- CCSL
Corpus Christianorum series latina; CSEL=Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum latinorum
- EME
Early medieval Europe
- HE
Historia ecclesiastica
- MGH
Monumenta Germaniae Historica
‘In reading Bede on paganism … we need to keep a critical mind, to admit he was not infallible or disinterested or even precise, and to judge the merit of his evidence accordingly.’Footnote 1
In exploring what Bede has to tell us about paganism and Christianisation among the Anglo-Saxons, literary scholars have over the last three decades tended to concentrate on Bede's Christian message, and his reluctance to tell us more than he absolutely has to about non-Christian beliefs and practices. In this vein, Ray Page has attacked Bede's reliability as a source for Anglo-Saxon paganism.Footnote 2 In addition there have been studies from a literary viewpoint about Bede's conscious use of biblical parallels and religious symbolism in the conversion accounts: thus we have D. K. Fry commenting on the link between the sparrow in the hall story in HE ii.13 and the sparrow finding a dwelling place in Psalm lxxxiii/lxxxiv.4,Footnote 3 and Danuta Shanzer commenting on how Bede's use of the phrase ‘one of the sparrows’ in HE ii.13 mirrors Matthew x.29 concerning Christ's teaching about God not forgetting sparrows.Footnote 4 More generally, Roger Ray has demonstrated Bede's ability to invent events and particularly speeches.Footnote 5 Some historians have followed this line too, notably Nick Higham, while Stephen Church has recently provided a synthesis of debates on Bede's reliability as a source for the conversion for historians (notoriously reluctant to adopt literary approaches to their sources, even ones that are clearly literary, like HE).Footnote 6 Ian Wood has demonstrated that Bede's account of Oswald raising a cross at Heavenfield cannot be historically accurate, and should be read as an attempt to portray Oswald as a second Constantine on a Eusebian model.Footnote 7 Meanwhile, extensive study has been taking place on Bede's biblical exegesis;Footnote 8 as yet, relatively little of this approach has been applied directly to the HE, but significant work has been done to show how biblical exegesis underpins Bede's Prose Life of Cuthbert,Footnote 9 and the connections between Bede's exegesis and his Letter to Ecgberht have been fully explored.Footnote 10
None the less, historians and occasionally literary scholars continue to quarry Bede for scraps of information about paganism, notably James Campbell.Footnote 11 Richard North has gone considerably further, winding up with the opinion that the desecration of the pagan shrine at Goodmanham was carried out by Paulinus disguised as Woden (but operating under the alias of Coifi), desperately attempting to stop Edwin from celebrating fertility rites and thus breaking his Lenten fast in the run-up to his Easter baptism.Footnote 12 Very different in methodology (though still seeking to find out about paganism) is John Blair, who, though cautious about accepting Bede at face value, has analysed the archaeological evidence for the sites that can be interpreted as pagan shrines and has ended up with a vindication of the case for Goodmanham as one such.Footnote 13
This paper adopts a literary and exegetical approach to Bede's account of the conversion of Edwin king of Northumbria in HE ii.9–14, in order to explore further some of Bede's symbolism, in particular in the most dramatic section of the narrative, HE ii.13, which describes the meeting of Edwin's council and the ride of Coifi the high priest to Goodmanham to desecrate the pagan shrine. Exploring religious motifs will help us to see how Bede intended his audience to react to what he was saying: he was a teacher and the most learned biblical exegete of his day, and he hoped that readers and hearers of his book would be moved to meditate on what he had to say, applying the messages that he conveyed to their own moral and spiritual development.Footnote 14 To start with it may be helpful to summarise the events in Bede's narrative of Edwin's conversion in the four chapters preceding ii.13. Bede builds up his account of the process slowly, to demonstrate to the reader that Edwin thought carefully about conversion and thus acted as a wise and virtuous king.Footnote 15HE ii.9 is the point where Bede starts to talk about the conversion of the Northumbrians by Paulinus, and it sets out the political background to the latter's mission, with a sketch of Edwin's power as ruler, his request to Eadbald, king of Kent, to marry the latter's sister Æthelburh, the consecration of Paulinus as bishop on 21 July 625 and the arrival of Æthelburh and Paulinus at Edwin's court shortly afterwards. In spite of Paulinus’ missionary zeal Edwin was slow to rise to the bait and was still unconverted in the spring of the following year, at which point Cwichelm, king of the West Saxons, sent an assassin to kill him, an attempt that was foiled by the heroism of Edwin's ‘most friendly’ thegn Lilla, who jumped in front of his master to receive the knife thrust;Footnote 16 a few hours later, Æthelburh gave birth to a daughter. All this happened on Easter Day in 626.
