Better Than Gold, by Theresa Tomlinson. Book review

A & C Black 2014. ISBN 978-1-4729-0782-0. 124 pages.

Better Than Gold is set around 655 AD in Northumbria (in what is now north-east England) and Mercia (in what is now the Midlands). The main character, Egfrid, is a historical figure, and his time as a hostage at the royal court of Mercia is a historical event, although the details are not known. Other historical figures who feature as important characters in the novel include King Penda and Queen Cynewise of Mercia and their children, Egfrid’s father King Oswy of Bernicia and his queen Eanflaeda, Egfrid’s cousin Ethelwold and the Christian monk Chad (later St Chad, if I have identified him correctly).

Egfrid, son of the King of Bernicia, is aged ten when he is taken hostage by Penda, King of Mercia, in a raid. Mercia and Bernicia are bitter enemies; Penda has previously slaughtered Egfrid’s paternal uncle and his maternal grandfather and uncle. Egfrid’s father Oswy has so far escaped a similar fate by avoiding battle, which leads Penda to despise him as a coward. Unlike the Christian kings of Bernicia, Penda is a pagan and his religion practices human sacrifice, so when Egfrid is captured he fears the worst. But his courage and loyalty to his nursemaid and tutor, both captured with him, earns him Penda’s respect. He finds himself treated with honour and even kindness, particularly by Penda’s queen Cynewise, who is working to weave a peace treaty between the kingdoms. But when the old feud breaks out into war once more, Egfrid is faced with a dilemma – whose side should he be on?

I enjoyed Theresa Tomlinson’s mystery novels, Wolf Girl for young adult readers (review here) and A Swarming of Bees for adults (review here), both set in the Northumbrian royal abbey at Whitby in the seventh century, and her novel about Acha of Deira set in the late sixth century, The Tribute Bride (review here). Better Than Gold is a children’s book set a few years earlier than Wolf Girl or A Swarming of Bees.

Part of the inspiration for Better Than Gold was the discovery of the Staffordshire Hoard near Hammerwich in the territory of the old kingdom of Mercia in 2009. This is the largest collection of early English (Anglo-Saxon) precious metalwork ever found, and consists almost entirely of gold and silver objects associated with military equipment, for example the decorative fittings from sword hilts and fragments of at least one helmet. For details of the Staffordshire Hoard, see the official website. This overwhelming focus on martial items is extremely unusual, as most Anglo-Saxon precious metalwork consists of dress fittings such as strap-ends, buckles and brooches, or luxury tableware such as plates or cups, and immediately suggests that there ought to be a dramatic story behind the Staffordshire Hoard. How might it have been assembled, who owned it, what did it signify, why are the items almost all military, who might have buried it, and why might it have been buried and never recovered?  (For a discussion, see my blog post at the time and the associated comments thread). We will probably never know the answers for sure. In Better Than Gold, Theresa Tomlinson has drawn on an episode recorded in Bede’s History and the rather enigmatic Restoration of Iudeu mentioned in Historia Brittonum to imagine a scenario that might lie behind the hoard.

Better Than Gold also imagines how life might have been for a ten-year-old noble boy in the society that produced the Staffordshire Hoard. What would a boy at a royal court eat and wear, what would he be expected to learn, how would he spend his time? This focus on the details of daily life was one of the features I liked about The Tribute Bride and A Swarming of Bees, and it was pleasant to see it again here.

Better Than Gold has the same gentle tone as The Tribute Bride and A Swarming of Bees. Most of the people, most of the time, treat each other decently. There is violence – human sacrifice and battles with many casualties – but because of Egfrid’s age he is rarely directly involved and most of the violence happens in the background. Like the author’s other books, the women are very much to the fore. Queen Cynewise has much authority at the Mercian court, ruling the kingdom while Penda is away on campaign and exercising considerable influence when he is back. Their rule of Mercia seems to be very much a joint enterprise. Like Acha in The Tribute Bride, the royal women in Better Than Gold play a crucial role as peaceweavers, both by formal marriage alliance and in the day-to-day management of court life, ever alert to the need to head off situations where drink and ego threaten to spark conflict and even war.

