HOLDING THE BORDER: POWER, IDENTITY, AND THE CONVERSION OF MERCIA A Thesis presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School University of Missouri–Columbia In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts by MARK ALAN SINGER Dr. Lois Huneycutt, Thesis Supervisor MAY 2006 The undersigned, appointed by the Dean of the Graduate School, have examined the thesis entitled HOLDING THE BORDER: POWER, IDENTITY, AND THE CONVERSION OF MERCIA Presented by Mark Alan Singer A candidate for the degree of Master of Arts And hereby certify that in their opinion it is worthy of acceptance. (signed) Professor Lois Huneycutt Professor A. Mark Smith Professor John Miles Foley ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The author wishes to thank Professors Lois Huneycutt, Lawrence Okamura, and A. Mark Smith of the Department of History and Professor Todd VanPool of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Missouri–Columbia for their invaluable support, advice, and assistance in helping me ask the questions and do the research that led to this thesis. Thanks also go to Professor John Lavalle of Western New Mexico University, who supervised some of the initial research that led to this thesis, and Marion Ingham, who provided me with her translation of Walter Baetke’s work. Finally, I would like to thank Thomas Hart, a master’s candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Missouri–Columbia, whose recommendation to me of Helen Geake’s work proved key to my understanding of this material evidence for this period of Anglo- Saxon history. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...............................................................................................ii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ........................................................................................... iv Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION: INTERPRETING CONVERSION ................................... 1 2. ADVENTUS AND AFTERMATH .................................................................. 13 The Historiography of Anglo-Saxon Origins Documents of Origins and Conversions Material Evidence from the Sub-Roman and Anglo-Saxon Periods 3. KINGS AND PRIESTS ................................................................................... 41 The Kingdom of Mercia: Locating Mercia Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Settlement and Consolidation Mercia’s Kings Christianities and Paganism in England: Anglo-Saxon Paganism Anglo-Saxon Paganism and “Sacral Kingship” “Christianities” in England 4. POWER AND IDENTITY .............................................................................. 81 The Kings’ Political and Religious Power Identity and Influence among Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms The Power of Identity: Penda and Leovigild BIBLIOGRAPHY .......................................................................................................... 109 iii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure Page 1. The Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms c. 600. Adapted from H. M. Chadwick, The Origin of the English Nation ........................................................................... 27 2. Barton Court Farm. Adapted from Nicholas Higham, Rome, Britain and the Anglo-Saxons ................................................................................................... 31 3. Mercia and the other areas listed in the Tribal Hidage. Adapted from Wendy Davies and Hay Vierck, “The Contexts of Tribal Hidage: Social Aggregates and Settlement Patterns,” Frühmittelalterlihe Studien 8 ................................. 53 iv 1. INTRODUCTION: INTERPRETING CONVERSION Political empires and economic systems have come and gone, but the world religions have survived…. Their genius lies in their curious ability to renounce this world and announce another, more compelling and true. They relocate the divisive solidarities of language, custom, and region within a broader community and higher Truth.1 The seventh century is one of the most crucial in English history, for it was then that Christianity was firmly established among the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Part of this conversion’s effect on England was certainly to change its perceived boundaries and its relationship with the rest of the Christian world. Within a hundred years, England went from an island dominated by the individual kingdoms of pre-literate Anglo-Saxons to one able to produce a work of illuminated text – the Lindisfarne Gospel –that rivaled any produced on the Continent. By early in the eighth century, the English-educated monk Winfrith, who would come to be known as St. Boniface (675-754), was bringing Christianity to the continental kin of the Anglo-Saxons. England began in the fifth century as Roman Britain conquered, but England converted was not Britain reborn. Its system of government, its economy, and even its vernacular language had changed during the fifth and sixth centuries. But even so changed, after a century and a half of darkness during which its history lay mostly unrecorded, with the coming of Christianity England was once again part of Europe. 1 Robert W. Hefner, “Introduction: World Building and the Rationality of Conversion,” Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation, ed. Robert W. Hefner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 34. 1 2 That broad change, though, was not the goal of the mission that went from Rome to England in 596. Their goal was clear to Bede (672-735), the great historian of the English conversion, who in his 731 Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People) presents the tale of the Anglo-Saxons “snatched from the wrath of Christ and called to his mercy.”2 Bede tells how the Anglo-Saxon invaders who had established themselves in what was now England became Christian by means of the conversion of their kings. Over the course of the seventh century, even those kingdoms that resisted Christianity, such as the kingdom of Mercia long held by its pagan king and warlord Penda (r. 626-654)3, came to Christ. The pious Cenred (r. 704-9), who abdicated the Mercian throne in order to go on pilgrimage to Rome and enter holy orders there, ruled Mercia only 76 years after Penda had dismembered the Christian Northumbrian king Oswald (r. 634-642) at the battle of Hatfield. Bede’s history is that of men acting to further the providence of God. Recent scholarship on the Anglo-Saxon conversion makes a much different claim: that this religious change was not provident, but expedient. It presents Christianity as a tool that supplied Anglo-Saxon kings with a ready-made structure of power they could use to exert and support their own power and authority. This interpretation puts the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons into the social context with which we can best evaluate it. For that evaluation to be complete, however, we need to look at more than just political necessity, and we need to account for those kingdoms that resisted religious change. Examining the conversion of the kingdom of Mercia from the perspective of that 2 Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 135. 3 The probable date of Penda’s reign is examined in detail in Chapter 3. 3 kingdom’s origins and development and its rulers’ interests and concerns will enable us to understand both resistance and conversion to Christianity in seventh-century England. This examination was prompted by Nicholas Higham’s 1997 book The Convert Kings: Power and Religious Affiliation in Early Anglo-Saxon England, which does interpret the conversion of England as a response to political necessity. According to Higham’s interpretation of the Christianization of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, Æthelberht of Kent converted to Roman Christianity as “a diplomatic move occasioned by his need in 595-6 to seek an accommodation with what looked like the winning side in Frankia.”4 Even what may be seen as more purely religious considerations were, Higham says, based on political reasoning in response to earthly events. Oswald of Northumbria turned to Celtic rather than Roman Christianity neither because he had been raised in the Celtic Church, nor because he accepted the Celtic dating of Easter, nor even because there were no Roman Christians left in Northumbria,5 but instead because Edwin’s death at the hands of the Celtic Christian Cadwallon demonstrated “God’s preference for the Celtic customs and methods for determining the date of Easter.”6 And in Penda’s Mercia, where Higham claims the king’s power was based on the Anglo-Saxon concept of pagan sacral kingship, it was critical for Penda to exclude Christianity as a “Bernician cult, with 4 N. J. Higham, The Convert Kings: Power and Religious Affiliation in Early Anglo-Saxon England (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1997), 117. 5 James the Deacon remained at the church in York after Paulinus fled to Canterbury following Edwin’s defeat; Bede, 207. 6 Higham, Convert Kings, 213. 4 its capacity to reinforce subordination to [Edwin’s successor] Oswald.”7 For Higham, the sources for the conversion of England show how Anglo-Saxon kings, seeking instruments capable of consolidating, reinforcing and extending their own power … found crucial allies in Christian bishops, who were generally prepared to place their skills, ideologies and organising capabilities at the disposal of convert kings in return for royal backing for missionary activities. That fact, beyond any other, made many of the greatest kings welcoming and committed patrons of Christian missionaries.