Oswald

Oswald was a seventh-century king of Northumbria and one of the most widely venerated royal saints of early medieval England. He was the son of Æthelfrith, king of Bernicia, and of Acha, a Deiran princess and sister of King Edwin, and thus belonged by blood to both of the dynasties that together formed Northumbria. After Æthelfrith was defeated and killed by Edwin in 616, Oswald and his brothers were driven into exile. They took refuge in the Gaelic kingdom of Dál Riata, and Oswald spent his youth among the Irish monks of Iona, where he was baptized and formed in the Irish monastic tradition. That long exile, lasting into the early 630s, shaped both his personal piety and the Irish character of the Northumbrian church he later helped to plant.

When Edwin was killed in 633, Northumbria fell into disorder under the attacks of Cadwallon of Gwynedd and Penda of Mercia. Oswald returned from the north with a small force. Before giving battle to Cadwallon near Hexham he raised a wooden cross and had his army kneel in prayer; the place was afterwards known as Heavenfield. His victory and Cadwallon’s death enabled him to take the Northumbrian throne about 634 and to reunite Bernicia and Deira. Bede, writing in the eighth century, portrays him as a king of unusual personal holiness, open-handed to the poor and closely allied with the Irish mission. From Iona he obtained the bishop Aidan, to whom he granted the island of Lindisfarne as a monastic episcopal seat. Because Aidan at first preached in Irish, Oswald himself is said to have interpreted the preaching into English for his household and thegns.

His reign of some eight years restored Christianity in Northumbria after the pagan reaction that followed Edwin’s death. Bede ranks him among the rulers who held a wide overlordship in Britain. He stood sponsor at the baptism of Cynegils of Wessex, linking Northumbria to the conversion of the West Saxons. Later medieval writers name a daughter of Cynegils, Cyneburh, as Oswald’s wife; Bede does not record her name, but he does mention Oswald’s son Œthelwald, who afterwards ruled in Deira. Oswald was neither cleric nor monk and belonged to no religious order; the sanctity attributed to him was that of a Christian king rather than of a bishop or ascetic.

On 5 August 642 he was defeated and killed by Penda of Mercia at the Battle of Maserfield. The site is traditionally identified with Oswestry in the Welsh marches, though other locations have been proposed and certainty is lacking. His body was dismembered and his head and arms displayed as trophies. Bede reports that miracles soon occurred at the place where he fell, including healings connected with the soil of the battlefield. His niece Osthryth later translated his bones to Bardney Abbey in Lincolnshire. His head was taken to Lindisfarne and, in the tenth century, laid in the coffin of Saint Cuthbert at Durham; his right arm was enshrined at Bamburgh. The cult spread through England and into Ireland, Scotland, and the Continent, notably to Switzerland, where he became patron of the city of Zug. He was honoured as a martyr because he died in battle against a pagan king while ruling as a Christian monarch.

His principal feast is 5 August. The cult grew from popular devotion and from Bede’s testimony rather than from any later papal canonization. Almost all that can be said of his character and deeds rests on the Ecclesiastical History, composed some eighty years after his death; later medieval lives added miracle stories and dynastic detail to that foundation. He remains associated with Northumbria, with Christian kingship, and with the churches and towns that claimed his relics.