Better Than Gold is a much simpler and shorter story than the young adult mystery Wolf Girl. I’d estimate its length at around 20,000–25,000 words, roughly a quarter of the length of a ‘standard’ adult novel. I would guess it is aimed at a younger audience, perhaps about the same age as the ten-year-old protagonist. The complex political rivalries and feuds between the various kingdoms are seen mainly in family terms – appropriately, since the conventions of blood-feud and vengeance for a kinsman meant that early English warfare could have a personal as well as a political dimension. It’s clearly written in straightforward modern English, with some archaic terms to add a period flavour, such as the Old English names for the months (Blood-month, Offerings-month, etc. More information on the Old English calendar and the month-names can be found in my article here). I was pleased to see that the original Old English personal names have been kept, e.g. Egfrid, Cynewise. Some names have been replaced by nicknames to avoid potential confusion between similar names within a family, e.g. Egfrid’s dead uncle Oswald is referred to by his (historically documented) nickname of Whiteblade to avoid confusion with his brother Oswy.

A short Author’s Note at the end briefly outlines some of the underlying history and provides a link to learn more about the Staffordshire Hoard. Unfortunately there’s no map on which a reader could follow Egfrid’s travels, although as most of the place names are given in their modern forms (Bamburgh rather than Bebbanburgh, Tamworth rather than Tameworthig) they could be identified on a modern map.

Charming tale about life at the royal courts of seventh-century England and the sort of events that might lie behind the burial of the magnificent Staffordshire Hoard.

Staffordshire Hoard – revisited

Jonathan Jarrett has some interesting additional information on the Staffordshire Hoard on his blog, reporting from a seminar held at Oxford in October this year. Read the article here.

The Staffordshire Hoard
I’m sure you all remember the Staffordshire Hoard, discovered in 2009. If you need to refresh your memory, see my post on the Hoard and the comments thread, and Jonathan’s post on Cliopatria.

The Hoard was discovered at Hammerwich (Map here), in the heartland of the early medieval kingdom of Mercia. It is near the Mercian royal centre at Tamworth and the Mercian ecclesiastical centre at Lichfield, and very close to the Roman road of Watling Street.

At the time of the announcement of the discovery, it was thought that the hoard’s burial site was a field in the middle of nowhere, as there was no evidence of any structures in the vicinity. This, coupled with its proximity to the road, supported interpretations suggesting that the Staffordshire Hoard was buried in a hurry in adverse circumstances by someone who was unable to recover it subsequently, perhaps because the people who buried it were being pursued by an enemy and did not survive to recover the hoard or reveal its location. Whether this represented someone burying their wealth for safekeeping from enemies, an attempt to recover tribute yielded unwillingly by a defeated army, a sort of seventh-century jewel heist (theft of a royal treasury?) gone disastrously wrong, or any number of other interpretations, is open to discussion.

Was the Staffordshire Hoard originally under a mound?
Jonathan’s blog post adds the important new information that the site of the hoard might originally have been under a mound.

“It also emerged later that the deposition site may have once had a mound over it, which would have been quite clear from the road”
-- http://tenthmedieval.wordpress.com/2010/11/03/seminary-lxviii-a-namecheck-to-be-treasured/

If true, this turns the idea of a hasty burial completely on its head. Raising a mound is a non-trivial task requiring quite a lot of labour (how much depends on the size of the mound). It’s not something you can do in a hurry with an enemy in hot pursuit. If there was a mound raised over the Staffordshire Hoard, it suggests that the hoard was deposited deliberately and was meant to be marked and remembered.

Valuable objects buried under a mound are well-known from rich graves, like the ones at Sutton Hoo. However, the Staffordshire Hoard site was excavated by archaeologists and no trace of a grave was discovered in the vicinity. Furthermore, the composition of the Staffordshire Hoard was very peculiar, containing a high proportion of precious metal fittings from military equipment, such as sword pommels and helmet pieces, no actual weapons, and no belt fittings, buckles, brooches or strap-ends. This composition is nothing like any grave assemblage I have ever heard of. So it doesn’t look likely that the Staffordshire Hoard was a rich burial (or if it was, it was a very peculiar one).

A ritual deposit?
In my original post I mentioned the possibility of a ritual deposit in passing, but did not consider it in detail because it seemed too inconsistent with the idea of a hurried deposition. However, the suggestion of a mound raised over the site brings the possibility of a deliberate ritual deposit back into the frame.

