The scene is familiar to most students of English history. In 664 A.D., the Northumbrian kings Oswiu and his son Alhfrith met with their clergy at Whitby to resolve (in Bede’s words) “a great and active controversy about the keeping of Easter.” Oswiu, who presided over the council, listened patiently to a long and often bitter debate between the Irish and Roman advocates. On the surface, it was an unequal contest, for the traditions of Iona were upheld by the king’s own bishop, Colman, while those of Rome were championed by a young abbot, Wilfrid, a protégé of Alhfrith.
But once again David slew Goliath. Oswiu, fearing for the welfare of his soul, pronounced in favor of the Apostle Peter, the hostiarius … qui claues tenere probatur, thus turning his back on his own childhood teachings. “When the king had spoken, all who were seated there or standing by, both high and low, gave up their imperfect rules, and readily accepted in their place those which they recognized to be better.”
Bede portrayed the Council of Whitby as the decisive confrontation in his native Northumbria between the rival ecclesiastical traditions of Rome and Iona. For him, the Roman triumph, the climax of the third book of his Ecclesiastical History, signified that the Northumbrian church would no longer be guided by “a handful of people in the remotest of islands,” but would rejoin the “catholic and apostolic” Church of Christ. Oswiu’s dramatic conversion at Whitby was thus a crucial step in the growth of Christian unity in the British Isles.
That Bede’s interpretation of the council has largely prevailed is quite understandable. Bede was not only the greatest historian of his age, but is also the only source for much of what we know about pre-Viking England. A second, and more contemporary, source does, however, exist for the Council of Whitby: Eddius’s Life of St. Wilfrid. A comparison of the two accounts has led a number of historians to question Bede’s assessment of the council. The present paper will expand upon these doubts and offer a reappraisal of the purposes and results of Whitby. The council cannot be explained solely in terms of the Easter controversy, as Bede would have us believe. Rather, the contemporary significance of Whitby may have been as much political as liturgical.
Bede, an eighth-century cleric who wrote the Historia Ecclesiastica primarily to edify, had good reason to emphasize the spiritual issues resolved at the council. His prior interest in computistical matters, coupled with his general theme of the growth of Christian unity among the English people, undoubtedly shaped his portrayal of the synod. Nonetheless, to understand fully what transpired at Whitby in 664, one must also take into account certain political factors neglected by Bede. Among the most important of these were Alhfrith’s aspirations to his father’s throne; Oswiu’s fading position as bretwalda, that is, as overlord of the southern kings; the growing challenge to Oswiu’s supremacy from Mercia; and, finally, the recent death of Deusdedit, Archbishop of Canterbury.
While we must often rely upon the facts which Bede records, we should regard his interpretations and conclusions with the same skepticism that we would accord any other historian’s. Bede’s interpretation of Whitby as the climactic resolution of a long-standing dispute over Easter quite simply is not substantiated by the evidence that he adduces for it. We can see this clearly in the History‘s discussion of the origin of the council.
According to Bede, there were both practical and spiritual reasons for deciding the Easter controversy in 664. Oswiu’s queen, Eanflaed, had been reared in Kent after the death of her father, King Edwin. Even after her marriage to her Bernician kinsman in 643, she and her entourage (regina Eanfled cum suis) kept the Roman Easter, having brought with them from Kent a priest named Romanus. Her husband, however, like his brother Oswald, had been educated and baptized at Iona, where the sons of Aethelfrith along with a great number of young Bernician noblemen had found refuge from the hostility of the Deiran King Edwin. Oswiu insisted that there was nothing better than the usages that he had learned there.
Consequently, whenever the Irish and Roman reckonings fixed different dates for Easter, the Northumbrian court found itself in an awkward position. To quote Bede: “Hence it is said (fertur) that in these days it sometimes happened that Easter was celebrated twice in the same year, so that the king had finished the fast and was keeping Easter Sunday, while the queen and her people were still in Lent and observing Palm Sunday.”
As long as Bishop Aidan was alive, everyone tolerated the embarrassment and inconvenience of a religiously divided court. Aidan, after all, was so saintly that even ardent Romanists were reluctant to offend him. But with his death the suppressed tensions burst forth. Even the common folk were drawn into this conflict. For there were many “who feared that, though they had received the name Christian, they were running or had run in vain.” As good Christian rulers, the Irish-educated Oswiu and his Romanist son Alhfrith were obliged to clear away this confusion. It was therefore decided that a council should be held to resolve the question of Easter and other subjects of dispute between Rome and Iona.
Historians have pounced upon Bede’s picturesque description of Oswiu’s domestic difficulties to explain the calling of the council in 664. One often reads that in 664 (or 663, if the historian is following Stenton’s mistaken redating) Oswiu had recently experienced the inconvenience of a dual Easter celebration, which was severe enough to convince him to resolve the problem once and for all. On the surface, this is an attractive suggestion; it is a plausible reading of Bede’s text. Unfortunately, it is specious. Put simply, Whitby was not called because the Irish and Roman Easter had suddenly fallen out of synchronism.
We cannot reconstruct with certainty the Irish Easter cycle, since the system of epacts it used remains a matter of conjecture. The epacts, however, of either the Supputatio Romana or the more empirically correct Alexandrine tables are the most likely candidates. B. MacCarthy produced an Easter cycle based upon the former, reasoning that the 84-year cycle that prevailed among the Celts in the seventh century had been brought to Britain from the Council of Arles (314).
D. J. O’Connell argued against this, contending that the epacts were probably corrected by the end of the sixth century, and thus were likely Alexandrine at the time of Whitby. The result, as one might expect, is that these two tables give differing dates for the Irish Easters of the seventh century. One of the few things upon which MacCarthy and O’Connell agree, in fact, is that the years 663 through 665 were unexceptional in terms of the Roman and Irish Easter cycles. Thus by MacCarthy’s calculations, the Irish celebrated Easter in 664 on the 14th of April while the Romans kept the festival one week later. This, however, was by no means a unique event. The same situation had occurred in fourteen of the twenty-two years of Oswiu’s and Eanflaed’s marriage.
Turning to O’Connell’s table, we find that the Irish and Roman Easters rarely diverged in the mid-seventh century. On this reconstruction, the Irish and the Romans celebrated Easter on the same day nineteen times during the period 643 (the year of the royal wedding) to 665. MacCarthy and O’Connell agree, moreover, that in 665 the Irish and Roman Easters would fall on the same day. The conclusion to be drawn is clear: in 664 there was no immediate practical necessity for reconciling the two Easter cycles.
Nor is it plausible to view the Easter question in Northumbria as a great and active controversy chronically plaguing the consciences of the devout from the days of St. Aidan on. Certainly, Bede implies that there had been a great deal of confusion and unhappiness over the divergent Easter practices even in the 640s. But if the Northumbrians were riddled with doubts, they hid their concern well. Although Aidan died in 651, a synod was not convoked until 664. This means that the “distraught” Northumbrians suffered their uncertainty through the full ten years of Finan’s episcopacy, and then, instead of taking up the matter upon the election of his successor, Colman, they patiently waited another three years.
During this entire period Bede describes but a single disputation upon this topic preceding the one that ended at Whitby. This pitted Bishop Finan against another Irishman, the peregrinus Ronan. When their debate had ended—and it is significant that the impetus for such a debate had come from outside Northumbria—the Northumbrian church remained firmly within Iona’s sphere of influence.
Bede’s explanation of the calling of the council thus fails to withstand scrutiny. There was more to Whitby than the desire of a king to resolve a domestic problem or unburden his people of their spiritual anxiety. Undoubtedly, the Easter question was of vital importance to men such as Wilfrid and Colman. But the council was not convoked by the Northumbrian clergy. Bede clearly suggests that the two kings, Oswiu and Alhfrith, were responsible for convening the synod, and this seems the most reasonable. Upon examining the sources, it becomes evident that father and son had excellent, if conflicting, political reasons for desiring a synod upon the question of Easter in 664.
Let us consider Alhfrith first. Henry Mayr-Harting and Eric John have both stressed the importance of Alhfrith in the calling of Whitby. John thus contended that the council is “best explained by the perennial tensions of Northumbrian politics.” When Alhfrith, who ruled Deira under his father, converted to the Roman ways, he added a religious dimension to the political and dynastic tensions already existing between the two kingdoms composing Northumbria. Oswiu’s decision at Whitby defused the situation, but the Bernician king paid a price: “obedience to papal commands and the removal of the Northumbrian cathedra to Deira.” Mayr-Harting added to this thesis by arguing that Alhfrith was largely responsible for convoking the council, for the young king saw in the Easter controversy an opportunity “to bring political pressure to bear and weaken the influence of his father in Bernicia.”
While this interpretation has much to recommend it, neither Mayr-Harting nor John sufficiently explains why Alhfrith should have wished to bring political pressure to bear upon his father. The uncertainty of Anglo-Saxon royal succession suggests a possible motive. It has long been recognized that the Anglo-Saxons lacked an established rule of automatic succession. Although it seems that only members of the royal house (those within seven generations of a royal ancestor) were deemed worthy of kingship, descent within the cynecynn depended more upon ad hoc considerations than upon any constitutional principle. Strong kings were able to designate their successors, but the most common route to the throne appears to have been through election.
This was not the election by Witan so dear to the nineteenth-century historian, but rather “election” in the sense of securing the commendation of the nation’s magnates. The support of the nobility meant that the would-be king could back up his claim with force, and one should never underestimate the practical importance of force in the seventh century. In the year 685, for example, Caedwalla “began to contend for the kingdom” of Wessex, while in Kent, Eadric, who had been passed over for succession upon his father’s death, raised the South Saxons against his uncle Hlothhere. Hlothhere fell in battle, and Eadric became king of Kent. Civil strife was always a threat if there was more than one strong claimant to the throne. The troubled history of Northumbria in the second half of the eighth century bears eloquent witness to the chaos that could ensue from this royal survival of the fittest.
One of the few things that we can say with assurance about Alhfrith is that he eventually revolted against his father. Since Alhfrith ruled Deira under his father at the time of Whitby and disappears from all our sources soon after the council, it is a logical inference that his revolt took place soon after 664 A.D. Alhfrith’s disaffection may have arisen from this uncertainty over the Northumbrian succession. While the young sub-king’s position might superficially appear to have been secure in 664, it had actually deteriorated in recent years.
Alhfrith had emerged from the Battle of the Winwaed in 655 as Oswiu’s probable successor. His only true rival at that time was his cousin Oethelwald, St. Oswald’s son. Before the Winwaed, Oethelwald had ruled Deira under his uncle, but the relationship between the two appears to have been strained. Oethelwald, perhaps embittered by his uncle’s ascent to his father’s throne, threw in his lot with the Mercian king Penda. Although he seems to have betrayed the Mercians in the hour of the battle, his initial treachery against his kin cost him his kingdom and possibly his life. After the Winwaed, Alhfrith, who had fought at his father’s side, was rewarded with his cousin’s kingdom. Oswiu’s willingness to associate his son in the kingship of Northumbria is strong evidence that in 655/656 he considered Alhfrith to be his heir, a most reasonable assumption when one remembers that not only was Alhfrith a proven warrior but also Oswiu’s only adult legitimate son.
