Sublime

Oswald Iding ruled Northumbria for eight years, from ad 634 to 642. In that time he was recognised as overlord of almost all the other kingdoms of Britain: of Wessex, Mercia, Lindsey and East Anglia, of the Britons of Rheged, Strathclyde, Powys and Gwynedd, the Scots of Dál Riata and the Picts of the far North. A famed warrior, the ‘Whiteblade’ or

Unlike Gildas, he was not classically educated – his Latin was, by his own testimony, uncultured. The backdrop to his life is a landscape in which arbitrary violence, extreme wealth and poverty, kindness and cruelty are shadowed by a functioning, literate institutional church capable of conducting business with daughter churches across the Irish Se

Between the ages of twelve, when he fled Bernicia, and thirty, when he returned, Oswald was transformed from an English heathen refugee into a crusading Irish Christian prince.