Ritual deposition of the military equipment of a defeated army is recorded in Germany and southern Scandinavia in the early centuries AD. Tacitus recounts a battle between two first-century German tribes, the Hermundari and the Chatti, in which the entire defeated army and its equipment was sacrificed to the gods:

In the same summer, a great battle was waged between the Hermunduri and Chatti,
both attempting to appropriate by force a river which was at once a rich source
for salt and the frontier line between the tribes. Apart from their
passion for deciding all questions by the sword, they held an ingrained
religious belief that this district was peculiarly close to heaven
[…..]
The struggle, which went in favour of the Hermunduri, was the more
disastrousº to the Chatti in that both sides
consecrated, in the event of victory, the adverse host to Mars and Mercury; a
vow implying the extermination of horses, men, and all objects whatsoever.

--Tacitus, Annals of Imperial Rome, Book 13 ch 57, available online

Archaeological discoveries in Denmark and southern Sweden show that this was not a literary exaggeration or invention; for example, at Illerup in Denmark entire armies’ military equipment has been found systematically broken and dropped into a lake (see this English-language article on the Illerup website for information).

Extrapolating from first- or second-century Germany and Denmark to seventh- or eighth-century England is speculative at best, as should surely go without saying. That said, Tacitus’ description and the Illerup finds offer at least an intriguing parallel. The Staffordshire Hoard contained a high proportion of military items, consistent with an assemblage of war gear. The rich weapon fittings in the Staffordshire Hoard had been stripped from the weapons they had originally adorned, which could be dismantling for re-use or could also be consistent with a form of symbolic destruction. The helmet pieces in the Staffordshire Hoard are fragments of multiple helmets, not pieces of the same helmet, suggesting that the hoard was part of a larger collection and that some of the material ended up elsewhere (see Jonathan’s post), which is reminiscent of the findings from Illerup of different pieces of the same sword in different bundles on the lake bed. This may even provide an answer to the question about what happened to the business end of the weapons – perhaps the blades ended up with the other bits of the various helmets, wherever that is or was.

The Staffordshire Hoard need not necessarily represent the spoils of a single battle. The items may have been accumulated in different places over time and brought together at a later date, perhaps as a tribute payment after a military defeat as Jonathan suggested in his Cliopatria article. Jonathan has the respectable historian’s wariness of romantic ‘storybook’ explanations, and rightly so, though I rather suspect that the deposition of 5 kg of gold composed mostly of fittings from high-status weapons was far from an everyday occurrence and therefore might reasonably be taken to indicate some extraordinary event. Perhaps the Staffordshire Hoard reflects some profoundly important struggle, in which the identity or survival of a kingdom or a people was seen as being at stake. An enormous ritual deposit, made in thanks for victory/survival, as a consequence of defeat, or in fulfilment of an oath, could fit into such a context.

The concept of a ritual deposit also offers a potential explanation for why the Staffordshire Hoard was not recovered – a ritual deposit is not meant to be recovered. Everyone knows it is there, that it is supposed to stay there for all time, and that disturbing it may have appalling consequences. The cup-stealing episode in Beowulf, where theft of a cup from a burial mound brings down the dragon’s wrath and results in the destruction of Beowulf (soon to be followed, it is hinted, by the destruction of his people), offers a glimpse of the sort of beliefs that may have prevailed, even after the conversion to Christianity if the Christian glosses in the poem are anything to go by. By the time such beliefs were no longer current and digging up burial mounds for treasure was permissible, the mound marking the location of the Staffordshire Hoard could have long since eroded away and the existence of the hoard have passed from memory. In a way, this is a simpler explanation than the idea that no-one who buried the Staffordshire Hoard survived to tell the tale.

References
Tacitus, Annals of Imperial Rome, Book 13 ch 57, available online

Sword Song, by Bernard Cornwell. Book review

Edition reviewed: Harper, 2008. ISBN 978-0-00-721973-5. 360 pages.

Fourth in Bernard Cornwell’s Uhtred series, Sword Song is set in 885. Alfred of Wessex (later known as Alfred the Great), Aethelred of Mercia, Alfred’s daughter Aethelflaed and the Danish leader Haesten are based on historical figures. All the main characters are fictional.