By 664, however, things had changed considerably to Alhfrith’s detriment. Oswiu’s second son, Ecgfrith, was now a man of nineteen, and, if we can trust the testimony of the Liber Eliensis, also his father’s favorite. Ecgfrith enjoyed a number of advantages over his older brother. His marriage to an East Anglian princess, for example, must have appeared a far more attractive connection than the Mercian princess whom Alhfrith had married a decade before. East Anglia, after all, was an ally of Northumbria, while Mercia under the rule of Alhfrith’s brother-in-law Wulfhere was an implacable foe. In addition, Ecgfrith was the son of the reigning queen, Eanflaed, while Alhfrith was most probably the product of an earlier marriage. This meant not only that Ecgfrith could depend upon his mother’s influence at court when the issue of the succession arose, but could also expect support in his brother’s kingdom, for as Eanflaed’s son, Ecgfrith was the grandson of King Edwin of Deira. With Edwin’s own sons dead, the native Deiran thegnage would naturally consider him heir to the house of Aelle. Alhfrith, on the other hand, could not claim as close kinship bonds with the traditional rulers of Deira.
Alhfrith appears to have become interested in the Roman usages in the late 650s. Without questioning his religious sincerity, one ought not to ignore the profound political implications of his conversion. By championing Rome, Alhfrith underscored his independence from his father and from the Bernician church. At the same time, his actions linked him both to his Deiran thenage, who had received Christianity thirty years before from the Roman missionary Paulinus, and, just as important, to the two greatest kingdoms still subject to Oswiu, Kent and Wessex. Significantly, when Alhfrith invited the ardent Romanist Wilfrid into his kingdom, he acted upon the advice of his “faithful friend,” Coenwealh, King of the West Saxons. Whether intentionally or not, Alhfrith seems to have gained political support from his conversion to the Roman cause.
It is tempting to view Alhfrith as the father of the great Easter controversy of 664. Both Bede and Eddius tell us that when Wilfrid arrived at the Deiran court the young king was already a Romanist. In fact, it was precisely because of Wilfrid’s orthodoxy that Alhfrith invested him first with ten hides of land at Stanford and then with an additional thirty at Ripon. The second grant involved an interesting complication. There was already a monastery at Ripon when Wilfrid received these thirty hides. Alhfrith had previously granted the land to Eata, the Abbot of the Bernician monastery of Melrose. Eata founded a monastery on the site, peopled it with monks transferred from Melrose, and organized it according to the rule practiced in his other foundation. Thus Ripon was originally part of the Columban paruchia in Northumbria.
Now, however, Alhfrith confronted Eata and his monks with an ultimatum—abandon the rites and customs of Iona for those of Rome or abandon Ripon. They chose the latter, and returned north to Melrose. At least two immediate results arose from this. First, Alhfrith had successfully transferred land from an individual loyal to Bishop Colman and subject to Oswiu to one more dependent upon himself, Wilfrid. Secondly, Alhfrith had delivered a blow against his father. Clerics at this time stood in a similar relationship to the king as retainers to a lord. The insult to Eata, thus, could only be taken as an insult to Eata’s lord, King Oswiu.
Plummer dated this transaction to 661. But there is no solid contemporary evidence for this. Rather, it seems that Plummer assumed that Wilfrid returned directly to Northumbria after the murder of his patron Annemundus in 658, and had immediately entered Alhfrith’s service. While plausible, this conjecture does lead to certain difficulties. Bede relates in his prose Life of Saint Cuthbert that soon after the saint had been expelled from Ripon and forced to return to Melrose, he fell ill from “a plague that was then ravaging the length and breadth of Britain.”
This is confirmed by the anonymous Historia Abbatum, for just about the time that Ceolfrith left Gilling for Ripon, his brother died of plague in Ireland. Although plague was not uncommon in seventh-century Britain, the magnitude of this pestilentia clearly suggests that it was the great plague of 664. If so, Cuthbert left Ripon in either 663 or 664. In that case, Alhfrith’s ejection of Eata and his monks might well have been the immediate cause of Whitby. Undoubtedly, it heightened tensions between the Irish and Roman factions in Northumbria.
Mayr-Harting’s contention that Alhfrith was the moving force behind the council has some merit, although it overstates the case and ignores Oswiu’s preeminence in this affair. Certainly, Alhfrith’s influence must explain the location of the synod within his provincia. Furthermore, the two leaders of the Roman party at Whitby were both intimately connected with the young king: Bishop Agilberht was Alhfrith’s guest at the time, and Wilfrid was his protégé. But if Alhfrith did indeed agitate for a council, what did he hope to gain?
It has been argued that Alhfrith intended Whitby to be a Deiran conference over which he would preside. Such a synod would have resulted in a condemnation of the Irish Easter and, most probably, a redistribution of monastic lands à la Ripon. Deira, however, was neither politically nor ecclesiastically independent at that time, and it is unlikely that Alhfrith would have challenged his father’s supremacy so directly. It would seem that the council was meant from the outset to be Northumbrian rather than Deiran.
Alhfrith may have seen a council as a means of weakening his father politically while strengthening his own prospects for the throne. He knew that his father, as king of Northumbria, would have to decide the Easter question. He had no reason to believe that Oswiu would suddenly abandon his lifelong allegiance to Iona. But whatever his father decided, Oswiu would be placed in an uncomfortable position. Reaffirming the Irish usage would alienate Coenwealh of Wessex and Egbert of Kent at a time when Oswiu was desperately trying to ward off the Mercian challenge.
Furthermore, Eanflaed and her retinue had clung tenaciously to the Roman usage throughout the marriage; a decision by her husband in favor of Iona could have repercussions at the Bernician court. Choosing Rome, on the other hand, would mean turning away from his Irish upbringing and his beloved bishop, Colman. Colman, who was bound by monastic obedience to the customs of Iona, would have to be replaced by a Romanist. The new bishop might well favor Alhfrith because of his proven devotion to Rome. In either case, Alhfrith would weaken his father’s authority.
But in spite of these obvious dangers, Oswiu was willing to preside over the council, which upon first glance is surprising. Almost everything about Oswiu’s participation in the synod is a bit odd. Bede tells us that the king had always looked to Iona for spiritual guidance before Whitby. In fact, despite his having a Romanist wife and son, the king had never entertained the possibility that his childhood religious training had been deficient in any way. Furthermore, he sat in judgment over an unevenly matched debate. On one side was his personal bishop, Colman, a man whom he “greatly loved for his innate prudence”; on the other was Wilfrid, a recently ordained priest, his son’s (and before that his wife’s) protégé.
Yet Oswiu decided in favor of Rome, and in a manner that is more than a little surprising. Oswiu’s verdict did not rest upon any of the technical arguments adduced by Wilfrid. Instead, he rendered his decision as if it had been a foregone conclusion. As Stenton has noted, “the appeal to St. Peter’s authority allowed the king to close the debate in a way which suggests his own decision had been made before it began.” As a final incongruous touch, Eddius tells us that Oswiu smiled when he asked the question that was to result in Colman’s forced resignation: “Who is greater in the kingdom of Heaven, Columba or the Apostle Peter?”
We must view the king’s decision against the backdrop of seventh-century politics. In the late summer or early autumn of 664, when Oswiu and his son called the council, Oswiu had a number of compelling reasons for declaring his loyalty to the Roman see. To understand his actions at Whitby—and his smile—we must first comprehend Oswiu’s political situation at the time: his eroding authority as bretwalda and the new challenge to his supremacy over the southern kingdoms brought on by Alhfrith’s conversion.
Political and religious supremacy went hand-in-hand in seventh-century England. As Oswiu’s own bishop, Colman must be thought of as the bishop of the Northumbrians rather than bishop of the see of Lindisfarne, just as Oswiu himself was king of all Northumbria and not simply of Bernicia. When Alhfrith, who was but a subregulus, chose the Roman customs over those of Lindisfarne and Iona, and underlined his conversion by expelling the Bernician monks from Ripon, he was indirectly challenging his father’s supremacy over Deira. Eric John is correct in saying that Oswiu’s conversion nipped this development in the bud, but one must also recognize that by co-opting the Romanist movement, Oswiu was acting out of weakness. By all rights, he should have found for Bishop Colman, and enforced his decision in the subject southern provincia. Yet he chose Rome, and for this decision to be explicable, it must be taken out of a purely Northumbrian context.
Oswiu had emerged from his victory at the Winwaed not only king of Northumbria but also bretwalda. Like his brother Oswald before him, Oswiu now had an imperium over all the southern kingdoms. But his preeminence at the time of the council was threatened by the resurgence of Mercian power. Although he may still have been nominally bretwalda in the summer of 664 (or at least recognized as such in the kingdoms of Kent and Wessex), Oswiu’s supremacy was being successfully challenged by the young and aggressive Wulfhere, Alhfrith’s brother-in-law. By 664, Wulfhere probably reigned directly over the kingdoms of Mercia, Middle Anglia, and Lindsey, and claimed the allegiance of the East and South Saxon kings.
Alhfrith’s conversion and the complications it introduced into the already unstable relationship between Bernicia and Deira thus came at a time when Oswiu saw his suzerainty over the southern kingdoms slipping away. In this context, the Paschal question took on new meaning. In itself, the debate over the proper calculation of Easter may have been less important in mid-seventh-century England than Bede, the master computist, would have us believe. But in the summer of 664, Oswiu found that it had become necessary that he resolve the controversy—and resolve it in favor of Rome.
For on July 14, Deusdedit, the Archbishop of Canterbury, had succumbed to the plague, leaving the primacy of England vacant. Bede’s account is vague about the temporal relationship between the death of the archbishop and the convoking of the council. A straightforward reading of Bede’s text might, in fact, lead one to believe that news of Deusdedit’s death did not arrive in Northumbria until well after the synod. According to Bede, Chad, who had been elected bishop in the wake of the council after Tuda’s death and Wilfrid’s departure for Gaul, journeyed to Kent for his consecration, unaware that Deusdedit had since passed away.
But this is one instance in which we must challenge Bede’s authority. Eddius’s Life of Wilfrid strongly implies that the Northumbrians were well aware of the archbishop’s demise before Chad was dispatched to Kent. In Eddius’s account, Wilfrid himself sought permission to seek consecration on the continent, arguing that such a journey was absolutely necessary if his ordination were to be considered valid by “catholics,” since there were no bishops then in Britain acceptable to the papacy. Even Wilfrid could not have challenged the validity of Deusdedit’s orders, for he had been raised to the episcopacy by Bishop Ithamar of Rochester, who in turn had been consecrated by Archbishop Honorius, “one of the disciples of the Blessed Gregory.” Since Deusdedit’s orthodoxy had never been suspect, one must conclude either that Eddius’s account is made out of whole cloth or that Wilfrid knew of the Kentish prelate’s death when he petitioned the Northumbrian kings and received their permission to go abroad for his consecration.
In spite of the problems raised by Bede’s narrative, the latter seems far more probable. Eddius wrote about twenty years before Bede and addressed himself to an audience—the monks of Ripon—who themselves had known the saint. Furthermore, Eddius himself appears to have been a member of Wilfrid’s familia, and certainly numbered among his sources individuals such as Abbot Tatberht, who had been intimates of his subject. Finally, if the author of the Life really is the Eddius Stephanus mentioned in chapter 14 of that work, as most historians have argued, then the matter is clinched. For this Eddius was a Kentish chanter whom Wilfrid had called to Northumbria in 669. The dating of the Council of Whitby, thus, is one case in which the much-maligned Life of Wilfrid is to be preferred to Bede’s History.
