Sublime

Oswald Iding ruled Northumbria for eight years, from ad 634 to 642. In that time he was recognised as overlord of almost all the other kingdoms of Britain: of Wessex, Mercia, Lindsey and East Anglia, of the Britons of Rheged, Strathclyde, Powys and Gwynedd, the Scots of Dál Riata and the Picts of the far North. A famed warrior, the ‘Whiteblade’ or

Ceawlin’s long reign over the West Saxons, from 560 to 592, is, nevertheless, instructive. He was the first of the West Saxon kings whose career is marked by tangible achievements in subduing rivals and poaching their territory. However, looking at the geography of his victories, it becomes clear that his wars were not campaigns of conquest but of

When, in 577, King Ceawlin of the West Saxons went to war with his neighbours, he killed three British kings whose territories were apparently based on former Roman towns at Bath, Gloucester and Cirencester – at least, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

His daughter Eanflæd was brought up, also in exile, as a Christian in the courts of Kent and then of Dagobert I in Paris.35 Her experience of sophisticated Frankish politics was to play a key role in the development of the Northumbrian state.

Early Medieval kings were required to fight, to defend and expand their territories, and to display their successes appropriately. The Beowulf poem provides the model. As Hrothgar, king of the Danes, prospers, so the size of his warband increases: Then to Hrothgar was granted glory in battle, Mastery of the field; so friends and kinsmen gladly

In the sorts of lordship and territorial holding that can be reconstructed for the fifth century, in which renders supported a modest élite, there is little to suggest the future fortunes of these great overlords. There is a gulf between the territoria of Cadbury hillfort or Great Chesterford and that immense swathe of France over which Clovis’s

England achieved, at the beginning of her modern history, that one thing human imagination will always find heroic–the story of a small nationality.