Uhtred of Bebbanburg is now 28, married to his beloved Gisela, sister of the Danish king of Northumbria (told in Book 3, The Lords of the North). Still reluctantly oath-bound to serve King Alfred of Wessex, he is lord of the burh of Coccham (modern Cookham) on Wessex’s eastern border. Alfred and the Danes have signed a treaty, ceding north and east England to Danish rule (the Danelaw), and the land is more or less at peace. When a new group of Norse adventurers come to Lundene (modern London) bent on conquering Wessex, they offer to recognise Uhtred as King of Mercia if he will join them. Uhtred has to choose between allying with the Danes, whom he likes but does not entirely trust, and remaining loyal to Alfred, whom he neither likes nor trusts but to whom he is bound by a sworn oath. When Aethelflaed, Alfred’s lovely and spirited daughter, enters the frame, Uhtred’s uncertain loyalties shape the fate of kingdoms.

Years ago, I once persuaded a gentleman in my local bookstore who said he loved the Sharpe series but had got fed up with Bernard Cornwell’s medieval novels to try The Last Kingdom, on the grounds that it was essentially Sharpe with Vikings and battleaxes instead of rifles and Frenchmen. Well, it seems that early assessment was not too far off the mark. The Uhtred series seems to get more like Sharpe with each succeeding book. Sword Song has all the trademark ingredients: the detailed blood-splattered battle scenes; the resentful hero from the wrong side of the tracks with an unrivalled talent for violence and war; the incompetent/vicious/deceitful/hypocritical enemies in high places on his own side; a plot constructed around one or two set-piece battles. In Finan, the capable Irish warrior introduced in Book 3 (Lords of the North) and now Uhtred’s loyal friend and comrade-in-arms, there may even be an echo of Sergeant Harper. Sword Song is located firmly in the south along the River Thames, so Ragnar and the likeable Guthred of Northumbria don’t make an appearance, but Finan and the ebullient Welsh warrior-turned priest Father Pyrlig inject a cheerful note into the proceedings.

All the usual features of the Uhtred series are present too: Vikings are cool; whenever Uhtred kills someone he quite likes he makes sure to put a weapon in the man’s hand so they can drink together in the corpse-hall after death; Christianity is “…a religion that sucks joy from this world like dusk swallowing daylight…” and its senior clergy are cruel woman-oppressing hypocrites; Uhtred miraculously overcomes impossible odds. Fans of the series so far will know pretty much what to expect.

Sword Song is a quick, easy and undemanding read. The plot is somewhat average, and in places it feels almost as if it has been padded out to fill in the space between the battles (e.g. a dozen pages devoted to an obscure Old Testament ceremony with no evidence of it ever having been used by the relevant characters). As one would expect, the set-piece battle scenes are suitably bloodstained, brutal and graphic. For me the highlight was the assault on Lundene in the middle of the book, with its attack and counter-attack and its bitter fighting among the gates and ramparts of the old Roman fortifications.

Poor Aethelred of Mercia gets a very unflattering portrayal, and probably has grounds for joining the Support Group for People Unfairly Maligned in Historical Fiction. Not that much is known about Aethelred, and he may well not have been the greatest ruler ever, but there’s no evidence that he was a stupid wife-beating snake. It’s his misfortune to be in the right historical place at the right time to be cast as a fictional hero’s antagonist, and I suspect he also has to be cast as a loathsome creep so that the reader won’t mind when Aethelflaed cuckolds him. Bernard Cornwell, to his credit, acknowledges in his Historical Note that he has probably been extremely unfair to the real Aethelred.

The Historical Note also acknowledges that there is more fiction in Sword Song than in the previous Uhtred novels. In particular, the major plot strand involving Aethelflaed is completely fictional, as acknowledged in the Note. I can see its attraction; it has the same obvious dramatic appeal as a meeting between Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I. I can’t help wishing, however, that something more interesting had been made of it. The historical Aethelflaed was a remarkable woman, a highly effective ruler of Mercia whose death was respectfully noted in the Annals of Ulster (“U918.5. Ethelfled, a very famous queen of the Saxons, dies”) and Annales Cambriae (“917. Queen Aethelflaed died”). In Sword Song, however, she is merely beautiful and haughty and spends most of the novel being taken here and taken there, willingly or otherwise, by the various men in her life. Perhaps this is because she is still only about fourteen or fifteen, and maybe she will come into her own in the later novels in the series. I hope so.

