The Miracles and the King

Bede reports several miracles in connection with Aidan, and they must be received as exactly what they are: the testimony of Bede, writing eighty years after the events, as to what he had learned and believed, not facts independently established by this account. The chief miracles are the storm calmed by oil that Aidan gave to a priest setting out by sea (III.15), the church-timber at Bamburgh that would not burn though the town around it was set ablaze, given as the wood against which Aidan died (III.17), and the incorrupt right hand of King Oswald, preserved at Bamburgh, which Bede connects with Aidan’s blessing (III.6). This file gathers these accounts, pins each to its chapter in Bede per METHODOLOGY §3.5, and explains how Bede uses them.

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

How These Accounts Stand in the Record

The methodology of this collection is explicit on the point: hagiographical and miraculous claims are never “verified” as historical fact, but are pinned to their earliest written attestation and reported as what the source attests, with the source named (METHODOLOGY §3.5). For Aidan, the earliest and effectively the only written attestation is Bede, Ecclesiastical History, completed in 731. Everything that follows is therefore reported as Bede’s testimony — what Bede records, from the traditions of Lindisfarne, Bamburgh, and his informants, as having happened. Bede himself often signals that he is passing on what he was told; he names some of his sources and frames the miracles as the report of trustworthy witnesses (HE, Preface; III.15, III.17; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). The Orthodox reader receives these as the Church’s memory of the signs that accompanied a holy man, held in the confidence proper to that memory, without converting them into claims of forensic history.

It is also worth noting why Bede records them at all. For Bede, the miracles are theologically load-bearing in a particular way: they are God’s own vindication of Aidan’s sanctity despite the Easter error (see Bede’s Portrait). Bede reasons, in effect, that a man through whom God works wonders cannot be other than holy, whatever the fault in his reckoning of Easter — and so the miracles become part of his argument that Aidan is to be honoured (HE III.15–17; Mayr-Harting 1991; Ward 1990). The wonders and the “holy despite his error” framing are thus two halves of one move.

The Calmed Storm and the Holy Oil

The first and most fully told of the miracles concerns a sea voyage. Bede relates that a priest named Utta, a man of weight and sincerity, was sent to Kent to bring back Eanflæd, the bride of King Oswiu, and was to return with her by sea. Before he set out, Utta went to Aidan and asked his prayers. Aidan prayed for him, commended him to the Lord, and gave him a flask of holy oil, saying that when they were caught in a storm at sea they should pour the oil upon the waves, and the wind would drop and grant them calm water (HE III.15; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). And so, Bede reports, it fell out: a great tempest arose, the sailors despaired, and at last, remembering the bishop’s words, they poured the oil on the sea — whereupon the waves were stilled, and they completed their voyage in calm (HE III.15; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). Bede adds that Aidan had foreseen the storm by a prophetic spirit, and he names his chain of report, tracing the story back through a most reliable priest of his own church who had it from Utta himself (HE III.15; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). The account is given, that is, with an unusually explicit pedigree — Bede’s way of marking it as well-attested within his own house.

The Unburnt Timber

The second miracle is tied to the royal fortress of Bamburgh and to the manner of Aidan’s death. Bede relates that the pagan Mercian king Penda, ravaging Northumbria, came against Bamburgh and, unable to take the rock-set fortress by storm or siege, tried to burn it: he tore down the villages around, heaped beams, rafters, wattle, and thatch against the landward wall, and set the whole mass alight when the wind was blowing toward the town (HE III.16; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). At that hour Aidan was on his island retreat of Inner Farne, two miles off, and seeing the smoke and flames carried up over the city walls, he is said to have lifted his eyes and hands to heaven and cried with tears, “Lord, see what evil Penda does!” — whereupon the wind at once shifted away from the city and drove the flames back upon those who had kindled them, so that the attackers, struck with fear, abandoned the assault (HE III.16; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). Closely associated with Bamburgh in Bede’s narrative is the timber against which Aidan himself died and which would not burn (see below). These Bamburgh wonders are reported by Bede as the tradition of the place; he gives them as received accounts of God’s protection of the city through the bishop’s prayer (HE III.16–17; Mayr-Harting 1991).

