07 — Iona and the Conversion of Northumbria

A generation after Columba’s death, his island monastery became the spiritual mother of English Christianity. When King Oswald of Northumbria — baptized among the Irish during his exile — regained his throne after the battle of Heavenfield (634), he sent to Iona for a bishop; Iona sent Aidan, who founded Lindisfarne (635) as a daughter-house on the Northumbrian coast and evangelized the English in the Ionan manner. With the mission came the Columban customs — the Celtic Easter reckoning and the Celtic tonsure — and with them the tension that came to a head at the Synod of Whitby (664), where King Oswiu decided for the Roman Easter and Colmán of Lindisfarne withdrew with his monks to Iona and Ireland.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Celtic; apostle to the Picts)

This section follows Columba’s legacy across the sea into England. Columba himself never preached to the English; his mission, recounted earlier in this collection, was to the Picts of the north (see The Vita Columbae). But the monastic familia he founded outlived him by centuries, and within forty years of his repose its monks were carrying the faith to the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria — not from Rome by way of Canterbury, where Augustine’s mission had landed in 597, the very year Columba died, but from the Hebrides by way of Iona. For a generation the English north was Christianized by Irish and Iona-trained monks working out of Lindisfarne, and the Northumbrian church bore the stamp of Iona in its discipline, its monasticism, and its calendar.

That stamp is also what brought the controversy. The Ionan mission carried with it the customs the community had received from its fathers — most visibly the older reckoning of Easter that Iona retained after most of the West had moved on, and the distinctive ear-to-ear tonsure of the Celtic monks. In Northumbria the Ionan and the Roman observances came to coexist within a single kingdom and even a single royal household, so that the king and queen could be keeping Easter on different Sundays. The Synod of Whitby in 664 resolved the calendrical question for Northumbria in favour of Rome; Iona itself held to its older Easter for another half-century, conforming only in 716.

Our knowledge of all this comes overwhelmingly from one source written from the Roman side — Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica — and the section is at pains to read him carefully. Bede is firmly committed to the Roman Easter and tells the story as the triumph of catholic uniformity over a well-meant provincial error; yet he also reveres Aidan and the Ionan saints, praising their holiness even as he laments their calendar. The two files below treat, first, how the mission reached Northumbria, and second, the disciplinary dispute over Easter and tonsure and its resolution at Whitby — handled, per the methodology, as a difference of custom within the one pre-Schism Church and not as a quarrel of orthodoxy against heresy (METHODOLOGY §4).

Files in This Section

File	Description
The Seed of Lindisfarne	King Oswald’s exile and baptism among the Irish; his victory at Heavenfield (634) and his request to Iona for a bishop; the first, harsher monk who failed and the sending of Aidan; the founding of Lindisfarne (635) as a daughter-house of Iona; Aidan’s gentleness and the Ionan evangelization of the English (Bede, HE 3.3, 3.5). Iona as the spiritual mother of Northumbrian Christianity.
The Columban Tradition and Whitby	The Columban liturgical peculiarities — the Celtic (84-year latercus) Easter and the ear-to-ear tonsure — set beside the Roman practice; the coexistence and tension in Northumbria (Oswiu keeping the Ionan Easter, Eanflæd the Roman); the Synod of Whitby (664), Colmán’s defence of the Columban Easter and Wilfrid’s of the Petrine, Oswiu’s decision for Rome, and Colmán’s withdrawal (HE 3.25–26); Iona’s own conformity in 716 (HE 5.22). Handled as a disciplinary difference, both cases stated without polemic.

See Also

• The Vita Columbae — Iona’s own self-understanding, the source against which its mission must be read
• The Familia of Columba — the federation of houses, headed by Iona, of which Lindisfarne became a member
• Celtic Monasticism and the Desert — the ascetic tradition the Ionan monks carried into England
• St. Aidan of Lindisfarne — the Iona monk sent to Northumbria, treated in his own collection
• St. Colmán of Lindisfarne — the Iona man who defended the Columban Easter at Whitby and withdrew
• Monasticism — the monastic life that was the form of the Ionan mission
• The Church Calendar — the liturgical reckoning at the heart of the Easter dispute
• The Pre-Schism Church — the undivided Church within which the Easter difference was a disciplinary, not a doctrinal, matter

References

• Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum). Ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. (HE 3.3, 3.5 for Oswald, Aidan, and Lindisfarne; 3.25–26 for the Synod of Whitby and Colmán’s withdrawal; 5.15, 5.21 for Adomnán; 5.22 for Iona’s adoption of the Roman Easter in 716.)
• Adomnán of Iona. Life of St Columba (Vita Sancti Columbae). Trans. Richard Sharpe. London: Penguin, 1995.
• Herbert, Máire. Iona, Kells, and Derry: The History and Hagiography of the Monastic Familia of Columba. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.
• Clancy, Thomas Owen, and Gilbert Márkus. Iona: The Earliest Poetry of a Celtic Monastery. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995.