Entertaining adventure yarn with Cornwell’s trademark battle scenes carrying a rather slight plot. Not his best, but still an enjoyable read.

Staffordshire Hoard

Some of the sword hilt fittings, image courtesy of the Staffordshire Hoard website photograph set on Flickr.








A hoard of over 1500 gold and silver artefacts of extremely high quality, many decorated with precious stones, has been discovered in Staffordshire. It has been declared as treasure trove. The date of the hoard is uncertain, but according to the summary report on the official website, the objects analysed so far can be dated on stylistic grounds to the period between the late sixth and early eighth century. A Biblical inscription on a gold strip and two, possibly three, gold crosses may indicate that at least some of the objects may have originally had Christian owners. The date of the inscription is uncertain, with late seventh/early eighth century and eighth/ninth century both suggested. (It should be noted that different objects within a hoard can be of different ages, and that the date of the latest object in the assemblage gives the earliest date at which the hoard could have been buried).

The exact location of the find has not been released. A press report said the site was somewhere near Lichfield. The official website says “in the heartland of the Kingdom of Mercia”, which would be consistent with a location near Lichfield.

Most of the objects are associated with weapons and war gear, e.g. 84 pommel caps and 71 hilt fittings from swords or seaxes (a seax was a long fighting knife or short sword) have been identified so far. Some of the items may be helmet fittings, although it is not yet known how many helmets they represent. There are no dress fittings, brooches or jewellery normally associated with women, and there are no buckles, baldric fittings or strap-ends.

Whatever its origin and whoever buried it, the hoard so far looks like a large collection of very high-status military equipment.

The importance of the hoard can hardly be overstated. It will be fascinating to see what further information emerges from research on the hoard over the next few years.

Much more information, including pictures, on the official website. It was a bit slow to load this morning, and now appears to be down altogether (no doubt due to pressure of traffic following this morning’s announcement!), but I daresay it will come back to life in a few days once the fuss has died down. So far the press reports I’ve read mostly seem to be rephrasing the official press release.
More photos on the Staffordshire Hoard set on Flickr.

Speculation
Okay, so where might the hoard have come from and who might have buried it? This is essentially speculation, but hey, speculation is fun.

The enormous wealth represented, both by the sheer quantity of precious metal and the very high quality of the craftsmanship, is indicative that the original objects belonged to people of very high status. A reasonably logical inference is that the hoard itself also belonged to a person or group of very high status. (I suppose it could be the results of the greatest ever early medieval jewel heist, but let’s apply Occam’s Razor for the time being.) The amount of precious metal is several times greater than in the Sutton Hoo ship burial, and the craftsmanship appears to be as high, as far as I can tell from the photographs, so we can reasonably infer that the hoard also belonged to someone right at the top of society, i.e. a king.

The hoard was found in Staffordshire, possibly near Lichfield. The area that is now Staffordshire was the heart of the early medieval 'Anglo-Saxon' Kingdom of Mercia. The kings of Mercia had a royal centre at Tamworth, and the Mercian bishopric (later, temporarily, an archbishopric) was based at Lichfield. The most likely people to have owned a vast amount of wealth that ended up buried near the royal centres of the Kingdom of Mercia are, logically, the kings of Mercia.

One of the Christian crosses in the hoard had been folded up as if to squash it into a small space, and it has been suggested that this may indicate that the hoard was buried by pagans. However, I wouldn’t myself put too much weight on that. It seems to me quite possible that the cross could have been squashed when the hoard was buried, especially if it was buried in a hurry in times of trouble, and the folding may represent haste rather than disrespect as such. Unless there's more evidence, I’m not convinced that the folded cross tells us much, if anything, about the religion of the people who buried the hoard, as distinct from the circumstances of the deposition.

The overwhelming predominance of military objects in the hoard suggests that it represents the result of a specific selection process rather than a random collection of valuable objects. It may be that the royal treasury of Mercia was carefully sorted, with military gear kept in one place, jewellery in another, coins in another, precious tableware in another etc, and we just happen to have found the military component. Another possibility is that the hoard represents a sort of “trophy cabinet”, a collection of weapons and armour taken from defeated enemies or tributary kings and displayed prominently in the royal hall or royal church to demonstrate the king’s power and military success.

