Edwin of Northumbria

Edwin (Old English Eadwine) was a king of the Northumbrians in the early seventh century and was afterwards honoured as a saint and martyr. He was the son of Ælle, king of Deira, whose territory lay in what is now Yorkshire. After Ælle’s death, Æthelfrith of Bernicia seized Deira and Edwin spent a long exile at other courts, including that of Rædwald of the East Angles. With Rædwald’s military support he defeated and killed Æthelfrith at the Battle of the River Idle, about the year 616, and thereafter ruled both Deira and Bernicia as a united Northumbria. No reliable source records his exact year or place of birth.

As king, Edwin became one of the strongest rulers in Britain in his generation. Bede lists him among the English kings who held imperium, or overlordship, south of the Humber. He expelled the British king of Elmet and is credited with authority over the Mevanian islands (Anglesey and the Isle of Man). He first married Cwenburh, daughter of King Cearl of Mercia, by whom he had at least two sons, Osfrith and Eadfrith. He later married, around 625, Æthelburh, daughter of King Æthelberht of Kent and Queen Bertha. That marriage brought the Roman missionary Paulinus, consecrated bishop, into Northumbria and opened the way to the kingdom’s conversion.

Edwin’s conversion is among the episodes Bede describes most fully. After an assassination attempt at Easter in 626, and after the birth of his daughter Eanflæd, he delayed a public decision while consulting his counsellors. Bede records the comparison of human life to a sparrow flying through a lighted hall in winter, and the subsequent desecration of the pagan shrine at Goodmanham by the priest Coifi. Edwin was baptized at York on Easter Day in 627 in a wooden church he had built for the purpose, and he began a stone church of St Peter on the same site, the ancestor of York Minster. Pope Boniface V had written to him and to Æthelburh urging conversion. Bede remembered his reign for its peace—so that a woman with a newborn child might walk from sea to sea unharmed—and for practical measures such as bronze cups set at springs for travellers.

In 633 Edwin was defeated and killed at the Battle of Hatfield Chase (Haethfelth) by Cadwallon ap Cadfan of Gwynedd and Penda of Mercia. Osfrith fell in the same battle; Eadfrith was captured and later put to death. Northumbria temporarily split, and Paulinus withdrew to Kent with Queen Æthelburh and the surviving children, including Eanflæd, who later married King Oswiu and became abbess of Whitby. Edwin’s head was buried in the church of St Peter at York; early Whitby tradition associated his body with Whitby Abbey. Because he died in battle after baptism he was commemorated as a martyr, with a feast on 12 October. He was not a monk, pope, or patriarch, and he was never the subject of a later papal canonization in the modern sense. Almost everything that can be said of him with confidence depends on Bede, a few papal letters, and early Northumbrian monastic tradition; many details of his youth remain unknown.