If we accept that Deusdedit’s death preceded the calling of the council, matters become far clearer. Oswiu, like Æthelberht before him, claimed as overlord of the southern kingdoms a sort of principatus over the whole English Church, and in consequence the right to name the new archbishop. Deusdedit’s death came at a critical time for Oswiu. Because of Mercia’s resurgence, it was crucial that Oswiu choose Deusdedit’s successor, for by doing so he would not only secure the support of an important ecclesiastic but would also dramatically assert his supremacy over the other English kings. On the other hand, failure to choose the new primate would underline Oswiu’s loss of power and prestige.
But naming the new archbishop meant winning papal approval for his candidate, and therein lay the problem. Oswiu could not be sure that Pope Vitalian would ignore his heterodoxy on the question of Easter, which had so recently been emphasized by his son’s conversion to the Roman practice. Oswiu realized that if the pope were to consider him a schismatic, there would be no hope for papal recognition of his choice. He also knew that a blow to his prestige of this sort would further undermine his authority over the orthodox kingdoms of Kent and Wessex. Hence Oswiu had reason to announce publicly and dramatically his allegiance to the papacy, even if this meant abandoning the teachings of his youth—teachings that had recently failed to secure him heaven’s favor in his earthly battles or to ward off the plague.
This point is worth emphasizing. Oswiu lived in an age in which the gulf between the spiritual and temporal had not yet emerged. A king could order the massacre of priests as a military precaution, and a rebel nobleman could seek the spiritual aid of an exiled bishop in his pursuit of a throne. Oswiu’s recent setbacks may well have figured in his decision to join his son in summoning a council in the late summer or early fall of 664 in order to resolve the Easter question in Northumbria and remove the stigma of heterodoxy.
This reconstruction is supported by correspondence between Vitalian and Oswiu. As Bede tells us, Oswiu had consulted with Egbert of Kent in either late 664 or early 665 about a replacement for Deusdedit. The candidate they settled upon was one of Deusdedit’s priests, Wigheard. “With the choice and consent of the Holy Church of the English people,” they sent him to Rome to be consecrated archbishop by Vitalian. Unfortunately, he and nearly all of his companions fell victim to the plague soon after they had been received by the pope.
Vitalian wrote Oswiu a most revealing letter to inform him of his candidate’s death. Since this letter mentions Oswiu’s recent conversion in a context which suggests some relationship between the Council of Whitby and Oswiu’s claim to the English imperium, we ought to examine it in some detail. The beginning of the letter is especially interesting:
To the most excellent lord, our son Oswiu, king of the Saxons, Bishop Vitalian, servant of the servants of God.
We have received your Highness’ welcome letter. As we read it we recognized your most sincere devotion and fervent desire for the life everlasting. We know that, by God’s protecting hand, you have been converted to the true and apostolic faith.
Oswiu had apparently sent with Wigheard a letter describing the Council of Whitby, the role played by the king in converting Northumbria to orthodoxy, and the present position of the Northumbrian king vis-à-vis other English rulers.
The manner in which Vitalian chose to address Oswiu—“the most excellent lord, our son, Oswiu, king of the Saxons (regi Saxonum)”—implies that he completely accepted the Northumbrian monarch’s claim to imperium. Not only does the title “king of the Saxons” suggest a wider suzerainty than “king of the Northumbrians,” it also echoes earlier papal letters to the bretwaldas Æthelberht and Edwin. Moreover, although both Oswiu and Egbert had sent Wigheard to Rome, Vitalian ignored the king of Kent, in whose realm the archiepiscopal see lay, and addressed himself only to Oswiu. This would have been exceedingly odd unless Oswiu’s letter to Vitalian had stressed the Northumbrian supremacy in England.
It would not be surprising if Oswiu had written to Vitalian in that vein. If Whitby had been intended as a public protestation of loyalty to the papacy, one would expect Oswiu to have made its results known to the pope. Oswiu’s letter would have dispelled any rumor of Northumbrian heterodoxy that might have reached the pope’s ear—a plausible concern since Wilfrid and Benedict Biscop, both ardent opponents of the Ionan usages, had recently sojourned in Rome. Furthermore, a letter of this sort was essential if Wigheard’s mission was to succeed, for it contained the credentials of the man who had chosen Wigheard to be the new primate of the English Church. Those credentials were apparently persuasive, as Vitalian’s language in the second half of his letter demonstrates:
Finally, in view of the length of the journey, we are not at present able to find a man who is entirely suitable to be your bishop, as you request in your letter. But as soon as a fit person is found, we will send him to your land… so that he may… entirely root out, with His blessing, the tares sown by the enemy throughout your island (uestra insula)… We trust that your Highness will speedily fulfil our desire and dedicate the whole of your island (totam suam) to Christ our God.
Passing over the pope’s problematic claim that he had been asked to choose the new archbishop, one is struck by the position Vitalian assigned Oswiu. Deusdedit’s successor is to be Oswiu’s own bishop, sent to the Northumbrian king’s patria, Kent. Vitalian apparently viewed Oswiu much as his predecessor Gregory I had viewed Æthelberht—as the ruler of all Britain. Vitalian’s use of such phrases as uestra insula and totam suam insulam shows that the Council of Whitby had brought about papal recognition of Oswiu’s claim to hegemony over the English, as he had intended.
The political and ecclesiastical situation in post-Whitby Northumbria becomes far more explicable once the synod is viewed in a political context. Whether or not Oswiu actually smiled before delivering his surprising decision at the council, as Eddius reports, he had reason to be pleased with himself. He had turned a potentially disastrous situation to his advantage. By finding for Rome, he had not only saved himself from possible religious friction within his imperium but he had completely outmanoeuvred his son.
Alhfrith seems to have gained nothing from the council. Although the Roman liturgy had prevailed and Colman had resigned, the Northumbrian Church remained firmly loyal to Oswiu. Colman’s successor, Tuda, was named by Oswiu and had himself been educated and consecrated by the Irish. Moreover, as a parting favor to Colman, Oswiu made Eata abbot of Lindisfarne. Eata, “one of those twelve boys of English race whom Aidan, when he first became bishop, had taken and instructed in Christ,” was the very abbot whose expulsion from Ripon had precipitated the Easter crisis. He and St. Hild, the abbess of Hartlepool and Streaneshalch, formed the nucleus of a post-Whitby “Irish” faction, which Eddius tendentiously labeled “Quartodeciman.” The hostility of these clerics toward Alhfrith’s protégé, Wilfrid, forms a major theme of the Life of that saint.
Wilfrid’s elevation to the bishopric must be viewed against this background. The Council of Whitby left a confused political and ecclesiastical scene in Northumbria. Tuda had succeeded Colman as “bishop of the Northumbrians,” that is, bishop of the Bernician and Deiran peoples, but succumbed almost immediately to plague. Before Oswiu filled the vacant see, Alhfrith petitioned his father to have his own bishop. Alhfrith apparently was not content to have a single bishop for both Bernicia and Deira, especially one based at Lindisfarne, near his father’s court. Therefore, upon Tuda’s death, he dispatched Wilfrid to Gaul “with the counsel and consent of his father Oswiu” to be consecrated bishop “for himself and his people” (eum sibi suisque).
The location of Wilfrid’s intended see is open to debate. Bede implies, and Eddius insists, that it was to be York. Modern historians’ concern with this question is perhaps excessive; the Roman diocesan system was not firmly established in the north of England until the synod of Hertford in 672. At the time of Whitby, “bishop” was in most cases a gentilic title; individuals such as Ceollach, Cedd, Colman, and Diuma were bishops of tribes, not cities, as on the continent. Moreover, as we have already seen, the relationship between a bishop and his king was intensely personal. It is more than coincidence that the see Oswald chose for his bishop, Aidan, was at Lindisfarne, within ten miles of Oswald’s court at Bamburgh. It is thus less important to determine where Wilfrid was to have had his cathedral than what people or peoples he was to serve. And here Bede is unambiguous: Wilfrid was to be Alhfrith’s own bishop—that is, bishop of the Deirans.
It is nevertheless surprising that Oswiu should have appointed Chad, another of Aidan’s former pupils, to the see of York while Wilfrid “lingered abroad” for his consecration. York was, after all, the royal city of the Deiran kingdom. This meant that a second bishop had been intruded into Wilfrid’s episcopal territory, and that the see of the Bernician king’s own bishop had been transferred from Lindisfarne to the heart of his son’s kingdom. When Wilfrid finally returned, “it became obvious that a wrong deed had been done. He, however, returned to his post of abbot of the monastery and humbly dwelt once more in Ripon for three years.”
Both Bede and Eddius seem to be less than forthcoming about Oswiu’s usurpation of his son’s royal prerogative. Bede is most reticent about these matters, which is only natural when one considers the prestige that both Wilfrid and Chad enjoyed in his day, while Eddius is unabashedly partisan. As Eric John argues, Bede’s narrative implies that Oswiu chose Chad because Wilfrid had forfeited his see by delaying his return. Yet this does not explain why Oswiu—and not Alhfrith—had appointed Wilfrid’s successor. Eddius is more explicit about Oswiu’s reasons:
“After a lapse of time, when Saint Wilfrid the Bishop did not arrive from across the sea, King Oswiu, moved by envy and at the instigation of the ancient foe, consented to allow another to forestall him in an irregular manner; for he was instructed by those who adhered to the Quartodeciman party in opposition to the role of the Apostolic See.”
Once again we must deal with Alhfrith’s puzzling absence from these deliberations. Even granting that Oswiu had come to regret his former consent to Wilfrid’s elevation, it is nevertheless odd that Eddius should be so silent about Alhfrith’s defense of his friend and personal bishop.
The solution to these problems may well lie, as Plummer has suggested, in Alhfrith’s fate after Whitby. Bede relates that the young king, like his cousin Oethelwald, eventually took up arms against Oswiu. Alhfrith’s ill-fated revolt probably took place soon after the Council of Whitby. Alhfrith disappears from our sources soon after the council. While this may be understandable in Bede’s History, it is more curious for the Life of Wilfrid, in which the young king had been given a prominent role as Wilfrid’s patron. Furthermore, Bede mentions in his Historia Abbatum that Alhfrith had planned to visit Rome about this time, but that his father forbade him to leave the kingdom. If Alhfrith planned this trip, as is possible, soon after the council, Oswiu’s decision to keep his son within his reach might be evidence of the growing mistrust between the two.
If we are correct in dating Alhfrith’s rebellion to the latter part of 664 or the early months of 665, the ecclesiastical situation at that time becomes much clearer. Wilfrid “lingered abroad” out of prudence, for while in Gaul he may well have learned of his patron’s fall. When he deemed it safe to return to his homeland, he retired to Ripon rather than contest Chad’s right to the see of York, because in a very real sense Chad had not usurped his position. Wilfrid had not merely been expelled from his intended see; his office had been abolished, for he had been consecrated bishop for Alhfrith and his people, but now Alhfrith was dead or in exile. In his place, Oswiu ruled directly, and Chad was his bishop.