So far, the date range of the objects covers the late sixth to early eighth century, possibly into the eighth/ninth century if the later date for the inscription is confirmed. Mercia was not short of highly successful and aggressive kings pursuing military expansion at the expense of their neighbours during this period, starting with Penda (c. 633 to 655) and going through to Aethelbald (716-757) and Offa, of Offa’s Dyke fame (757-796). It would not be at all surprising if one or several of these kings (or indeed others whose names have not come down to us) had accumulated a large collection of military trophies taken as booty from defeated enemies, tribute from subordinate rulers and/or gifts from allies. The hoard could have been acquired all of a piece by one of the later kings, or successively added to by several generations. Detailed research might generate sufficient evidence to tell which.

So far, no object in the hoard needs to be dated to later than the early eighth century (although this may change depending on the dating of the inscription). However, that doesn’t mean the hoard was buried then. It may have been buried later, perhaps considerably later, than the latest object within it.

Why might the hoard have been buried? Ritual deposit is one possibility, but a common reason for burying a treasure hoard is to keep it safe from real or perceived enemies in times of trouble. Early medieval Mercia wasn’t short of trouble. Its militarily aggressive kings didn’t always win their wars against other kingdoms, and domestic politics could be violent. For example, Aethelbald, Offa’s predecessor, was assassinated in 757 and Offa had to fight his way to the throne. In the early ninth century Mercia was defeated by the kings of Wessex, and in the mid ninth century the Danes (Vikings if you prefer) arrived and took control. Incidents such as these – and no doubt many others – could provide a context in which a king’s hoard could be buried for safekeeping and the location subsequently lost.

If detailed research confirms the dating as early eighth century, I’d probably look to the political turmoil surrounding Aethelbald’s death and Offa’s accession in 757-758 as a plausible context for the deposition of the hoard. If the dating moves into the ninth century, then the Danish invasion begins to come to the fore as a possibility.

The Staffordshire Hoard looks like one of the most significant finds since Sutton Hoo, and it will be interesting to see what further research can tell us about the hoard and the society from which it came.

Edit: Coverage of the find on BBC Radio 4's PM news programme is available on the BBC iPlayer for the next 7 days. It's the lead item on the news sumamry at the beginning, then fast forward to 5 minutes in for the start of the report and interviews. The interview with historian Michael Wood is especially interesting, He draws the same possible connection with the royal Mercian bishopric at Lichfield, founded by St Chad, as I mention in the post.

Edit: Interesting discussion of the find by Jonathan Jarrett on Cliopatria.

Map links
Lichfield
Tamworth

Cearl, King of the Mercians

Mercia was an early medieval kingdom in what is now the Midland region of England. In the mid-seventh century under King Penda and again in the eighth under King Offa, it was among the most powerful kingdoms in Britain. Cearl is the first king of Mercia recorded in the surviving sources. What can we say about him?

Evidence

Bede

Among these were Osfrid and Eadfrid, sons of King Edwin, who were both born to him in exile of Coenburg, daughter of Cearl, King of the Mercians

--Bede, Ecclesiastical History, Book II Ch. 14]

Inferences

The line quoted above is the sole mention of Cearl in any historical source, which is not a lot to go on, even by the standards of early medieval history. However, a few things can be inferred.

Date
Cearl had a daughter, Coenburh, who had borne two sons before 617 AD. Even if Coenburh was married young, say at age 15, and conceived her first child straight away, she can hardly have been born much after 600 AD and a few years before is more likely. By extension, her father Cearl cannot have been born much after 580, and some years before is more likely.

Lineage
Or, possibly, lack thereof. Cearl is not mentioned in the genealogy of the Mercian kings in the Anglian Collection or Historia Brittonum Ch 60. Either he was not in the direct line of ancestry of the later kings, perhaps belonging to a different branch of the royal family, or he belonged to a different dynasty altogether. There is a group of three C- names in the Anglian Collection genealogy (Creoda, Cynewald, Cnebba), placed in the generations immediately before Penda’s father Pybba. Alliteration was popular, though by no means universal, in Old English naming conventions, so these may indicate that Cearl belonged to a branch of the dynasty that claimed descent from one or other of these figures. But this is essentially speculation.