The two chapters that follow consist of letters written by Pope Boniface v, who died in October 625, to Edwin (ii. 10) and to Æthelburh (ii. 11); some doubts have been cast on the chronology of the letters because Boniface refers to Edwin as ‘still serving abominable idols’ in the letter that he wrote to Æthelburh, on the assumption that such a letter could only have been written once she had put some effort into persuading Edwin to convert.Footnote 17 But this difficulty is removed if we assume that the two letters were written slightly in advance of the marriage as a wedding present (which is all the more likely as Boniface discourses on the spiritual meaning of marriage in his letter to the queen),Footnote 18 and if we also assume that Boniface meant that Edwin had not bothered to convert in the run-up to the marriage, even though he had been in contact with Eadbald.Footnote 19 Edwin and Eadbald would have been in negotiation with each other for some time before the marriage in any case, for Edwin could not have claimed imperium or bretwaldaship over the kingdoms in Britain without Eadbald's submission.Footnote 20
In HE ii.12 Bede goes back in time to recount a vision that Edwin is supposed to have had before he became king while in exile at the court of Rædwald, in which a mysterious stranger made him promise that he would obey anyone who offered him salvation who would also put his right hand on his head, and how Paulinus fulfilled this sign, thus prompting Edwin to come off the fence. This chapter, which is based on a passage in the anonymous Whitby Life of Gregory the Great,Footnote 21 has aroused quite varied reactions, usefully summarised by J. M. Wallace-Hadrill:Footnote 22 Charles Plummer commented that it might be a reflection of Ananias in Damascus seeking out the blinded Paul (Acts ix.10–19);Footnote 23 George Henderson noted the parallels between Edwin's position in exile and that of David represented in the Psalms;Footnote 24 while František Graus thought that it was ‘absolutely not ecclesiastical, and was only adapted by Bede to the conversion story out of necessity’.Footnote 25 Given Bede's staunchly Christian standpoint, Graus's views do not convince, and there is much to be said for those of Plummer and Henderson. Yet another possibility, hitherto unmentioned, is that the spirit-figure encountered by Edwin outside Rædwald's hall represents the promises of the Old Testament, awaiting fulfilment in the revelation of the New, preached to Edwin by Paulinus, for, whereas the Whitby Life describes the figure as beautiful and crowned with the cross of Christ, and comments that it is said to have been Paulinus who appeared to Edwin at Rædwald's court, in Bede's account this apparition is a spirit, coming by night, and thus by implication a shadowy figure. Moreover, Bede implicitly contrasts the apparition with the vivid and down-to-earth personality of Paulinus. For Bede, the interpretation of the Old Testament as a prefiguration of the New was of vital importance, and when, in his In Genesim, he uttered criticism of people who followed the precepts of the Old Testament to the letter he accused them of lapsing ‘in umbras figurarum’ (‘into the shadows of figures’).Footnote 26 Bede used the word figura here principally in its rhetorical sense, but he might well also have had the original meaning of the word in mind – figure or ghost. At any rate, before making a final public declaration on the matter, Edwin, like Æthelberht of Kent before him, felt the need to consult with his followers, and this consultation process is the subject of HE ii. 13.
Accordingly, in HE ii. 13 Edwin summoned a meeting of his wise men,Footnote 27 at which all had to say what they thought about the new doctrine. The first to reply was Coifi, the ‘chief priest’ (‘primus pontificum’) of the old religion. Pontifex is the term used in the Vulgate version of the Gospel of St John to mean high priest, applied to Caiaphas (John xviii.13, 24), and given the alliteration between Caiaphas and Coifi Bede's use of this term to describe the latter is suggestive.Footnote 28 The name Coifi is extremely rare in Anglo-Saxon sources, occurring only here in HE, with the variants Coefi in Alcuin's retelling of the Goodmanham narrative in his York poem, and Cefi in the Old English version of HE.Footnote 29 The name Ceefi, probably but not necessarily the same, occurs in the list of monks in the early ninth-century core of the Durham Liber Vitae.Footnote 30 The origins of both Coifi/Coefi and Ceefi are obscure.Footnote 31 Coifi said that the old religion had no usefulness (‘nihil utilitatis’)Footnote 32 in it because there were many who had performed fewer services to the old gods than he had but none the less had received much better rewards. As Charles Plummer remarked, this response shows ‘gross materialism’.Footnote 33 Bede would have expected his readers to react as Plummer did, since Coifi's answer comes only a few chapters after Lilla, without hope of any return (he was an unenlightened pagan and could not expect to go to heaven) had laid down his life for his lord. Lilla's action echoes John xv.13 (‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends’), and perhaps explains why Lilla is the amicissimus or ‘most friendly’ of Edwin's thegns in ii.9. Plummer goes a little too far in showing surprise at Bede saying that Coifi's words are ‘prudent’: they are prudent, in a worldly way (though it would have taken some courage for one of Edwin's followers to stand up to the king and say that the latter was rewarding him poorly).Footnote 34 Obviously, however, if Coifi had been an oblate monk at Jarrow being tested by Bede on why he ought to believe in God, he would have failed.
