TY - JOUR
AU - Snook, Ben
AB - The seventh century is a period of Anglo-Saxon history that is unusually brightly illuminated. A wealth of major, near-contemporary works of history and hagiography (Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum being pre-eminent among them) survive, which describe the secular and religious politics of the age in remarkable detail. The flourishing of monasticism throughout Britain and Ireland at this time contributed to an extraordinarily vibrant cultural resurgence, which, in its art and literature, blended Insular, Continental and Mediterranean influences to create new and unique visual, literary and even architectural languages. Driven by such figures as Archbishop Theodore and his collaborator, Hadrian; the brilliant Aldhelm of Malmesbury; and saints Wilfred, Cuthbert and Aedan, powerful currents of intellectualism and scholarship, some with their origins in Ireland, others originating from the Continent or coming directly from Rome, surged through both northern and southern Britain. Sometimes, these traditions worked in harmony, each drawing inspiration from the others; and sometimes, such as at the acrimonious Synod of Whitby in 664, they came into conflict. Aldhelm, who was quite possibly the greatest Latinist of his age, summed up the rivalry in his letter to Heahfrith, his former student. In the grandest and most sophisticated Latin (just in case the point should be lost), he chastised the hapless Heahfrith for seeking enlightenment in Ireland when such outstanding teachers were available at Canterbury. Conflict was not merely intellectual and ideological, however: in the pages of Bede, among others, we read of shifting political boundaries, great battles, tense military stand-offs and heroic last stands as kings and subkings jockeyed for power and influence. There is no doubt that the secular politics of the seventh century was every bit as intricate and as rancorous as the religious conflicts of the age. King Ecgfrith of the Northumbrians (670–685) was a major figure in later seventh-century Insular politics. His political supremacy in northern England, the influence he won over certain of England’s southern kingdoms and his Irish connections made him a major figure not just in northern Britain, but in the Insular world more broadly. As such, the sources which record his life are unusually rich: Bede wrote about him at some length, as did Stephen of Ripon (the contemporary hagiographer of St Wilfrid); he was mentioned in a number of Irish texts, as well as in various libri uitae; and his name is recorded by at least one stone inscription; all of which augurs very well indeed for a biographer. On closer inspection, however, a biography of King Ecgfrith is not nearly as straightforward a project as it should be. The portraits painted of him by Bede and Stephen, in particular, are really quite one-dimensional, their tone pivoting on his support for, or antipathy towards, different religious figures; chronicles and inscriptions rarely move far beyond a few brusque words which coldly record an event; and no charters or laws survive from Ecgfrith’s court. Therefore, we can never get closer to Ecgfrith than Bede and Stephen allow us: the source material may be abundant, but it tells us surprisingly little. This, as the present book by N.J. Higham illustrates, is a significant problem when it comes to writing this kind of royal biography. Before even turning to the first page, Higham’s provocative choice of title raises several questions. Firstly, one could argue that the eponymous King Ecgfrith is not actually the book’s main focus: only two out of the four sections of the book, after the introduction, actually focus on Ecgfrith himself. The first two chapters provide a brief overview of the sources, a history of sub-Roman Britain, a description of the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons and a discussion of the growth of ‘national’ identities in the sixth and seventh centuries. Higham then moves on to describe the formation of the kingdoms of the Northumbrians and their early leaders in more depth. Clearly, some background is needed, particularly for the non-specialist reader, and Higham’s description of the three-and-a-half centuries between the departure of the legions and Ecgfrith’s accession provides valuable context for the subsequent discussion. However, by the time we finally meet Ecgfrith himself, on page 122, one cannot help but feel that the young king’s arrival is a little overdue. Altogether more troubling, though, is the second part of the book’s title. Ecgfrith was King of the Northumbrians: he was not ‘High King of Britain’, at least not beyond the imaginations of his supporters and apologists, for no such office existed in seventh-century England (as Higham himself acknowledges on page 19), nor has the term customarily been used to describe Anglo-Saxon kingship. The term ‘High King’ itself is a controversial one. Presumably, Higham has borrowed it from the Irish context, where Ard Rí na hÉireann (‘High King of Ireland’) was a title constructed in the eighth century and then projected back on to the pseudo-historical and legendary past. The nearest Anglo-Saxon equivalent is the term Bretwalda (perhaps ‘wide-ruler’), which is how a late ninth-century West Saxon chronicler, keen to place the contemporary West Saxon dynasty in the context of Bede’s ‘Golden Age’, paraphrased a passage from the Historia ecclesiastica (adding the name of Egbert, the grandfather of Alfred ‘the Great’, to a list of seven powerful kings given by Bede—which importantly did not include Ecgfrith). The history and semantics of the word Bretwalda are controversial. Accordingly, there is a considerable and important scholarly literature surrounding the term, a certain amount of which has been written by Higham himself. It is all the more surprising, therefore, that Higham’s discussion of the word on page 18 does not contain a single footnote referencing this debate. ‘Today’, he writes, ‘use of Bretwalda has fallen out of fashion, but we still need a terminology for this sort of political ascendancy, however fleeting’ (p. 18). Prior