Political influence and power
Cearl married his daughter to a political exile from Deira who was on the run from Aethelferth of Bernicia/Northumbria at the time. Aethelferth’s military power is well documented. Bede describes him as very powerful and ambitious and credits him with military success over much Brittonic territory (Ecclesiastical History Book I Ch. 34). Aethelferth had won a major victory over the Irish of Dal Riada (roughly modern Argyll) in 603, and would win another over King Selyf of Powys at the Battle of Chester in 613/617, both kingdoms well removed from his core territory of Bernicia (approximate location map for Bernicia, Dal Riada and Powys on my website). Evidently Aethelferth was well capable of projecting his military power over considerable distances, with disastrous consequences for those on the receiving end. And Cearl of Mercia chose to form a marriage alliance with Aethelferth’s sworn enemy. Assuming he did it knowingly and was not stupid, this implies the following things to me:

• Cearl was presumably confident of his power and his ability to withstand Aethelferth in battle. Either he had delusions of grandeur, or he presumably controlled considerable military resources of his own, as ruler of a substantial kingdom and/or as part of a powerful group of allies and/or client kings


• Cearl could hardly have thought Aethelferth would not find out, so presumably he was prepared to challenge Aethelferth. Perhaps Aethelferth’s power was on the wane (or Cearl thought it was), and Cearl’s purpose with the marriage alliance was to pick a fight and claim Aethelferth’s dominions, or some of them, for himself. (A sort of early medieval equivalent of, “Come on, punk, make my day”).

If correct, this further implies that Cearl was ambitious, that he fancied expanding his power to the north (at least into Eadwine’s ancestral territory of Deira, and perhaps beyond that into Aethelferth’s own kingdom), and that he thought he had the means to do so.

Date of death
Cearl’s reign was certainly over by 633 AD, when Penda son of Pybba was ruling Mercia (Bede Book II Ch. 20). The date and circumstances of the end of Cearl’s reign are not known.

It is known that Cearl’s son-in-law Eadwine had changed his place of exile to the court of Raedwald of East Anglia before 617 (Bede, Book II Ch. 12). This may indicate that Cearl had simply changed his mind, perhaps having been threatened by Aethelferth (as we know Raedwald was) and decided that discretion was the better part of valour, or perhaps having decided that Eadwine was no longer a good bet or having taken a dislike to him.

Or it may indicate that Cearl had died or been deposed before 617, and his successor no longer wanted Eadwine in Mercia. The next king of the Mercians mentioned by Bede is Penda son of Pybba, who was ruling in Mercia by 633 AD. If the change of initial letter in the names of the Mercian kings from C- to P- is indicative of a change of dynasty, and if Eadwine’s departure indicates a change of political policy (very likely, since it is clear from Bede’s account that Penda and Eadwine were enemies), it is possible that Cearl was deposed as King of the Mercians by Penda or Penda’s predecessor at some time before 617.

It is not clear whether Penda was Cearl’s direct successor, or if there were one or more kings in between. Bede describes Penda in 633 as “a warrior of the Mercian royal house” and says that “from this time on” he ruled the Mercians, which would suggest that Penda became king in or around 633. If this is the case, it suggests that if Cearl was deposed before 617, it was by Penda’s predecessor(s) rather than by Penda himself.

Even if Cearl was deposed by a rival, his family may not have vanished entirely from Mercian history. A later king of the Mercians, Coenred, who reigned in 704-709 (Bede Book V Ch. 24), had the same first name element as Cearl’s daughter Coenburh. This may be pure coincidence, or it may indicate a connection with Cearl’s family.

References
Full-text sources available online are linked in the text.
Bede, Ecclesiastical history of the English people. Translated by Leo Sherley-Price. Penguin Classics, 1968, ISBN 0-14-044565-X.

The Whispering Bell, by Brian Sellars. Book review

Quaestor2000, 2009. ISBN 978-1-906836-01-6. 208 pages.

Disclaimer: The Whispering Bell is published by Quaestor2000, who are also publishing my novel Paths of Exile. However, I read The Whispering Bell before Quaestor2000 expressed interest in Paths of Exile.

The Whispering Bell is set in seventh-century ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Mercia, mainly in what is now the Derbyshire Peak District and the area around modern Sheffield. The main narrative spans the period from 633 to about 644, with a prologue in 620. All the main characters are fictional.