The next speaker answered much better, comparing human life to the flight of a sparrow through Edwin's hall in midwinter: ‘after the briefest moment of calm, it flits from your sight, out of the wintry storm and into it again. So this life of man appears but for a moment; what follows or indeed what went before, we know not at all. If this new doctrine brings us more certain information, it seems right that we should accept it’.Footnote 35 This account of a bird associated with Edwin's hall may represent another extensive reconfiguration by Bede of one of the stories in the Whitby Life, in this case the crow outside the royal hall that Paulinus ordered to be shot down with an arrow so that Edwin's followers could see that it was incapable of foretelling the future.Footnote 36 Bede's reason for switching from crow to sparrow becomes clearer if we reflect on the symbolism of the two birds. Crows (or ravens – the Latin corvus can be used of any member of the corvus genus)Footnote 37 were birds of ill-omen in the eyes of the followers of Edwin as depicted in the Whitby Life, but for Bede they represented Christians who, in spite of being baptised, were unable to shed the black stain left by indulgence in earthly delights. He develops this comparison in commentary on the raven sent out by Noah from the Ark in Genesis viii.5–7.Footnote 38 By contrast, the sparrows in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke represent human souls that are capable of being saved.Footnote 39 More generally, we may consider the roles of birds in two contemporary texts, Felix's Life of St Guthlac, with its wicked (though teachable) crows and its virtuous swallows,Footnote 40 and also the Vision of the monk of Wenlock, a vision of the afterlife recounted by Boniface of Mainz, in which human souls in the form of black birds fall into the pit of hell.Footnote 41 The storms of rain and snow into which the sparrow flies in the nobleman's story have their parallel in the freezing cold, snow and hail that commonly figure in hell and purgatory in afterlife visions, as for example in Bede's own vision of Dryhthelm in HE v. 12 and also in Felix's Life of Guthlac and the Visio Sancti Pauli.Footnote 42 The idea that hell might freeze as well as burn had originated with Jerome, who interpreted the ‘weeping and gnashing of teeth’ in Matt. xxv.30 as the chattering of teeth due to extreme cold.Footnote 43 Overall, it appears that the words about the afterlife placed in the counsellor's mouth have been modelled closely on Christian accounts of the other world.
