Diuma

Diuma (also spelled Dwyna, Dima, or Dioma) was a seventh-century Irish missionary priest who became the first bishop of the Mercians, the Middle Angles, and the people of Lindsey. Almost everything that can be said of him with confidence derives from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed in the early eighth century. Bede identifies him as a Scottus, that is, an Irishman, and places him among the clergy associated with the monastic church of Lindisfarne under Bishop Finan, himself an Irish monk from Iona. No contemporary source records Diuma’s parentage, place of birth, or year of birth, and later writers do not fill those gaps with anything that can be verified.

In the early 650s Peada, son of the pagan Mercian king Penda and ruler of the Middle Angles, sought to marry Alhflaed, daughter of King Oswiu of Northumbria. Oswiu made Peada’s conversion a condition of the alliance. Peada was baptized by Finan of Lindisfarne and, on returning south, brought with him four priests to preach among his people: Cedd, Adda, Betti, and Diuma. Bede notes that this mission among the Middle Angles began while Penda still lived. Penda remained a pagan until his death, but he did not forbid Christian preaching in his territories so long as converts lived according to the faith they professed. Diuma thus belongs to the Irish and Northumbrian missionary effort that entered Mercia before the kingdom as a whole had accepted Christianity.

The situation changed after Penda was killed in battle against Oswiu at the Winwaed in 655. Mercia then accepted Christianity, and Diuma was consecrated bishop by Finan. His charge covered the Mercians, the Middle Angles, and Lindsey. No cathedral city is named for him; the later identification of the Mercian see with Lichfield belongs to the time of Chad, more than a decade later. Bede states that Diuma did not remain long in office. He died among the Middle Angles and was buried in a district called Infeppingum. That place has never been securely identified. It is usually taken to mean the territory of a small people known as the Feppingas, somewhere in Middle Anglian country; antiquarian suggestions have included sites in the later east Midlands, but none is proven.

He was succeeded by another Irishman, Ceollach, who shortly afterwards withdrew to Iona. Later bishops of the Mercians included Trumhere, Jaruman, and Chad. Because Bede gives no annalistic date for Diuma’s death, the exact year is unknown; modern reconstructions often place it around the later 650s by working backwards from the known sequence of his successors, but that remains an inference. Later tradition has sometimes numbered Diuma among the saints of the conversion period, yet no early feast day, list of patronages, or account of formal canonization is securely attested in the principal calendars and martyrologies. His importance in the historical record is that of the first bishop of a newly converted Mercia and a representative of the Irish missionary tradition that, through Lindisfarne, shaped the church in large parts of seventh-century England.