to the tenth century at least, the Anglo-Saxons themselves preferred to describe a powerful political overlord simply as rex, ‘king’. To introduce such loaded terms as ‘High King’, and to use Bretwalda uncritically, seems unwise, as it immediately skews the narrative towards an untested, maximalist perspective of Ecgfrith’s power. Higham’s rather selective footnoting is also a problem elsewhere in the book. On several occasions in the discussion he refers to the Historia Brittonum. A delight for a folklorist or a student of literature, this is a troublesome text to say the least for an historian: a compilation of Classical, patristic, Old Testament, and Brittonic mythology and pseudo-history, the Historia Brittonum weaves a complex narrative tapestry within which half-remembered, and often much-embellished, accounts of tangible historical events are set in the context of the ancient, mythic past. To make matters more complicated still, the text (which was popular in the later Middle Ages) survives in a number of recensions which preserve a variety of different readings. Yet Higham refers uncritically to the Historia Brittonum at least fifteen times throughout the book. On several occasions, he uses the Historia Brittonum in conjunction with other works of history or hagiography (such as Bede’s Historia) without acknowledging the crucial differences between the context, reception and nature of his sources. Moreover, neither the footnotes nor the bibliography make reference to David Dumville’s work on the text, which not only underpins our modern understanding of it, but which also highlights major shortcomings in the 1929 and 1980 editions of the Historia Brittonum on which Higham appears to have relied for his referencing. A similar lack of detail mars Higham’s discussion of the secular and religious administration of Ecgfrith’s Northumbria. On pages 146 and 147, interesting points are raised about levels of literacy at the court, which (in view of Ecgfrith’s background) were likely to have been unusually high. On page 146, Higham observes that ‘it would not be surprising if charters were in use’, and on page 147, he refers to ‘the beginnings of the use of charters by Northumbrian Romanist monasteries’ during Ecgfrith’s reign. Neither statement is footnoted, which is a great shame, since neither can be allowed to stand. The earliest, certainly authentic Anglo-Saxon charter dates from 679 (a copy of an earlier document, from 675, probably preserves authentic elements), in the middle of Ecgfrith’s reign; however, it was granted by King Hlothere of Kent, and has nothing to do with Northumbria or Ecgfrith. No authentic charter from early Anglo-Saxon Northumbria survives; while Northumbrian kings certainly disposed of land in favour of religious foundations, it seems likely that these grants were recorded using informal means, such as notes entered into the margins of gospel books, rather than through formal land charters, which were probably introduced into England by Archbishop Theodore and, as such, were a Southumbrian phenomenon at this time. Higham’s failure to reference David Woodman’s excellent discussion of the matter, which prefaces his British Academy Charters Series edition of the Charters of the Northern Houses, feels like a serious omission here. Further evidence of Higham’s uneasiness with diplomatic material comes on page 190, where he refers to a charter (S 1169) recording a grant of land in Gloucestershire. This is another difficult text, which, in light of Susan Kelly’s important discussion of it in her Charters of Malmesbury Abbey (which, again, Higham does not reference), should not be taken completely at face value. More broadly, the book suffers from something of an identity crisis. Its lengthy contextual chapters and comparative affordability, along with Higham’s rather perfunctory approach to referencing, suggest a popular audience; yet the depth of the discussion and the intricacy with which the author describes the politics of the seventh century are such that a reader without a significant grounding in early Insular history could easily become bogged down among the mass of unfamiliar Anglo-Saxon, Welsh and Irish names, and meticulous descriptions of religious arguments over the dating of Easter. A more scholarly audience is likely to find much of interest in Higham’s forensic analysis of Ecgfrith’s reign. Whether he ever really succeeds in moving beyond the accounts of Ecgfrith written by Bede and Stephen, on which much of the book’s narrative is necessarily based, is doubtful. There are plenty of useful observations and judicious ‘best guesses’ about the nature and extent of Ecgfrith’s power but, as so often in the field of early medieval studies, there are few clear conclusions, and relatively little that is really ‘new’. Overall, there is no doubt that this powerful and educated king, whose patronage of Northumbria’s religious foundations was so important in energising the extraordinary scholarly achievements of his age, is a worthy subject of his own biography. Indeed, the great kings and warlords of early Anglo-Saxon England have too often been seen as actors in the grand narrative of the first Anglo-Saxon ‘Golden Age’, rather than as central figures in their own right, and they certainly deserve a fuller treatment than they have tended to receive hitherto. In so far as Higham’s book seeks to examine the late seventh century from Ecgfrith’s perspective, rather than the other way around, it is very welcome; nevertheless, the uncritical use of sources, and the straightforwardly ‘maximalist’ position that Higham takes on the question of Ecgfrith’s political authority, suggest that this book should be approached with some caution. © Oxford University Press 2018. All rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Ecgfrith: King of the Northumbrians, High King of Britain, by N.J. Higham
JF - The English Historical Review
DO - 10.1093/ehr/cey222
DA - 2018-10-05
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/ecgfrith-king-of-the-northumbrians-high-king-of-britain-by-n-j-higham-9f08IDIbYh
SP - 1270
EP - 1273
VL - 133
IS - 564
DP - DeepDyve
ER -