This interpretation would also explain the movement of the Northumbrian see from Lindisfarne to York. If Alhfrith had indeed rebelled, it is likely that Oswiu, once he had defeated his son, would have moved his government south to bring Deira under closer supervision. In this case, Oswiu would have established his court in the Deiran regia civitas, York, instead of the Bernician chief city, Bamburgh. Similarly, his bishop, Chad, would have chosen York for his see rather than Lindisfarne.
The nature of our evidence does not permit us to be dogmatic about our conclusions. Nonetheless, it is likely that Bede’s interpretation of the purposes and results of the Council of Whitby obscures the political issues that underlay the Easter controversy in Northumbria. In itself, the debate over the proper manner in which Easter was to be calculated must have interested Bede, the greatest computist of his age, far more than it did Oswiu, who actually decided the question at Whitby. But in the summer of 664, the liturgical differences between the established Celtic Church in Northumbria and the Romanist churches of Kent and Wessex became politically significant. The ability to choose the Archbishop of Canterbury was one sign of being bretwalda.
At a time when Oswiu’s hegemony was being challenged by the reemergence of Mercia, the Northumbrian king could not afford to be branded a schismatic by the papacy. The consequences would have been disastrous: not only would Oswiu have lost his principatus over the English Church and its lands, but his authority over the orthodox kingdoms of the south, as well as his son’s provincia, Deira, would have been severely weakened. Easter had become a political problem which demanded an immediate resolution. For this reason, Oswiu summoned the Council of Whitby.
Oswiu emerged victorious from the synod. In return for liturgical concessions, which cost him his bishop, he had managed to defuse the growing religious tension within his imperium and, even more important, had gained papal recognition for his claim to supremacy in England. Alhfrith, who had also desired a council on the Easter question, was not as fortunate as his father. His attempt to forge a Romanist party that would support his succession to the Northumbrian throne had failed. Oswiu had co-opted his movement, and through it had strengthened his control over Northumbria.
Instead of embarrassing his father and diminishing his authority within the Northumbrian imperium, as he had planned, Alhfrith had destroyed himself at Whitby.
Appendix on the Dating of the Council of Whitby
We cannot date the Council of Whitby as exactly as we might wish. Eddius and Bede supply neither the day nor the month of the synod, and even the year that Bede gives—664—has been disputed. A careful examination of the evidence suggests, however, that the council was called in the late summer or early autumn of 664, soon after the death of Archbishop Deusdedit.
Bede reports both his term of office and the date of his death. Unfortunately, they conflict. In Book Four, Chapter One of the History, Bede tells us: “In the year of the eclipse already mentioned and of the pestilence that quickly followed … Deusdedit, the sixth bishop of the church at Canterbury, died on 14 July.” Calculations made at the Royal Observatory, Brussels, show that this eclipse occurred on May 1, 664. If Deusdedit’s death notice is correct, it must follow that the archbishop died on July 14, 664. There can be no doubt about this. This date would be firmly anchored by an astronomically verifiable fact.
But is this obituary reliable? The text of the History leaves room for doubt. Bede also noted that Deusdedit had been consecrated archbishop on March 26, 655, and had reigned for exactly nine years, four months, and two days, thus passing away on the 28th of July, 664. How can we reconcile these two dates?
Grosjean’s solution is the most probable. Maundy Thursday fell on March 26 in 655, and it is unlikely that the church of Canterbury would have chosen such an inconvenient day—after a vacancy of eighteen months—for the consecration of their new bishop. Instead, we should accept July 14 as the day on which Archbishop Deusdedit died, and use Bede’s data to calculate back to his consecration. Thus Deusdedit became archbishop on March 12, 655, and passed away on July 14, 664.
Stenton rejected both July 14 and July 28, and concluded that Deusdedit died on October 28, 663. According to Bede, Archbishop Honorius passed away on September 30, 653. Since Stenton assumed that Bede began his year according to the Indiction—that is, with September 1—this becomes September 30, 652 by the modern reckoning. Hence, Deusdedit became archbishop on March 26, 654.
Stenton continues by noting that three “good” manuscripts of the History give Deusdedit’s episcopate as lasting for nine years, seven months, and two days. Stenton thus recalculates the archbishop’s death as occurring on October 28, 663. This argument is unconvincing for a number of reasons.
Stenton’s three “good” manuscripts were the Moore MS (Cambridge University Library Kk 5.16) and two of its family. Although the Moore MS is indeed early (it may have been copied as early as 737), Colgrave and Mynors agree with Plummer in preferring the more accurate Leningrad MS (Leningrad Public Library Lat. Q. v. I, 18). This MS, copied no later than 747 at Wearmouth or Jarrow, reads menses iiii, as do the C and O MSS.
Stenton followed Poole in dating the archbishop’s death to 663. Poole had argued for a September 1 New Year in the History to explain certain apparent errors in Bede’s chronology. Unfortunately, the choice of September 1 creates as many problems as it solves.
Kenneth Harrison recently reexamined the question and concluded that Bede began the annus Domini, or Year of Grace, with January 1, as Dionysius Exiguus had suggested. Bede’s misdating of the Councils of Hatfield and Hertford by a full year is to be explained by his adherence to the rule for reconciling the Year of Grace and the Indiction, rather than by the use of the Indiction’s New Year. Moreover, a Bedan New Year on January 1 would clear away many of the problems surrounding the History’s chronology—problems which led Jones to declare that in Bede’s statements “lie buried as many New Years as were employed in the many sources from which he drew.”
The text itself leads us to reject Stenton’s thesis. It has been generally accepted that Deusdedit fell victim to the plague. Although, as with so much else in Bede, we cannot be absolutely certain of this, the evidence is persuasive. As we have seen, Bede tells us that a plague struck England soon after the eclipse of May 1, 664. He follows this with the notice that King Eorcenberht of Kent and Archbishop Deusdedit of Canterbury died on the same day, July 14. We know from a previous chapter that this plague depopulated the southern parts of Britain. We also know from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that King Eorcenberht died of this pestilence. Since we have no reason to dislocate Eorcenberht’s death date or doubt that it occurred on the same day as Deusdedit’s, and since we have a perfectly logical explanation for the chronological difficulties in Bede’s account of Deusdedit’s reign and death, it is reasonable to infer that the Kentish king and archbishop succumbed to plague in mid-summer 664. This is the most straightforward reading of Bede’s text.
Stenton seems to have also been mistaken about the temporal relationship between Deusdedit’s death and the calling of the Council of Whitby. Stenton states that Deusdedit is known to have passed away soon after the conclusion of the synod, and hence that the council must have sat in late September or early October 663. It is probable that he is merely following Stubbs and Haddan here. They had argued that the Council of Whitby must have preceded the archbishop’s death, since Chad, who was elected bishop after Tuda’s death and Wilfrid’s departure for Gaul, journeyed to Kent for his consecration, unaware that Deusdedit had passed away. If this were true, it would prove at least that Oswiu thought that Deusdedit was alive when he and his son summoned the council. But is it true?
Haddan and Stubbs argued from a passage in the History in which we are told that, as Wilfrid lingered abroad, Oswiu, imitating his son Alhfrith, sent Chad to Kent to be consecrated bishop of the Church of York. But when Chad and a companion arrived, they discovered “archiepiscopum Deusdedit iam migrasse de saeculo, et necdum alium pro eo constitutum fuisse pontificem. Unde diverterunt ad provinciam Occidentalium Saxonum, ubi erat Uini episcopus.” If we were to rely on this text, we would conclude that knowledge of Deusdedit’s passing reached Northumbria after Chad’s departure.
But as we have seen, the Life of Wilfrid forces us to reconsider this conclusion. In Eddius’s account, Wilfrid himself had sought permission to go to the continent, arguing that such a journey was necessary if his ordination were to be considered valid by “catholics,” for there were then no bishops in Britain acceptable to the papacy. This could not have been necessary if Deusdedit had been alive. Since the Life is the more contemporary source, Eddius’s account is to be preferred on this point. Hence, it would seem that the Northumbrians were aware of Deusdedit’s death soon after the Council of Whitby had concluded.
Even if Bede is correct and Oswiu did send his episcopal candidate to Kent, this does not necessarily mean that Oswiu thought that Deusdedit was alive. Perhaps the Northumbrians had expected to find someone exercising the episcopal office in Kent as a temporary replacement for Deusdedit. Bede, after all, writes that Chad had not only discovered the archbishop dead, but also that necdum alium pro eo constitutum fuisse pontificem. Wilfrid’s subsequent career in Kent proves that such an expectation would not have been unreasonable. Perhaps Chad went south not only to seek consecration but also to inform Oswiu’s subject, King Egbert, of the results of the recent synod.
At any rate, Bede himself seems to have guessed at the reason for Chad’s journey to Kent, and in view of the conflicting evidence of the Life, it is quite possible that he deduced wrongly.
Bede supplies textual evidence for dating Whitby to 664. “This dispute,” writes Bede, “took place in the year of our Lord 664, in the twenty-second year of King Oswiu’s reign and after the Irish had held the episcopate in the English Kingdom for thirty years.” This disposes of Stenton’s argument for the autumn of 663, since by Bede’s reckoning Oswiu did not ascend the throne until 15 November × 24/31 December 642, and consequently the twenty-second year of his reign must have begun after mid-November 663. It is unlikely that Oswiu would have called a council at the beginning of winter in Northumbria. Thus, even if we reject Harrison’s convincing arguments for a January 1 New Year in the History, we nevertheless must conclude that the Council of Whitby was called sometime in 664.
Apparently neither Bede nor Eddius knew the exact date of the council, but the fact that 664 was a plague year can help us in this matter. The pestilentiae lues struck the southern parts of England soon after the May 1 eclipse. On 14 July it carried off both the king of Kent and the archbishop of Canterbury. After an appreciable period of time had elapsed, it spread to Northumbria, “raging far and wide with cruel devastation and laying low a vast number of people.” If the great plague of 1349 is any guide, the pestilentia did not hit Northumbria until August or September. This would agree with Florence of Worcester’s date for Cedd’s death, 26 October 664. If Cedd did die in late October, late summer or early autumn becomes the most reasonable date for the Council of Whitby. Cedd returned ad suam sedem directly from the synod, most probably to enforce Oswiu’s verdict upon his charges. Bede also tells us that Cedd died at his monastery at Lastingham, which he happened to visit while the plague raged there. The phrase ad suam sedem is problematic, for nowhere does Bede mention Cedd’s episcopal see in the kingdom of the East Saxons, and it is possible that Bede meant that Cedd returned directly to Lastingham, which is near Whitby. At any rate, whether or not we read Bede to mean that Cedd went directly to Essex from Whitby, it is more than likely that he visited Lastingham soon after the council in order to assure the submission of his Irish-educated monks to the Roman Easter.
Evidence of this sort, of course, can lead only to tentative conclusions. The most that we can say is that there is no convincing evidence for placing the Council of Whitby before the death of Archbishop Deusdedit and much to suggest that it occurred soon after his demise. The Council of Whitby, therefore, is most plausibly placed in the late summer or early autumn of 664, after the death of Deusdedit and before the death of Cedd.
