In death his severed head and arms were displayed on stakes at a place which came to be known as Oswald’s Tree or Oswestry and his skull, a sacred possession of Durham Cathedral, exhibits a sword-cut wide enough to accommodate three fingers. His post-mortem career was as extraordinary as his life and death had been. Many miracles were said to have

The seventh century is outstanding for the number of women who played active, sometimes decisive roles in the fortunes of kingdoms, both earthly and spiritual. They are not to be underestimated. They had their own queenly agendas, engineering lines of patronage for their families, acting as brakes on hot-headed husbands, as brokers of deals, as pac

In the days of Kings Æthelfrith, Edwin and Oswald the greatest architectural feats since the end of the Roman Empire stood here as symbols of royal power: a palace complex, noble halls of great technical complexity and grandeur and, wonder of wonders, a grandstand unique in its period. In a pagan temple offerings were made to the gods and tribal to

The first principle to grasp here is that water, for all the dangers of shipwreck and piracy and the vagaries of wind and wave, was a faster and more secure medium on which to travel than land. The second is to understand that Britain’s coasts and her hundreds of islands were not isolated by the sea; they were connected by it. It is wrong to think

Three items show that at least some of the participants in the battle or battles from which the hoard came were Christian. Two are crosses of marvellous workmanship, made of thin sheets of Byzantine gold and Indian garnets, both folded as if to compress them.

The real dark age in British history, the yawning gap in its continuous narrative history, can be found in Book I of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, between Chapter 21, in which the fifth-century Gaulish bishop Germanus puts down a heresy among British Christians, and Chapter 23 which opens with events in 582. Germanus’s visit is generally dated to

Kent was unlike the other kingdoms of Britain. Its modern name is little changed from the tribal folk-name Cantium by which Julius Caesar knew it.19 It maintained close links with the Continent and the courts of the Frankish kings. Its land-holding structures were different from elsewhere in English-held territories—East Kent was divided into units

Who would dare to suggest without a trustworthy record that England’s seventh Archbishop of Canterbury, Theodore—a contemporary of Oswald—would be a Greek from Asia Minor, plucked from his studies in Rome at the age of sixty-seven and sent to England without knowing anything of the language or culture of the English; that he would set the essential

Oswald’s historical significance is greater even than the sum of his parts. He forged a hybrid culture of Briton, Irish, Scot and Anglo-Saxon which gave rise to a glorious age of arts and language symbolised by his foundation of the monastery on Lindisfarne and the sumptuous manuscripts later crafted there by Northumbria’s monks. His political lega