Bede now makes Coifi see that his initial response was mistaken; chastened by the anonymous nobleman's wise reply, he asked Paulinus for more information, and on receiving this was able to supply the correct response, that the new religion provided ‘the gift of life, salvation and eternal happiness’.Footnote 44 More than that, Coifi and Edwin vied with each other to be the first to profane the pagan shrines, and Coifi won, with Edwin lending him his horse and providing him with weapons.Footnote 45 It has been commonly observed that Bede's statement that pagan priests were not supposed to ride any horse except a mare and were not supposed to carry weapons is essentially an ideal for the behaviour of Christian clergy (and, as far as the ban on priests carrying weapons is concerned, a statement of canon law); Stephen Church, for example, points out examples of bishops legislating on these matters in the seventh and eighth centuries.Footnote 46 But we can get even nearer to home on the subject of high priests, horses and weapons by looking at what Bede himself says about bishops. Of Aidan, Bede notes that he preferred to walk everywhere and that when he was given a horse by Oswine he gave it away to a poor man; of Chad, Bede says that he liked to walk everywhere and that it was only when Theodore ordered him to ride and actually shoved him onto a horse that he did so.Footnote 47
The closest parallel of all comes in Bede's Prose Life of Cuthbert. Admittedly this story occurs at a point in Cuthbert's life long before he became bishop, but, since Bede throughout the work shows Cuthbert acting in a manner worthy of a bishop from boyhood onwards, it is another example of this topos.Footnote 48 In writing about Cuthbert, Bede made use of the Anonymous life; in doing so, he took over the latter's description of Cuthbert riding around on a horse before he became a monk so that he could include the miracle about Cuthbert finding food in the deserted sheiling, with the descriptive touch about the horse tearing down straw from the roof.Footnote 49 However, Bede then disposed of the horse in a passage which he did not model on the Anonymous life but invented for himself, the description of how Cuthbert arrived at Melrose: ‘And by chance it happened that, having jumped down from his horse on reaching the monastery, and being about to enter the church to pray, he gave both his horse and the spear he was holding to a servant, for he had not yet put off his secular habit.’Footnote 50 This is a piece of demonstrative behaviour: on the threshold of becoming a monk, Cuthbert is publicly giving up his secular life, of which horses and spears were a vital part (at least for men). Later on, Bede shows Cuthbert (still only a monk of Melrose, but acting rather like a bishop) sometimes using a horse when travelling to preach (or, as Bede puts it, to correct the double error of wicked deeds and idolatry), but he is careful to add that Cuthbert also sometimes travelled on foot.Footnote 51 Bede was prepared to allow that bishops might ride to reach remote places;Footnote 52 equally, of course, he thought that dioceses should be considerably smaller than they were, and he urged the division of the large diocese of York in his Letter to Ecgberht.Footnote 53 Presumably he thought bishops should try to walk as much as possible.
Very probably, therefore, Bede was influenced by his own mental image of Cuthbert's behaviour on his arrival at Melrose when he came to describe Coifi's ride to Goodmanham. There is, however, one crucial difference of vocabulary (the word which gives the point to the title of this paper, in fact). Cuthbert handed over his spear (‘hasta’) on arrival at Melrose. Coifi received a lance (‘lancea’) before setting out for Goodmanham. Lancea is not the word medieval writers normally used for a spear – hasta was the usual choice, as in Bede's account of Cuthbert – but Bede deliberately chose lancea for Coifi, because he repeats the word two sentences later. The usage of this term that would have been most vivid in Bede's mind must surely have been John xix.34 in the Vulgate version: ‘sed unus militum lancea latus eius aperuit, et continuo exivit sanguis et aqua’ (‘But one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith there came out blood and water’). In other words, by throwing his lance into the pagan shrine at Goodmanham, Coifi was echoing the action of the soldier who pierced Christ's side. Bede describes the shrine at Goodmanham as a fanum, or fane, a term for a specifically pagan place of worship; he was careful to avoid using the word templum or temple for such places, preferring to reserve it for the Temple in Jerusalem, the temple of Christ's body, the temple of all believers and the temple of each believer.Footnote 54 None the less he must have intended his readers to make this connection and thus interpret Coifi's piercing of a pagan shrine as an inversion of the piercing of the temple of Christ's body. For Bede, the door in the middle of the side of Solomon's Temple was a forerunner of the wound in Christ's side, and he worked out the parallels between the two in his In Ezram et Neemiam and his De templo, both written in the later 720s, and both closely connected with the works in which Bede commented on how the Church should improve its pastoral care, that is HE and the Letter to Ecgberht.Footnote 55 Here, in De templo, is Bede commenting on I Kings (III Kingdoms) vi. 8:
For the door to the middle section was on the right of the house because when the Lord died on the cross one of the soldiers opened his side with a spear. And aptly (does it say) on the right hand of the house because the Holy Church believes his right side was opened by the soldier. Here too the evangelist used the appropriate word when instead of saying he struck or wounded his side, said opened, that is to say, as it were, the door of the middle side through which a path to heavenly things might be thrown open to us. Finally he added the following: and forthwith there flowed out blood and water, i.e. water with which we are washed in baptism, and blood with which we are consecrated in the holy chalice.Footnote 56