By Richard Abels
The scene is familiar to most students of English history. In 664 A.D., the Northumbrian kings Oswiu and his son Alhfrith met with their clergy at Whitby to resolve (in Bede’s words) “a great and active controversy about the keeping of Easter.” Oswiu, who presided over the council, listened patiently to a long and often bitter debate between the Irish and Roman advocates. On the surface, it was an unequal contest, for the traditions of Iona were upheld by the king’s own bishop, Colman, while those of Rome were championed by a young abbot, Wilfrid, a protégé of Alhfrith.
But once again David slew Goliath. Oswiu, fearing for the welfare of his soul, pronounced in favor of the Apostle Peter, the hostiarius … qui claues tenere probatur, thus turning his back on his own childhood teachings. “When the king had spoken, all who were seated there or standing by, both high and low, gave up their imperfect rules, and readily accepted in their place those which they recognized to be better.”
Bede portrayed the Council of Whitby as the decisive confrontation in his native Northumbria between the rival ecclesiastical traditions of Rome and Iona. For him, the Roman triumph, the climax of the third book of his Ecclesiastical History, signified that the Northumbrian church would no longer be guided by “a handful of people in the remotest of islands,” but would rejoin the “catholic and apostolic” Church of Christ. Oswiu’s dramatic conversion at Whitby was thus a crucial step in the growth of Christian unity in the British Isles.
That Bede’s interpretation of the council has largely prevailed is quite understandable. Bede was not only the greatest historian of his age, but is also the only source for much of what we know about pre-Viking England. A second, and more contemporary, source does, however, exist for the Council of Whitby: Eddius’s Life of St. Wilfrid. A comparison of the two accounts has led a number of historians to question Bede’s assessment of the council. The present paper will expand upon these doubts and offer a reappraisal of the purposes and results of Whitby. The council cannot be explained solely in terms of the Easter controversy, as Bede would have us believe. Rather, the contemporary significance of Whitby may have been as much political as liturgical.
Bede, an eighth-century cleric who wrote the Historia Ecclesiastica primarily to edify, had good reason to emphasize the spiritual issues resolved at the council. His prior interest in computistical matters, coupled with his general theme of the growth of Christian unity among the English people, undoubtedly shaped his portrayal of the synod. Nonetheless, to understand fully what transpired at Whitby in 664, one must also take into account certain political factors neglected by Bede. Among the most important of these were Alhfrith’s aspirations to his father’s throne; Oswiu’s fading position as bretwalda, that is, as overlord of the southern kings; the growing challenge to Oswiu’s supremacy from Mercia; and, finally, the recent death of Deusdedit, Archbishop of Canterbury.
While we must often rely upon the facts which Bede records, we should regard his interpretations and conclusions with the same skepticism that we would accord any other historian’s. Bede’s interpretation of Whitby as the climactic resolution of a long-standing dispute over Easter quite simply is not substantiated by the evidence that he adduces for it. We can see this clearly in the History‘s discussion of the origin of the council.
According to Bede, there were both practical and spiritual reasons for deciding the Easter controversy in 664. Oswiu’s queen, Eanflaed, had been reared in Kent after the death of her father, King Edwin. Even after her marriage to her Bernician kinsman in 643, she and her entourage (regina Eanfled cum suis) kept the Roman Easter, having brought with them from Kent a priest named Romanus. Her husband, however, like his brother Oswald, had been educated and baptized at Iona, where the sons of Aethelfrith along with a great number of young Bernician noblemen had found refuge from the hostility of the Deiran King Edwin. Oswiu insisted that there was nothing better than the usages that he had learned there.
Consequently, whenever the Irish and Roman reckonings fixed different dates for Easter, the Northumbrian court found itself in an awkward position. To quote Bede: “Hence it is said (fertur) that in these days it sometimes happened that Easter was celebrated twice in the same year, so that the king had finished the fast and was keeping Easter Sunday, while the queen and her people were still in Lent and observing Palm Sunday.”
As long as Bishop Aidan was alive, everyone tolerated the embarrassment and inconvenience of a religiously divided court. Aidan, after all, was so saintly that even ardent Romanists were reluctant to offend him. But with his death the suppressed tensions burst forth. Even the common folk were drawn into this conflict. For there were many “who feared that, though they had received the name Christian, they were running or had run in vain.” As good Christian rulers, the Irish-educated Oswiu and his Romanist son Alhfrith were obliged to clear away this confusion. It was therefore decided that a council should be held to resolve the question of Easter and other subjects of dispute between Rome and Iona.
Historians have pounced upon Bede’s picturesque description of Oswiu’s domestic difficulties to explain the calling of the council in 664. One often reads that in 664 (or 663, if the historian is following Stenton’s mistaken redating) Oswiu had recently experienced the inconvenience of a dual Easter celebration, which was severe enough to convince him to resolve the problem once and for all. On the surface, this is an attractive suggestion; it is a plausible reading of Bede’s text. Unfortunately, it is specious. Put simply, Whitby was not called because the Irish and Roman Easter had suddenly fallen out of synchronism.
We cannot reconstruct with certainty the Irish Easter cycle, since the system of epacts it used remains a matter of conjecture. The epacts, however, of either the Supputatio Romana or the more empirically correct Alexandrine tables are the most likely candidates. B. MacCarthy produced an Easter cycle based upon the former, reasoning that the 84-year cycle that prevailed among the Celts in the seventh century had been brought to Britain from the Council of Arles (314).
D. J. O’Connell argued against this, contending that the epacts were probably corrected by the end of the sixth century, and thus were likely Alexandrine at the time of Whitby. The result, as one might expect, is that these two tables give differing dates for the Irish Easters of the seventh century. One of the few things upon which MacCarthy and O’Connell agree, in fact, is that the years 663 through 665 were unexceptional in terms of the Roman and Irish Easter cycles. Thus by MacCarthy’s calculations, the Irish celebrated Easter in 664 on the 14th of April while the Romans kept the festival one week later. This, however, was by no means a unique event. The same situation had occurred in fourteen of the twenty-two years of Oswiu’s and Eanflaed’s marriage.
Turning to O’Connell’s table, we find that the Irish and Roman Easters rarely diverged in the mid-seventh century. On this reconstruction, the Irish and the Romans celebrated Easter on the same day nineteen times during the period 643 (the year of the royal wedding) to 665. MacCarthy and O’Connell agree, moreover, that in 665 the Irish and Roman Easters would fall on the same day. The conclusion to be drawn is clear: in 664 there was no immediate practical necessity for reconciling the two Easter cycles.
Nor is it plausible to view the Easter question in Northumbria as a great and active controversy chronically plaguing the consciences of the devout from the days of St. Aidan on. Certainly, Bede implies that there had been a great deal of confusion and unhappiness over the divergent Easter practices even in the 640s. But if the Northumbrians were riddled with doubts, they hid their concern well. Although Aidan died in 651, a synod was not convoked until 664. This means that the “distraught” Northumbrians suffered their uncertainty through the full ten years of Finan’s episcopacy, and then, instead of taking up the matter upon the election of his successor, Colman, they patiently waited another three years.
During this entire period Bede describes but a single disputation upon this topic preceding the one that ended at Whitby. This pitted Bishop Finan against another Irishman, the peregrinus Ronan. When their debate had ended—and it is significant that the impetus for such a debate had come from outside Northumbria—the Northumbrian church remained firmly within Iona’s sphere of influence.
Bede’s explanation of the calling of the council thus fails to withstand scrutiny. There was more to Whitby than the desire of a king to resolve a domestic problem or unburden his people of their spiritual anxiety. Undoubtedly, the Easter question was of vital importance to men such as Wilfrid and Colman. But the council was not convoked by the Northumbrian clergy. Bede clearly suggests that the two kings, Oswiu and Alhfrith, were responsible for convening the synod, and this seems the most reasonable. Upon examining the sources, it becomes evident that father and son had excellent, if conflicting, political reasons for desiring a synod upon the question of Easter in 664.
Let us consider Alhfrith first. Henry Mayr-Harting and Eric John have both stressed the importance of Alhfrith in the calling of Whitby. John thus contended that the council is “best explained by the perennial tensions of Northumbrian politics.” When Alhfrith, who ruled Deira under his father, converted to the Roman ways, he added a religious dimension to the political and dynastic tensions already existing between the two kingdoms composing Northumbria. Oswiu’s decision at Whitby defused the situation, but the Bernician king paid a price: “obedience to papal commands and the removal of the Northumbrian cathedra to Deira.” Mayr-Harting added to this thesis by arguing that Alhfrith was largely responsible for convoking the council, for the young king saw in the Easter controversy an opportunity “to bring political pressure to bear and weaken the influence of his father in Bernicia.”
While this interpretation has much to recommend it, neither Mayr-Harting nor John sufficiently explains why Alhfrith should have wished to bring political pressure to bear upon his father. The uncertainty of Anglo-Saxon royal succession suggests a possible motive. It has long been recognized that the Anglo-Saxons lacked an established rule of automatic succession. Although it seems that only members of the royal house (those within seven generations of a royal ancestor) were deemed worthy of kingship, descent within the cynecynn depended more upon ad hoc considerations than upon any constitutional principle. Strong kings were able to designate their successors, but the most common route to the throne appears to have been through election.
This was not the election by Witan so dear to the nineteenth-century historian, but rather “election” in the sense of securing the commendation of the nation’s magnates. The support of the nobility meant that the would-be king could back up his claim with force, and one should never underestimate the practical importance of force in the seventh century. In the year 685, for example, Caedwalla “began to contend for the kingdom” of Wessex, while in Kent, Eadric, who had been passed over for succession upon his father’s death, raised the South Saxons against his uncle Hlothhere. Hlothhere fell in battle, and Eadric became king of Kent. Civil strife was always a threat if there was more than one strong claimant to the throne. The troubled history of Northumbria in the second half of the eighth century bears eloquent witness to the chaos that could ensue from this royal survival of the fittest.
One of the few things that we can say with assurance about Alhfrith is that he eventually revolted against his father. Since Alhfrith ruled Deira under his father at the time of Whitby and disappears from all our sources soon after the council, it is a logical inference that his revolt took place soon after 664 A.D. Alhfrith’s disaffection may have arisen from this uncertainty over the Northumbrian succession. While the young sub-king’s position might superficially appear to have been secure in 664, it had actually deteriorated in recent years.
Alhfrith had emerged from the Battle of the Winwaed in 655 as Oswiu’s probable successor. His only true rival at that time was his cousin Oethelwald, St. Oswald’s son. Before the Winwaed, Oethelwald had ruled Deira under his uncle, but the relationship between the two appears to have been strained. Oethelwald, perhaps embittered by his uncle’s ascent to his father’s throne, threw in his lot with the Mercian king Penda. Although he seems to have betrayed the Mercians in the hour of the battle, his initial treachery against his kin cost him his kingdom and possibly his life. After the Winwaed, Alhfrith, who had fought at his father’s side, was rewarded with his cousin’s kingdom. Oswiu’s willingness to associate his son in the kingship of Northumbria is strong evidence that in 655/656 he considered Alhfrith to be his heir, a most reasonable assumption when one remembers that not only was Alhfrith a proven warrior but also Oswiu’s only adult legitimate son.
