aidan, the see of Lindisfarne, and the Ionan refounding of the Northumbrian church.

It is worth marking how different this second mission was in kind from the first. Paulinus had come north as the chaplain of a royal marriage and the agent of a southern, papal initiative; his Christianity was attached to a king and fell with him. The mission Oswald now summoned came from a monastic community at the king’s own request, was rooted from the start in a monastery (Lindisfarne) rather than a metropolitan see, and was carried by men whose method — as the next files will show — was itinerant, ascetic, and pastoral rather than diplomatic (Mayr-Harting 1991; Stancliffe 1995). The Roman mission had tried to convert Northumbria from the throne down; the Ionan mission would convert it from the road up. That contrast — drawn, it must be said, largely by Bede, who admired the Irish method even as he faulted their Easter — is the frame within which Aidan’s whole work is to be understood (see The Mission on Foot; on Bede’s double judgment, Bede’s Portrait).

What Can Be Said

Stripped to what the evidence will bear, the foundation is this: Northumbria had been touched by a Roman Christianity that did not survive the death of its royal patron; its next king had been formed in the Irish Christianity of Iona during exile; and on regaining his throne he asked Iona, not Canterbury, for a bishop. Every link in that chain rests on Bede, and Bede is writing nearly a century later from a house committed to the Roman Easter — yet his account of the turn to Iona runs against his own ecclesiastical sympathies, which is one reason to trust its main lines even where the dates are soft (on Bede as source, see Bede’s Ecclesiastical History). The bishop Iona sent in answer to Oswald’s request was Aidan — but, as Bede tells it, not the first man they tried (see The Sending from Iona).

References

Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People II.9–20, III.1–3. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (Edwin and Paulinus, II.9–14; the collapse after Hatfield Chase, II.20; Oswald’s exile and baptism among the Irish, III.1–2; Heavenfield, III.2; the request to Iona, III.3.)
Bede. The Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Trans. Judith McClure and Roger Collins. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Mayr-Harting, Henry. The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England. 3rd ed. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. (The Roman and Irish missions to Northumbria; the contrast of method.)
Stancliffe, Clare, and Eric Cambridge, eds. Oswald: Northumbrian King to European Saint. Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1995. (Oswald’s exile, baptism, and the chronology of his early life.)
Higham, N. J. The Convert Kings: Power and Religious Affiliation in Early Anglo-Saxon England. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997.