Orphaned by famine and war and raised as the ward of her father’s friend, a wealthy warrior, Wynflaed grows into a beautiful and accomplished woman, never knowing that she had a younger sister left behind by accident. When Mercia goes to war against Northumbria, Mercia’s king sends men to attack Wynflaed’s foster-father, who belongs to a rival faction. Only the kindness of the attackers’ leader, a young warrior called Wulfric, saves Wynflaed and her family from death. When Wulfric asks for Wynflaed as his wife, she is delighted to accept, and his father grants her lands and mining rights in the hills of the Peak District as her morning gift*. Wynflaed’s intelligence develops the near-defunct lead mine into a valuable asset, and with a loving husband and two healthy children it seems she has everything she could wish for. But her husband’s avaricious brother has designs on Wynflaed’s property, and news of Wulfric’s supposed death in battle gives him his chance. Outlawed and enslaved, if Wynflaed is to survive and regain what is rightfully hers she will need all her courage – and help from some unexpected quarters.

The novel is slow to start, and requires concentration to keep track of the large number of characters in different locations. I also found the prologue confusing because it took me several chapters to see how it linked to the main story. Once it gets going, however, it develops into a complex tale of love, friendship, loyalty and betrayal, with some unexpected turns.

The story focuses on the lives of relatively ordinary people, the middle-ranking warrior-farmers or people further down the social pecking order such as a mule-driver, a miner and a widow who takes in lodgers. Kings and aristocrats and their wars form the background to the story, but are not its main players. Details of daily life, such as buildings, food, farming, jewellery and possessions, are beautifully described, including a central role for the technology of mining and smelting lead. It’s known that the Romans exploited the lead ores of the Peak District, and the monks of Repton Abbey owned a lead mine at Wirksworth in the ninth century (when the Danes took it from them). A lead mine at Bakewell is also recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086. What happened in between is – as usual – a mystery. The Whispering Bell takes the premise that the lead resources were mined in the seventh century, on a rather smaller scale than the earlier Roman workings, which I think is highly plausible. I was delighted to see it play a key role in the story.

Wynflaed, the central character, is beautiful, intelligent, sweet-natured and thoroughly good, almost to the point of being too perfect, and the villain is pretty much unadulterated evil (though he is given a reason for his actions). For me, the large cast of secondary characters were the most vivid and memorable, from the none-too-bright but faithful young mule-driver Eadwin to the bawdy Widow Guthrum (Terry Pratchett’s Nanny Ogg would get on famously with her), the embittered miner Eofar, the kindly outlaw Rabbian (a sort of prototype Robin Hood) and the viper-tongued, fiercely independent Emma. There is a strong sense of a real, complex, changing world full of unexpected opportunities and setbacks, populated by real people busy getting on with their own lives.

The way the paths of Wynflaed and her (unrecognised) sister cross and re-cross in the novel has to be understood as the working of implacable Fate (Wyrd, an important concept in Old English), otherwise it might feel like rather too many coincidences. A good many things are left for the reader to work out from hints and clues in the text (e.g. the identity of Wynflaed’s lost sister), so this is a novel that rewards close attention. Sometimes I’d have welcomed a little more spelling out. Although the ending of Wynflaed and Wulfric’s story is pretty clearly resolved, I felt I wanted to know what happened to some of the other characters, especially Emma and Rabbian.

Landscape descriptions capture the narrow valleys, sparkling brooks and limestone uplands of the White Peak, and convey a sense of the wonder and mystery of its great natural caverns. A helpful map at the front of the book shows the location of the main places and allows the reader to follow the various characters’ journeys. I should perhaps mention that the dialogue is liberally sprinkled with those four-letter words traditionally considered ‘Anglo-Saxon’. For the most part they are used straightforwardly to describe the, ahem, body parts and activities in question, rather than as expletives, but readers who find words like c--- and f--- offensive may like to take note. The language uses a large number of archaic terms, so readers who aren’t familiar with Old English will be glad to know that a glossary at the back provides translations.

A complex tale of greed, jealousy, loyalty, betrayal and love set in the turbulent world of seventh-century England.


*Morning gift (Old English: morgengifu). A gift of money or property made by the bridegroom’s family to the bride the morning after consummation of the marriage. It was solely hers by right, remained her property even if she was widowed, and she could manage it or dispose of it without consulting her husband.