By 664, however, things had changed considerably to Alhfrith’s detriment. Oswiu’s second son, Ecgfrith, was now a man of nineteen, and, if we can trust the testimony of the Liber Eliensis, also his father’s favorite. Ecgfrith enjoyed a number of advantages over his older brother. His marriage to an East Anglian princess, for example, must have appeared a far more attractive connection than the Mercian princess whom Alhfrith had married a decade before. East Anglia, after all, was an ally of Northumbria, while Mercia under the rule of Alhfrith’s brother-in-law Wulfhere was an implacable foe. In addition, Ecgfrith was the son of the reigning queen, Eanflaed, while Alhfrith was most probably the product of an earlier marriage. This meant not only that Ecgfrith could depend upon his mother’s influence at court when the issue of the succession arose, but could also expect support in his brother’s kingdom, for as Eanflaed’s son, Ecgfrith was the grandson of King Edwin of Deira. With Edwin’s own sons dead, the native Deiran thegnage would naturally consider him heir to the house of Aelle. Alhfrith, on the other hand, could not claim as close kinship bonds with the traditional rulers of Deira.
Alhfrith appears to have become interested in the Roman usages in the late 650s. Without questioning his religious sincerity, one ought not to ignore the profound political implications of his conversion. By championing Rome, Alhfrith underscored his independence from his father and from the Bernician church. At the same time, his actions linked him both to his Deiran thenage, who had received Christianity thirty years before from the Roman missionary Paulinus, and, just as important, to the two greatest kingdoms still subject to Oswiu, Kent and Wessex. Significantly, when Alhfrith invited the ardent Romanist Wilfrid into his kingdom, he acted upon the advice of his “faithful friend,” Coenwealh, King of the West Saxons. Whether intentionally or not, Alhfrith seems to have gained political support from his conversion to the Roman cause.
It is tempting to view Alhfrith as the father of the great Easter controversy of 664. Both Bede and Eddius tell us that when Wilfrid arrived at the Deiran court the young king was already a Romanist. In fact, it was precisely because of Wilfrid’s orthodoxy that Alhfrith invested him first with ten hides of land at Stanford and then with an additional thirty at Ripon. The second grant involved an interesting complication. There was already a monastery at Ripon when Wilfrid received these thirty hides. Alhfrith had previously granted the land to Eata, the Abbot of the Bernician monastery of Melrose. Eata founded a monastery on the site, peopled it with monks transferred from Melrose, and organized it according to the rule practiced in his other foundation. Thus Ripon was originally part of the Columban paruchia in Northumbria.
Now, however, Alhfrith confronted Eata and his monks with an ultimatum—abandon the rites and customs of Iona for those of Rome or abandon Ripon. They chose the latter, and returned north to Melrose. At least two immediate results arose from this. First, Alhfrith had successfully transferred land from an individual loyal to Bishop Colman and subject to Oswiu to one more dependent upon himself, Wilfrid. Secondly, Alhfrith had delivered a blow against his father. Clerics at this time stood in a similar relationship to the king as retainers to a lord. The insult to Eata, thus, could only be taken as an insult to Eata’s lord, King Oswiu.
Plummer dated this transaction to 661. But there is no solid contemporary evidence for this. Rather, it seems that Plummer assumed that Wilfrid returned directly to Northumbria after the murder of his patron Annemundus in 658, and had immediately entered Alhfrith’s service. While plausible, this conjecture does lead to certain difficulties. Bede relates in his prose Life of Saint Cuthbert that soon after the saint had been expelled from Ripon and forced to return to Melrose, he fell ill from “a plague that was then ravaging the length and breadth of Britain.”
This is confirmed by the anonymous Historia Abbatum, for just about the time that Ceolfrith left Gilling for Ripon, his brother died of plague in Ireland. Although plague was not uncommon in seventh-century Britain, the magnitude of this pestilentia clearly suggests that it was the great plague of 664. If so, Cuthbert left Ripon in either 663 or 664. In that case, Alhfrith’s ejection of Eata and his monks might well have been the immediate cause of Whitby. Undoubtedly, it heightened tensions between the Irish and Roman factions in Northumbria.
Mayr-Harting’s contention that Alhfrith was the moving force behind the council has some merit, although it overstates the case and ignores Oswiu’s preeminence in this affair. Certainly, Alhfrith’s influence must explain the location of the synod within his provincia. Furthermore, the two leaders of the Roman party at Whitby were both intimately connected with the young king: Bishop Agilberht was Alhfrith’s guest at the time, and Wilfrid was his protégé. But if Alhfrith did indeed agitate for a council, what did he hope to gain?
It has been argued that Alhfrith intended Whitby to be a Deiran conference over which he would preside. Such a synod would have resulted in a condemnation of the Irish Easter and, most probably, a redistribution of monastic lands à la Ripon. Deira, however, was neither politically nor ecclesiastically independent at that time, and it is unlikely that Alhfrith would have challenged his father’s supremacy so directly. It would seem that the council was meant from the outset to be Northumbrian rather than Deiran.
Alhfrith may have seen a council as a means of weakening his father politically while strengthening his own prospects for the throne. He knew that his father, as king of Northumbria, would have to decide the Easter question. He had no reason to believe that Oswiu would suddenly abandon his lifelong allegiance to Iona. But whatever his father decided, Oswiu would be placed in an uncomfortable position. Reaffirming the Irish usage would alienate Coenwealh of Wessex and Egbert of Kent at a time when Oswiu was desperately trying to ward off the Mercian challenge.
Furthermore, Eanflaed and her retinue had clung tenaciously to the Roman usage throughout the marriage; a decision by her husband in favor of Iona could have repercussions at the Bernician court. Choosing Rome, on the other hand, would mean turning away from his Irish upbringing and his beloved bishop, Colman. Colman, who was bound by monastic obedience to the customs of Iona, would have to be replaced by a Romanist. The new bishop might well favor Alhfrith because of his proven devotion to Rome. In either case, Alhfrith would weaken his father’s authority.
But in spite of these obvious dangers, Oswiu was willing to preside over the council, which upon first glance is surprising. Almost everything about Oswiu’s participation in the synod is a bit odd. Bede tells us that the king had always looked to Iona for spiritual guidance before Whitby. In fact, despite his having a Romanist wife and son, the king had never entertained the possibility that his childhood religious training had been deficient in any way. Furthermore, he sat in judgment over an unevenly matched debate. On one side was his personal bishop, Colman, a man whom he “greatly loved for his innate prudence”; on the other was Wilfrid, a recently ordained priest, his son’s (and before that his wife’s) protégé.
Yet Oswiu decided in favor of Rome, and in a manner that is more than a little surprising. Oswiu’s verdict did not rest upon any of the technical arguments adduced by Wilfrid. Instead, he rendered his decision as if it had been a foregone conclusion. As Stenton has noted, “the appeal to St. Peter’s authority allowed the king to close the debate in a way which suggests his own decision had been made before it began.” As a final incongruous touch, Eddius tells us that Oswiu smiled when he asked the question that was to result in Colman’s forced resignation: “Who is greater in the kingdom of Heaven, Columba or the Apostle Peter?”
We must view the king’s decision against the backdrop of seventh-century politics. In the late summer or early autumn of 664, when Oswiu and his son called the council, Oswiu had a number of compelling reasons for declaring his loyalty to the Roman see. To understand his actions at Whitby—and his smile—we must first comprehend Oswiu’s political situation at the time: his eroding authority as bretwalda and the new challenge to his supremacy over the southern kingdoms brought on by Alhfrith’s conversion.
Political and religious supremacy went hand-in-hand in seventh-century England. As Oswiu’s own bishop, Colman must be thought of as the bishop of the Northumbrians rather than bishop of the see of Lindisfarne, just as Oswiu himself was king of all Northumbria and not simply of Bernicia. When Alhfrith, who was but a subregulus, chose the Roman customs over those of Lindisfarne and Iona, and underlined his conversion by expelling the Bernician monks from Ripon, he was indirectly challenging his father’s supremacy over Deira. Eric John is correct in saying that Oswiu’s conversion nipped this development in the bud, but one must also recognize that by co-opting the Romanist movement, Oswiu was acting out of weakness. By all rights, he should have found for Bishop Colman, and enforced his decision in the subject southern provincia. Yet he chose Rome, and for this decision to be explicable, it must be taken out of a purely Northumbrian context.
Oswiu had emerged from his victory at the Winwaed not only king of Northumbria but also bretwalda. Like his brother Oswald before him, Oswiu now had an imperium over all the southern kingdoms. But his preeminence at the time of the council was threatened by the resurgence of Mercian power. Although he may still have been nominally bretwalda in the summer of 664 (or at least recognized as such in the kingdoms of Kent and Wessex), Oswiu’s supremacy was being successfully challenged by the young and aggressive Wulfhere, Alhfrith’s brother-in-law. By 664, Wulfhere probably reigned directly over the kingdoms of Mercia, Middle Anglia, and Lindsey, and claimed the allegiance of the East and South Saxon kings.
Alhfrith’s conversion and the complications it introduced into the already unstable relationship between Bernicia and Deira thus came at a time when Oswiu saw his suzerainty over the southern kingdoms slipping away. In this context, the Paschal question took on new meaning. In itself, the debate over the proper calculation of Easter may have been less important in mid-seventh-century England than Bede, the master computist, would have us believe. But in the summer of 664, Oswiu found that it had become necessary that he resolve the controversy—and resolve it in favor of Rome.
For on July 14, Deusdedit, the Archbishop of Canterbury, had succumbed to the plague, leaving the primacy of England vacant. Bede’s account is vague about the temporal relationship between the death of the archbishop and the convoking of the council. A straightforward reading of Bede’s text might, in fact, lead one to believe that news of Deusdedit’s death did not arrive in Northumbria until well after the synod. According to Bede, Chad, who had been elected bishop in the wake of the council after Tuda’s death and Wilfrid’s departure for Gaul, journeyed to Kent for his consecration, unaware that Deusdedit had since passed away.
But this is one instance in which we must challenge Bede’s authority. Eddius’s Life of Wilfrid strongly implies that the Northumbrians were well aware of the archbishop’s demise before Chad was dispatched to Kent. In Eddius’s account, Wilfrid himself sought permission to seek consecration on the continent, arguing that such a journey was absolutely necessary if his ordination were to be considered valid by “catholics,” since there were no bishops then in Britain acceptable to the papacy. Even Wilfrid could not have challenged the validity of Deusdedit’s orders, for he had been raised to the episcopacy by Bishop Ithamar of Rochester, who in turn had been consecrated by Archbishop Honorius, “one of the disciples of the Blessed Gregory.” Since Deusdedit’s orthodoxy had never been suspect, one must conclude either that Eddius’s account is made out of whole cloth or that Wilfrid knew of the Kentish prelate’s death when he petitioned the Northumbrian kings and received their permission to go abroad for his consecration.
In spite of the problems raised by Bede’s narrative, the latter seems far more probable. Eddius wrote about twenty years before Bede and addressed himself to an audience—the monks of Ripon—who themselves had known the saint. Furthermore, Eddius himself appears to have been a member of Wilfrid’s familia, and certainly numbered among his sources individuals such as Abbot Tatberht, who had been intimates of his subject. Finally, if the author of the Life really is the Eddius Stephanus mentioned in chapter 14 of that work, as most historians have argued, then the matter is clinched. For this Eddius was a Kentish chanter whom Wilfrid had called to Northumbria in 669. The dating of the Council of Whitby, thus, is one case in which the much-maligned Life of Wilfrid is to be preferred to Bede’s History.