The most famous of the Bamburgh wonders is the post against which Aidan breathed his last. Bede records that Aidan died at Bamburgh, in a tent pitched against the wall of the church, leaning against a wooden buttress or post that shored up the church’s outer wall (HE III.17; Colgrave and Mynors 1969; on the death see Relics and the Cult). Twice afterward, Bede says, the church was burned down — once in a fire that consumed the whole town and village — and twice the flames spared that single post against which the dying bishop had leaned; though everything around it was consumed, the beam stood untouched (HE III.17; Colgrave and Mynors 1969). After the second fire the post was built into the rebuilt church as a relic, and Bede reports that miracles of healing were worked through it: many were cured of their ailments, and splinters cut from the beam and steeped in water healed the sick (HE III.17; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969; pinned to Bede per §3.5). Bede gives all this as the tradition attached to the place, the sign by which the holiness of Aidan was, in his telling, made manifest at the very spot of his death.

The Incorrupt Hand of King Oswald

The third miracle belongs as much to Oswald as to Aidan, and it joins the two in death as the interpreting scene had joined them in life (see Oswald and the Bishop). Bede tells the story of the Easter feast at which King Oswald, moved by the sight of the poor begging in the street, ordered the rich food before him carried out to them and the silver dish on which it lay broken up and shared among them. At this, Aidan, who sat beside the king, seized Oswald’s right hand and exclaimed, “May this hand never grow old” (Numquam inueterescat haec manus) (HE III.6; trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969). And so, Bede reports, it came to pass: after Oswald was killed in battle against Penda (642) and his body dismembered, his right hand and arm were recovered and kept at Bamburgh in a silver casket, where — Bede attests — they remained uncorrupted to his own day, the flesh as fresh as in life, in fulfilment of the bishop’s blessing (HE III.6; Colgrave and Mynors 1969; pinned to Bede per §3.5). The incorrupt hand became one of the relics of the cult of St. Oswald, and Bede presents it as the visible seal of Aidan’s word.

Reading the Miracles

A few observations belong to the methodology rather than to the narrative.

First, the attestation is single and late but internally careful. All these accounts come from Bede, writing c. 731; for the storm miracle he gives an explicit chain of witnesses, and for the Bamburgh and Oswald wonders he reports the living traditions of the places, some of which he presents as continuing “to this day.” This is the strongest kind of attestation the period affords, but it remains the testimony of one author working from oral and local memory eighty years on (see The Thin Record).

Second, the function is theological. Bede deploys the miracles to make a single point: that God Himself vindicated Aidan’s holiness, so that the paschal error cannot be the measure of the man (see Bede’s Portrait and Holiness Across the Divide). The wonders are not detachable curiosities but part of Bede’s argument about how to hold the Easter question.

Third, the Orthodox reception is unembarrassed but disciplined. The Church receives such accounts as the memory of the signs that accompany holiness, and venerates Aidan as a wonderworker in that memory; the present file neither asserts the miracles as established history nor dismisses them, but reports them as Bede’s testimony and pins them to his text, which is exactly what the tradition and the methodology both require (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

References

Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People III.6, III.15–17. Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (The incorrupt hand of Oswald and Aidan’s blessing, III.6; the holy oil given to Utta and the calmed storm, with the chain of witnesses, III.15; Penda’s attempted burning of Bamburgh and the shifting wind, III.16; Aidan’s death against the church post and the timber that would not burn, with the healings through its splinters, III.17.)
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 miracles as Bede’s vindication of Aidan’s sanctity.)
Ward, Benedicta. The Venerable Bede. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1990. (Bede’s theology of miracle and holiness.)