Ine

Ine (also Ina or Ini) was king of the West Saxons from 688 until he abdicated in 726. He belonged to the royal house of Wessex. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s West Saxon genealogy names his father as Cenred, a kinsman of the line traditionally traced to Cerdic. Ine came to the throne after Cædwalla, a powerful but short-reigned king who in 688 resigned his crown, went to Rome, and was baptized there before his death. Ine’s own long reign is comparatively well attested for the period: Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, charters (some of them later or interpolated), and the law code issued in Ine’s name are the principal sources. His birth date and birthplace are not recorded in any early authority.

Ine’s law code is the earliest surviving legislation from Wessex and, after the Kentish laws of Æthelberht, the oldest substantial body of Anglo-Saxon law. It was promulgated with the advice of Ine’s bishops, including bishop Hædde of Winchester, and of the leading men of the kingdom. The clauses deal with theft, the harbouring of fugitives, wergild and status, the obligations of the ceorl, the legal position of the British (wealh) population within Wessex, church scot and other ecclesiastical dues, and procedures of oath and ordeal. They depict a kingdom in which English and British communities lived under related but not identical legal regimes, and in which royal and ecclesiastical authority were already closely associated. Ine was an active patron of the church. In his reign the single West Saxon diocese was divided: a new bishopric was established at Sherborne in the early eighth century, with the scholar-abbot Aldhelm as its first bishop, while Winchester remained the other see. Later medieval writers, especially at Glastonbury, attributed to Ine the refoundation or lavish endowment of Glastonbury Abbey; genuine eighth-century patronage of West Saxon churches is likely, but many of the charters that later bore Ine’s name are not authentic in their received form.

As a war-leader Ine fought to extend and secure West Saxon power in the south-west and the south-east. The Chronicle records campaigns against the Britons of Dumnonia, including conflict associated with Geraint, a British king of the western peninsula. Ine also asserted authority over the South Saxons and intervened in Kent, and he came into periodic rivalry with Mercia. He is credited with constructing a fortress at Taunton. His wife, Queen Æthelburg (Æthelburh), is one of the few seventh- or eighth-century West Saxon queens named in the Chronicle: under the year 722 it states that she destroyed Taunton, an act generally understood as a response to rebellion, denying the stronghold to opponents of the king. No son of Ine is securely recorded as surviving to claim the kingship. When he laid down his power, he was succeeded by Æthelheard, whose kinship to Ine is not clearly established in the early sources.

In 726 Ine abdicated and travelled to Rome as a pilgrim, imitating Cædwalla’s earlier journey. Bede, who completed his Ecclesiastical History only a few years later, presents Ine’s departure as the pious close of a long reign and states that Ine ended his life in Rome, wishing to be near the shrines of the apostles. The exact year of his death is not given by Bede or by the Chronicle, which records the abdication and journey rather than the day of death. In Rome, English pilgrims of the period were associated with a hostel or community later known as the Schola Saxonum, near St Peter’s; later tradition connected West Saxon royal pilgrims, including Ine, with support for that establishment. His queen is said in later accounts to have entered the religious life as well, though contemporary detail is sparse.

Ine was remembered in the Middle Ages as a just lawgiver, a benefactor of churches, and a king who exchanged a throne for pilgrimage and a holy death. He came to be venerated as a saint in English tradition, and his name appears in later calendars of saints, with a feast commonly given as 6 February. He was never the subject of a formal papal canonization of the later medieval type; his cult belongs to the older pattern of local and national veneration of royal confessors. Modern historians treat him as one of the principal architects of an expanding, legally articulated Wessex in the generation before the rise of Offa of Mercia and, still later, the West Saxon kings of the ninth century. The survival of his laws, and Bede’s respectful notice of his abdication, are the foundation of that reputation; much of the later monastic legend that gathered around his name cannot be verified from eighth-century evidence.