Just as the door in the Temple gave access to the holy places, so the wound in Christ's side poured forth the blood of the eucharist and the water of baptism, opening heaven to believers.Footnote 57 Bede thus makes Coifi pierce the shrine at Goodmanham with a lance in order to give the Northumbrians the possibility of conversion to Christianity and eventual salvation. After this, Bede rounds off what is effectively a meditation on the Easter message by informing us of Edwin's baptism at York on Easter Day 627 (12 April) in HE ii. 14, followed by Paulinus’ baptism of people from each of the three Northumbrian provinces, each in their own localised version of the River Jordan – the Glen for the Bernicians, the Swale for the Deirans and the Trent for the people of Lindsey.Footnote 58
So far, this paper has concentrated on the symbolic rather than the historical content of HE ii. 13. None the less, there is a definitely historical element and a potentially historical element in ii. 13 that require consideration. The potentially historical element is the name Coifi, which might possibly be the name of a follower of Edwin recorded in oral tradition that Bede realised he could exploit for exegetical purposes, thanks to its similarity in sound to the name Caiaphas. Alternatively Bede might have adopted the name Coifi to make the reader think of Caiaphas. In either case, it is probably safe to assume that the title primus pontificum ascribed to Coifi echoes the Gospel of St John and not the institutional structure of Anglo-Saxon paganism. The definitely historical element is the name Goodmanham (Godmunddingaham in HE ii. 13), which can be translated as ‘the large farm or estate of the people of Godmund’, with the personal name Godmund itself meaning ‘good protection’, or perhaps ‘God-protection’, an ambiguity that Bede may be exploiting here. The name Godmund also occurs in the place-names Godmanchester (Hunts) and Gumley (Leics),Footnote 59 but no example of any Anglo-Saxon bearing this name is recorded in written sources before the mid-eleventh century.Footnote 60 Bede comments that Goodmanham is the name of the site of the shrine hodie, ‘today’, which may suggest that it had originally been called something else. Although names in ‘–ingham’ in East Anglia and the south-east are seventh-century, or even earlier, and refer to domestic settlement sites, research by Victor Watts and David Parsons suggests that north of the Humber ‘–ham’ was added to existing place-names when they developed as monastic sites (Hexham, Lastingham, Coldingham);Footnote 61 if Goodmanham was among this group, then a church must have been built there before 731. Whether or not this was so, however, Bede would have regarded the name ‘Goodmanham’ as highly appropriate in the light of Coifi's action, since in his eyes it was a place under good, or perhaps even divine, protection.
Hitherto historians and other scholars have not explored the range of biblical parallels in HE quite as fully as they might have done;Footnote 62 study of the biblical citations in HE has concentrated so far mostly on which version of the Bible Bede was using at any point.Footnote 63 On several occasions in HE Bede himself explicitly notes scriptural parallels for Anglo-Saxon events, for example in his comparison of Æthelfrith of Northumbria to Saul and to Benjamin at the end of book i,Footnote 64 or his use of Isaiah xxxv.7 to describe the topography of Lastingham, chosen by Cedd for his monastic foundation in HE iii.23.Footnote 65 Similarly he comments in HE i.1 that the five languages spoken in the island of Britain correspond to the five books of the Law (meaning the Law of Moses),Footnote 66 and thus implicitly expects the reader to note that HE itself is written in five books and therefore is modelled on the Pentateuch.Footnote 67 But the direct citations may simply be the tip of the iceberg: it is likely that many semi-submerged allusions remain to be discovered.
To sum up, Bede's account of Edwin's conversion to Christianity is a sustained piece of literary inversion and biblical exegesis, above all in HE ii. 13. The principal source being inverted is the Whitby Life of Gregory, whose ill-omened crow outside Edwin's hall becomes the sparrow flying through the hall, mirroring the human soul with its uncertainty about the afterlife and its capacity for redemption. Perhaps also the arrow used to shoot the crow in the Whitby Life gave Bede the initial inspiration for his idea about the lance with which Coifi profaned the shrine at Goodmanham. Much more potent, however, was the Gospel of St John with its account of the piercing of Christ's side and the gushing forth of the blood and water of the sacraments. Bede never wrote a full exegesis on the Gospel of John, but he commented on much of it in his Homilies on the Gospel,Footnote 68 and he was engaged in translating it into Old English when he died.Footnote 69 Possibly, before his final illness overtook him he had intended to compose a full-scale commentary on John. There is at least one historical element in HE ii. 13, the name Goodmanham, and it is likely that the name Coifi is another, but both these are capable of symbolic as well as historical interpretation. Overall, it seems safest to read HE ii.13 not as a historically accurate description of the council meeting at which the Northumbrians decided to back Christianity and the immediate consequences of this decision, but as a meditation on the Redemption.