If we accept that Deusdedit’s death preceded the calling of the council, matters become far clearer. Oswiu, like Æthelberht before him, claimed as overlord of the southern kingdoms a sort of principatus over the whole English Church, and in consequence the right to name the new archbishop. Deusdedit’s death came at a critical time for Oswiu. Because of Mercia’s resurgence, it was crucial that Oswiu choose Deusdedit’s successor, for by doing so he would not only secure the support of an important ecclesiastic but would also dramatically assert his supremacy over the other English kings. On the other hand, failure to choose the new primate would underline Oswiu’s loss of power and prestige.
But naming the new archbishop meant winning papal approval for his candidate, and therein lay the problem. Oswiu could not be sure that Pope Vitalian would ignore his heterodoxy on the question of Easter, which had so recently been emphasized by his son’s conversion to the Roman practice. Oswiu realized that if the pope were to consider him a schismatic, there would be no hope for papal recognition of his choice. He also knew that a blow to his prestige of this sort would further undermine his authority over the orthodox kingdoms of Kent and Wessex. Hence Oswiu had reason to announce publicly and dramatically his allegiance to the papacy, even if this meant abandoning the teachings of his youth—teachings that had recently failed to secure him heaven’s favor in his earthly battles or to ward off the plague.
This point is worth emphasizing. Oswiu lived in an age in which the gulf between the spiritual and temporal had not yet emerged. A king could order the massacre of priests as a military precaution, and a rebel nobleman could seek the spiritual aid of an exiled bishop in his pursuit of a throne. Oswiu’s recent setbacks may well have figured in his decision to join his son in summoning a council in the late summer or early fall of 664 in order to resolve the Easter question in Northumbria and remove the stigma of heterodoxy.
This reconstruction is supported by correspondence between Vitalian and Oswiu. As Bede tells us, Oswiu had consulted with Egbert of Kent in either late 664 or early 665 about a replacement for Deusdedit. The candidate they settled upon was one of Deusdedit’s priests, Wigheard. “With the choice and consent of the Holy Church of the English people,” they sent him to Rome to be consecrated archbishop by Vitalian. Unfortunately, he and nearly all of his companions fell victim to the plague soon after they had been received by the pope.
Vitalian wrote Oswiu a most revealing letter to inform him of his candidate’s death. Since this letter mentions Oswiu’s recent conversion in a context which suggests some relationship between the Council of Whitby and Oswiu’s claim to the English imperium, we ought to examine it in some detail. The beginning of the letter is especially interesting:
To the most excellent lord, our son Oswiu, king of the Saxons,
Bishop Vitalian, servant of the servants of God.
We have received your Highness’ welcome letter. As we read it we
recognized your most sincere devotion and fervent desire for the
life everlasting. We know that, by God’s protecting hand, you
have been converted to the true and apostolic faith.
Oswiu had apparently sent with Wigheard a letter describing the Council of Whitby, the role played by the king in converting Northumbria to orthodoxy, and the present position of the Northumbrian king vis-à-vis other English rulers.
The manner in which Vitalian chose to address Oswiu—“the most excellent lord, our son, Oswiu, king of the Saxons (regi Saxonum)”—implies that he completely accepted the Northumbrian monarch’s claim to imperium. Not only does the title “king of the Saxons” suggest a wider suzerainty than “king of the Northumbrians,” it also echoes earlier papal letters to the bretwaldas Æthelberht and Edwin. Moreover, although both Oswiu and Egbert had sent Wigheard to Rome, Vitalian ignored the king of Kent, in whose realm the archiepiscopal see lay, and addressed himself only to Oswiu. This would have been exceedingly odd unless Oswiu’s letter to Vitalian had stressed the Northumbrian supremacy in England.
It would not be surprising if Oswiu had written to Vitalian in that vein. If Whitby had been intended as a public protestation of loyalty to the papacy, one would expect Oswiu to have made its results known to the pope. Oswiu’s letter would have dispelled any rumor of Northumbrian heterodoxy that might have reached the pope’s ear—a plausible concern since Wilfrid and Benedict Biscop, both ardent opponents of the Ionan usages, had recently sojourned in Rome. Furthermore, a letter of this sort was essential if Wigheard’s mission was to succeed, for it contained the credentials of the man who had chosen Wigheard to be the new primate of the English Church. Those credentials were apparently persuasive, as Vitalian’s language in the second half of his letter demonstrates:
Finally, in view of the length of the journey, we are not at
present able to find a man who is entirely suitable to be your
bishop, as you request in your letter. But as soon as a fit person is found, we will send him to your land… so that he may… entirely root out, with His blessing, the tares sown by the enemy throughout your island (uestra insula)… We trust that your Highness will speedily fulfil our desire and dedicate the whole of your island (totam suam) to Christ our God.
Passing over the pope’s problematic claim that he had been asked to choose the new archbishop, one is struck by the position Vitalian assigned Oswiu. Deusdedit’s successor is to be Oswiu’s own bishop, sent to the Northumbrian king’s patria, Kent. Vitalian apparently viewed Oswiu much as his predecessor Gregory I had viewed Æthelberht—as the ruler of all Britain. Vitalian’s use of such phrases as uestra insula and totam suam insulam shows that the Council of Whitby had brought about papal recognition of Oswiu’s claim to hegemony over the English, as he had intended.
The political and ecclesiastical situation in post-Whitby Northumbria becomes far more explicable once the synod is viewed in a political context. Whether or not Oswiu actually smiled before delivering his surprising decision at the council, as Eddius reports, he had reason to be pleased with himself. He had turned a potentially disastrous situation to his advantage. By finding for Rome, he had not only saved himself from possible religious friction within his imperium but he had completely outmanoeuvred his son.
Alhfrith seems to have gained nothing from the council. Although the Roman liturgy had prevailed and Colman had resigned, the Northumbrian Church remained firmly loyal to Oswiu. Colman’s successor, Tuda, was named by Oswiu and had himself been educated and consecrated by the Irish. Moreover, as a parting favor to Colman, Oswiu made Eata abbot of Lindisfarne. Eata, “one of those twelve boys of English race whom Aidan, when he first became bishop, had taken and instructed in Christ,” was the very abbot whose expulsion from Ripon had precipitated the Easter crisis. He and St. Hild, the abbess of Hartlepool and Streaneshalch, formed the nucleus of a post-Whitby “Irish” faction, which Eddius tendentiously labeled “Quartodeciman.” The hostility of these clerics toward Alhfrith’s protégé, Wilfrid, forms a major theme of the Life of that saint.
Wilfrid’s elevation to the bishopric must be viewed against this background. The Council of Whitby left a confused political and ecclesiastical scene in Northumbria. Tuda had succeeded Colman as “bishop of the Northumbrians,” that is, bishop of the Bernician and Deiran peoples, but succumbed almost immediately to plague. Before Oswiu filled the vacant see, Alhfrith petitioned his father to have his own bishop. Alhfrith apparently was not content to have a single bishop for both Bernicia and Deira, especially one based at Lindisfarne, near his father’s court. Therefore, upon Tuda’s death, he dispatched Wilfrid to Gaul “with the counsel and consent of his father Oswiu” to be consecrated bishop “for himself and his people” (eum sibi suisque).
The location of Wilfrid’s intended see is open to debate. Bede implies, and Eddius insists, that it was to be York. Modern historians’ concern with this question is perhaps excessive; the Roman diocesan system was not firmly established in the north of England until the synod of Hertford in 672. At the time of Whitby, “bishop” was in most cases a gentilic title; individuals such as Ceollach, Cedd, Colman, and Diuma were bishops of tribes, not cities, as on the continent. Moreover, as we have already seen, the relationship between a bishop and his king was intensely personal. It is more than coincidence that the see Oswald chose for his bishop, Aidan, was at Lindisfarne, within ten miles of Oswald’s court at Bamburgh. It is thus less important to determine where Wilfrid was to have had his cathedral than what people or peoples he was to serve. And here Bede is unambiguous: Wilfrid was to be Alhfrith’s own bishop—that is, bishop of the Deirans.
It is nevertheless surprising that Oswiu should have appointed Chad, another of Aidan’s former pupils, to the see of York while Wilfrid “lingered abroad” for his consecration. York was, after all, the royal city of the Deiran kingdom. This meant that a second bishop had been intruded into Wilfrid’s episcopal territory, and that the see of the Bernician king’s own bishop had been transferred from Lindisfarne to the heart of his son’s kingdom. When Wilfrid finally returned, “it became obvious that a wrong deed had been done. He, however, returned to his post of abbot of the monastery and humbly dwelt once more in Ripon for three years.”
Both Bede and Eddius seem to be less than forthcoming about Oswiu’s usurpation of his son’s royal prerogative. Bede is most reticent about these matters, which is only natural when one considers the prestige that both Wilfrid and Chad enjoyed in his day, while Eddius is unabashedly partisan. As Eric John argues, Bede’s narrative implies that Oswiu chose Chad because Wilfrid had forfeited his see by delaying his return. Yet this does not explain why Oswiu—and not Alhfrith—had appointed Wilfrid’s successor. Eddius is more explicit about Oswiu’s reasons:
“After a lapse of time, when Saint Wilfrid the Bishop did not arrive from across the sea, King Oswiu, moved by envy and at the instigation of the ancient foe, consented to allow another to forestall him in an irregular manner; for he was instructed by those who adhered to the Quartodeciman party in opposition to the role of the Apostolic See.”
Once again we must deal with Alhfrith’s puzzling absence from these deliberations. Even granting that Oswiu had come to regret his former consent to Wilfrid’s elevation, it is nevertheless odd that Eddius should be so silent about Alhfrith’s defense of his friend and personal bishop.
The solution to these problems may well lie, as Plummer has suggested, in Alhfrith’s fate after Whitby. Bede relates that the young king, like his cousin Oethelwald, eventually took up arms against Oswiu. Alhfrith’s ill-fated revolt probably took place soon after the Council of Whitby. Alhfrith disappears from our sources soon after the council. While this may be understandable in Bede’s History, it is more curious for the Life of Wilfrid, in which the young king had been given a prominent role as Wilfrid’s patron. Furthermore, Bede mentions in his Historia Abbatum that Alhfrith had planned to visit Rome about this time, but that his father forbade him to leave the kingdom. If Alhfrith planned this trip, as is possible, soon after the council, Oswiu’s decision to keep his son within his reach might be evidence of the growing mistrust between the two.
If we are correct in dating Alhfrith’s rebellion to the latter part of 664 or the early months of 665, the ecclesiastical situation at that time becomes much clearer. Wilfrid “lingered abroad” out of prudence, for while in Gaul he may well have learned of his patron’s fall. When he deemed it safe to return to his homeland, he retired to Ripon rather than contest Chad’s right to the see of York, because in a very real sense Chad had not usurped his position. Wilfrid had not merely been expelled from his intended see; his office had been abolished, for he had been consecrated bishop for Alhfrith and his people, but now Alhfrith was dead or in exile. In his place, Oswiu ruled directly, and Chad was his bishop.
This interpretation would also explain the movement of the Northumbrian see from Lindisfarne to York. If Alhfrith had indeed rebelled, it is likely that Oswiu, once he had defeated his son, would have moved his government south to bring Deira under closer supervision. In this case, Oswiu would have established his court in the Deiran regia civitas, York, instead of the Bernician chief city, Bamburgh. Similarly, his bishop, Chad, would have chosen York for his see rather than Lindisfarne.
