Remember when the north of England nearly went to war over the date of Easter?
Probably not, it was 664AD.
Happy Easter! Below is something seasonal that went to paying subscribers in March last year. As ever, if you want me to write more things like this (interesting, diverting, delightful), and fewer things that the evil mainstream media would prefer me to write (boring! Worthy! Dry!), you know what to do:
York vs Lancaster, leave vs remain, Oasis vs Blur – the history of these islands is a history of unbridgeable political divides. The bout of factionalism that perhaps looks weirdest to modern eyes, though, may be the one which split an Anglo-Saxon royal family down the middle and may have brought their kingdom to the brink of civil war. It was a row over when to celebrate Easter.
It was the mid-7th century, when “medieval” still meant1 “centuries hence”, and Britain was fragmented into a dozen or more petty kingdoms. Christianity was then a relatively new arrival: some Roman Britons had been Christian, of course, but the Anglo-Saxon incomers who’d physically and culturally displaced them were not. That had only begun to change in the second half of the previous century, when missionaries from two different traditions had come from two different directions. In 563, the Irish abbot Columba had founded a monastery on Iona, in the western islands of Scotland, to spread the Celtic version of the faith to the Picts and Scots. In 597, Pope Gregory sent a delegation led by St Augustine to evangelise the Roman version from Canterbury, capital of the kingdom of Kent.
There were multiple matters on which these two versions of Christianity differed: the mechanics of baptism; how to consecrate bishops or churches; which bit of their heads monks should shave (the Irish tonsure involved shaving the front of the head, the Roman one the top, apparently in imitation of Christ’s crown of thorns).
But the big one in Northumbria, in what would become the north of England and south of Scotland, was the date of Easter. By this time, several centuries after the Council of Nicaea, everyone agreed that the festival should generally take place on the first Sunday after… something. (Some sources I’m drawing on say it’s the spring equinox, others the Jewish festival of Passover: I’m not sure, in all honesty, whether this is one of those things where the lack of documents from this period make it hard to be certain, or someone’s just screwed up.) But there was no consensus on whether or not it could take place on a Sunday that happened to coincide with that event. The Roman tradition said it couldn’t; the Celtic one that it could. [Note: An earlier version of this article got those two nouns the wrong way round, sorry.]
Northumbria, by this time the most powerful of the kingdoms on the island, and also roughly in its middle, had begun to convert to Christianity from the 620s, under influence from both directions. By the 660s, it was ruled by a king with the “good luck with that” name of Oswiu, who followed the Irish tradition. Meanwhile, his queen Eanflæd, who had been brought up in Kent, followed the Roman one. The result was that the king and his party would be celebrating the most important feast in the Christian calendar, while the queen and her party were still sulking hungrily about the place because it was Lent.
This was a scandal – the king feasts, while the queen fasts? Doesn’t this new fangled religion agree on anything? It all left some local worthies muttering darkly about whether, if those who followed it could disagree over a matter as stupid as this, this whole Christianity thing was quite as likely to offer the key to everlasting life as those monks claimed. As Bede2 wrote, half a century later: “This dispute rightly began to trouble the minds and consciences of many people, who feared that they might have received the name of Christian in vain.”
All that said, Oswiu and Eanflaed seem to have been married for 20 years or more without this becoming a political issue. What made it so was Oswiu’s – but not, apparently, Eanflæd’s – son, Alhfrith. Oswiu had appointed him as under-king of Deira, the southern of two kingdoms from whose merger Northumbria had been created a decade or so back. In theory, in this role, he owed fealty to his father – but as many kings have discovered down the centuries, an ambitious son won’t always wait. Alhfrith seems to have been looking for a matter on which he could start a row with his dad, possibly involving glory and honour and actual swords and stuff. Getting really, really into the Roman date of Easter, an upstart advisor named Wilfrid suggested, might just be it.
To avoid the prospect all this would end up as more than a mere diary clash, in 664 Oswiu called “the Synod of Whitby” to hear cases from both sides and decide once and for all which church had it right. Whitby seems to have been chosen because there was a monastery there, founded by Oswiu the previous decade to give thanks to god for his defeat of Penda, pagan king of Mercia (a sign of quite how new-fangled this whole Christianity thing was). By 664, it was a “double monastery”, housing both men and women (without funny business), and it was run by the king’s well-respected cousin, Hild. The site may also have been chosen because it was easily reached by sea: the only roads in the region were those built by the Romans and, two and a half centuries after the empire shipped out, these were starting to look a bit scrappy.
Speaking for the Celtic church was Colmán, born in Ireland and educated at Iona but now Bishop of Lindisfarne. That made him effectively the king’s own bishop: this should have been an easy win. The Roman party was in theory headed by Agilbert, probably a Frank, who had been bishop of both Wessex and Paris. But he left most of the talking to his protege, Alhfrith’s Northumbrian-born advisor Wilfrid. He was young, probably barely 30. But he’d spent time in Rome.
Colmán’s argument is difficult to be sure of: the only sources we have, from Bede and Wilfrid’s biography, were very much on the other side, and the main thing they disagree on was exactly how rude Wilfrid was while putting their faction’s case. But Wilfrid’s argument came down to two things. The first was universality: most of Christendom already followed the Roman tradition; did Northumbria really want to stand out? “Do you think that a handful of people in a corner of the remotest island is to be preferred to the universal church of Christ which is spread throughout the world?”3
The other was authority. Oswiu asked the two spokesmen which church father’s teaching they followed. Colmán cited St John; Wilfrid, St Peter – who, he noted, was the guy who the Bible made clear was the guy with the keys to heaven. Oswiu, who clearly fancied a spot of heaven, is said to have perked up at this discovery, and made his mind up on the spot.
And so, Northumbria fell in line with Rome: Easter could henceforth be on the same Sunday as the equinox/Passover if required; monks would shave the tops of their heads, which is why that’s the image you now all have of monks. Colmán resigned rather than change his practice. And where Northumbria led, the other kingdoms would follow: after Whitby, all the British kingdoms would follow Rome, a position that’d hold for the next nine centuries. This is almost certainly why essentially everyone in this story who wasn’t a king – Columba, Augustine, Colmán, Wilfrid, Agilbert, Eanflæd, Hild – ended up venerated as a saint in the Catholic Church.
It’s worth saying this wasn’t a split on the level of, say, the Reformation – the two churches and their followers broadly agreed, and Ireland too was increasingly falling in line with Rome. And Ahlfrith seems to have rebelled anyway: we don’t have the sources to be sure, but it is striking that, despite having been on the winning side at Whitby, he disappears from the record suspiciously quickly afterwards.
Still, as someone who can never remember when Easter is and finds himself surprised by it every year, I can’t help but find it pleasing that these islands once had a political crisis over the matter. More on the date of Easter from the archive, if that’s your jazz.
It didn’t actually, it didn’t mean anything, but you take my point.
I always have an urge to call him “the venerable Bede” because just “Bede” sounds stupid. But “venerable” isn’t actually a name, so.
This is quoted in Marc Morris’ The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England, a wonderful book in which I first came across this story. Other sources include two different pages on the English Heritage website.