The nature of our evidence does not permit us to be dogmatic about our conclusions. Nonetheless, it is likely that Bede’s interpretation of the purposes and results of the Council of Whitby obscures the political issues that underlay the Easter controversy in Northumbria. In itself, the debate over the proper manner in which Easter was to be calculated must have interested Bede, the greatest computist of his age, far more than it did Oswiu, who actually decided the question at Whitby. But in the summer of 664, the liturgical differences between the established Celtic Church in Northumbria and the Romanist churches of Kent and Wessex became politically significant. The ability to choose the Archbishop of Canterbury was one sign of being bretwalda.
At a time when Oswiu’s hegemony was being challenged by the reemergence of Mercia, the Northumbrian king could not afford to be branded a schismatic by the papacy. The consequences would have been disastrous: not only would Oswiu have lost his principatus over the English Church and its lands, but his authority over the orthodox kingdoms of the south, as well as his son’s provincia, Deira, would have been severely weakened. Easter had become a political problem which demanded an immediate resolution. For this reason, Oswiu summoned the Council of Whitby.
Oswiu emerged victorious from the synod. In return for liturgical concessions, which cost him his bishop, he had managed to defuse the growing religious tension within his imperium and, even more important, had gained papal recognition for his claim to supremacy in England. Alhfrith, who had also desired a council on the Easter question, was not as fortunate as his father. His attempt to forge a Romanist party that would support his succession to the Northumbrian throne had failed. Oswiu had co-opted his movement, and through it had strengthened his control over Northumbria.
Instead of embarrassing his father and diminishing his authority within the Northumbrian imperium, as he had planned, Alhfrith had destroyed himself at Whitby.
Appendix on the Dating of the Council of Whitby
We cannot date the Council of Whitby as exactly as we might wish. Eddius and Bede supply neither the day nor the month of the synod, and even the year that Bede gives—664—has been disputed. A careful examination of the evidence suggests, however, that the council was called in the late summer or early autumn of 664, soon after the death of Archbishop Deusdedit.
Bede reports both his term of office and the date of his death. Unfortunately, they conflict. In Book Four, Chapter One of the History, Bede tells us: “In the year of the eclipse already mentioned and of the pestilence that quickly followed … Deusdedit, the sixth bishop of the church at Canterbury, died on 14 July.” Calculations made at the Royal Observatory, Brussels, show that this eclipse occurred on May 1, 664. If Deusdedit’s death notice is correct, it must follow that the archbishop died on July 14, 664. There can be no doubt about this. This date would be firmly anchored by an astronomically verifiable fact.
But is this obituary reliable? The text of the History leaves room for doubt. Bede also noted that Deusdedit had been consecrated archbishop on March 26, 655, and had reigned for exactly nine years, four months, and two days, thus passing away on the 28th of July, 664. How can we reconcile these two dates?
Grosjean’s solution is the most probable. Maundy Thursday fell on March 26 in 655, and it is unlikely that the church of Canterbury would have chosen such an inconvenient day—after a vacancy of eighteen months—for the consecration of their new bishop. Instead, we should accept July 14 as the day on which Archbishop Deusdedit died, and use Bede’s data to calculate back to his consecration. Thus Deusdedit became archbishop on March 12, 655, and passed away on July 14, 664.
Stenton rejected both July 14 and July 28, and concluded that Deusdedit died on October 28, 663. According to Bede, Archbishop Honorius passed away on September 30, 653. Since Stenton assumed that Bede began his year according to the Indiction—that is, with September 1—this becomes September 30, 652 by the modern reckoning. Hence, Deusdedit became archbishop on March 26, 654.
Stenton continues by noting that three “good” manuscripts of the History give Deusdedit’s episcopate as lasting for nine years, seven months, and two days. Stenton thus recalculates the archbishop’s death as occurring on October 28, 663. This argument is unconvincing for a number of reasons.
Stenton’s three “good” manuscripts were the Moore MS (Cambridge University Library Kk 5.16) and two of its family. Although the Moore MS is indeed early (it may have been copied as early as 737), Colgrave and Mynors agree with Plummer in preferring the more accurate Leningrad MS (Leningrad Public Library Lat. Q. v. I, 18). This MS, copied no later than 747 at Wearmouth or Jarrow, reads menses iiii, as do the C and O MSS.
Stenton followed Poole in dating the archbishop’s death to 663. Poole had argued for a September 1 New Year in the History to explain certain apparent errors in Bede’s chronology. Unfortunately, the choice of September 1 creates as many problems as it solves.
Kenneth Harrison recently reexamined the question and concluded that Bede began the annus Domini, or Year of Grace, with January 1, as Dionysius Exiguus had suggested. Bede’s misdating of the Councils of Hatfield and Hertford by a full year is to be explained by his adherence to the rule for reconciling the Year of Grace and the Indiction, rather than by the use of the Indiction’s New Year. Moreover, a Bedan New Year on January 1 would clear away many of the problems surrounding the History’s chronology—problems which led Jones to declare that in Bede’s statements “lie buried as many New Years as were employed in the many sources from which he drew.”
The text itself leads us to reject Stenton’s thesis. It has been generally accepted that Deusdedit fell victim to the plague. Although, as with so much else in Bede, we cannot be absolutely certain of this, the evidence is persuasive. As we have seen, Bede tells us that a plague struck England soon after the eclipse of May 1, 664. He follows this with the notice that King Eorcenberht of Kent and Archbishop Deusdedit of Canterbury died on the same day, July 14. We know from a previous chapter that this plague depopulated the southern parts of Britain. We also know from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that King Eorcenberht died of this pestilence. Since we have no reason to dislocate Eorcenberht’s death date or doubt that it occurred on the same day as Deusdedit’s, and since we have a perfectly logical explanation for the chronological difficulties in Bede’s account of Deusdedit’s reign and death, it is reasonable to infer that the Kentish king and archbishop succumbed to plague in mid-summer 664. This is the most straightforward reading of Bede’s text.
Stenton seems to have also been mistaken about the temporal relationship between Deusdedit’s death and the calling of the Council of Whitby. Stenton states that Deusdedit is known to have passed away soon after the conclusion of the synod, and hence that the council must have sat in late September or early October 663. It is probable that he is merely following Stubbs and Haddan here. They had argued that the Council of Whitby must have preceded the archbishop’s death, since Chad, who was elected bishop after Tuda’s death and Wilfrid’s departure for Gaul, journeyed to Kent for his consecration, unaware that Deusdedit had passed away. If this were true, it would prove at least that Oswiu thought that Deusdedit was alive when he and his son summoned the council. But is it true?
Haddan and Stubbs argued from a passage in the History in which we are told that, as Wilfrid lingered abroad, Oswiu, imitating his son Alhfrith, sent Chad to Kent to be consecrated bishop of the Church of York. But when Chad and a companion arrived, they discovered “archiepiscopum Deusdedit iam migrasse de saeculo, et necdum alium pro eo constitutum fuisse pontificem. Unde diverterunt ad provinciam Occidentalium Saxonum, ubi erat Uini episcopus.” If we were to rely on this text, we would conclude that knowledge of Deusdedit’s passing reached Northumbria after Chad’s departure.
But as we have seen, the Life of Wilfrid forces us to reconsider this conclusion. In Eddius’s account, Wilfrid himself had sought permission to go to the continent, arguing that such a journey was necessary if his ordination were to be considered valid by “catholics,” for there were then no bishops in Britain acceptable to the papacy. This could not have been necessary if Deusdedit had been alive. Since the Life is the more contemporary source, Eddius’s account is to be preferred on this point. Hence, it would seem that the Northumbrians were aware of Deusdedit’s death soon after the Council of Whitby had concluded.
Even if Bede is correct and Oswiu did send his episcopal candidate to Kent, this does not necessarily mean that Oswiu thought that Deusdedit was alive. Perhaps the Northumbrians had expected to find someone exercising the episcopal office in Kent as a temporary replacement for Deusdedit. Bede, after all, writes that Chad had not only discovered the archbishop dead, but also that necdum alium pro eo constitutum fuisse pontificem. Wilfrid’s subsequent career in Kent proves that such an expectation would not have been unreasonable. Perhaps Chad went south not only to seek consecration but also to inform Oswiu’s subject, King Egbert, of the results of the recent synod.
At any rate, Bede himself seems to have guessed at the reason for Chad’s journey to Kent, and in view of the conflicting evidence of the Life, it is quite possible that he deduced wrongly.
Bede supplies textual evidence for dating Whitby to 664. “This dispute,” writes Bede, “took place in the year of our Lord 664, in the twenty-second year of King Oswiu’s reign and after the Irish had held the episcopate in the English Kingdom for thirty years.” This disposes of Stenton’s argument for the autumn of 663, since by Bede’s reckoning Oswiu did not ascend the throne until 15 November × 24/31 December 642, and consequently the twenty-second year of his reign must have begun after mid-November 663. It is unlikely that Oswiu would have called a council at the beginning of winter in Northumbria. Thus, even if we reject Harrison’s convincing arguments for a January 1 New Year in the History, we nevertheless must conclude that the Council of Whitby was called sometime in 664.
Apparently neither Bede nor Eddius knew the exact date of the council, but the fact that 664 was a plague year can help us in this matter. The pestilentiae lues struck the southern parts of England soon after the May 1 eclipse. On 14 July it carried off both the king of Kent and the archbishop of Canterbury. After an appreciable period of time had elapsed, it spread to Northumbria, “raging far and wide with cruel devastation and laying low a vast number of people.” If the great plague of 1349 is any guide, the pestilentia did not hit Northumbria until August or September. This would agree with Florence of Worcester’s date for Cedd’s death, 26 October 664. If Cedd did die in late October, late summer or early autumn becomes the most reasonable date for the Council of Whitby. Cedd returned ad suam sedem directly from the synod, most probably to enforce Oswiu’s verdict upon his charges. Bede also tells us that Cedd died at his monastery at Lastingham, which he happened to visit while the plague raged there. The phrase ad suam sedem is problematic, for nowhere does Bede mention Cedd’s episcopal see in the kingdom of the East Saxons, and it is possible that Bede meant that Cedd returned directly to Lastingham, which is near Whitby. At any rate, whether or not we read Bede to mean that Cedd went directly to Essex from Whitby, it is more than likely that he visited Lastingham soon after the council in order to assure the submission of his Irish-educated monks to the Roman Easter.
Evidence of this sort, of course, can lead only to tentative conclusions. The most that we can say is that there is no convincing evidence for placing the Council of Whitby before the death of Archbishop Deusdedit and much to suggest that it occurred soon after his demise. The Council of Whitby, therefore, is most plausibly placed in the late summer or early autumn of 664, after the death of Deusdedit and before the death of Cedd.
Richard Abels is professor emeritus at the United States Naval Academy and a medieval historian. He now hosts the podcast ’tis but a scratch: Fact and Fiction about the Middle Ages.
This article was first published in Journal of British Studies, Vol. 23:1 (1983). We thank Professor Abels for his permission to republish it.
Click here to read the PDF file of this article, which includes footnotes
Top Image: Cambridge, University Library, MS Kk.3.18 fol. 3r
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