Anglican Commemoration
King of Northumbria & Martyr
August 5 · d. 642
also known as Oswald of Northumbria
Oswald was king of Northumbria from 634 until he fell in battle in 642. Raised in exile among the monks of Iona, he came home to win back his father's throne, and his first act as king was to send to Iona for a bishop to evangelize his people. He gave Aidan (the missionary who came) the island of Lindisfarne. And even as King he stood beside Aidan to serve faithfully as the interpreter of the gospel into their native English. He died fighting the pagan Penda of Mercia, praying for his soldiers as he fell, and the church has kept him ever since as a martyr.
Oswald was a prince of Northumbria, the great Anglo-Saxon kingdom of the north, in what is now the border country of England and Scotland. When he was a boy his father, King Aethelfrith, was killed and his enemies placed Edwin on his throne. Oswald and his brothers were carried away north into exile, to the Irish of the western isles. There, on the small island monastery of Iona, the monks took him in. They taught him their language and their learning, and they baptized him and taught him Christ. He grew up a king without a kingdom trusting the King of the monks who reared him.
Meanwhile, Edwin married the princess Æthelburh from Kent where St. Augustine was preaching the gospel. She brought a missionary named Paulinus with her to share the good news of Jesus with Northumbria. King Edwin himself became a Christian, but after his death in battle, Northumbria quickly began to slide away from the faith. A British war-king named Cadwallon was harrying the land and killing its princes one after another. When the news reached Iona, Oswald gathered the small band of men he had and went home to take his father's throne back from a far stronger enemy and to bring the good news back to his people.
The two armies met near the old Roman wall, at a place afterward called Heavenfield. Oswald's men were few and Cadwallon's were many. According to the tradition of Iona, the night before the battle Saint Columba appeared to Oswald in a dream and promised him victory, echoing God's words to Joshua, "Be strong and act courageously. Behold, I will be with thee." In the morning Oswald made a wooden cross with his own hands. He had the hole dug, set the cross upright, and held it himself while his soldiers packed the earth in around it. Then he called out to the whole army, in the words Bede preserved: Let us all kneel, and jointly beseech the true and living God Almighty, in his mercy, to defend us from the haughty and fierce enemy. They knelt in the field and prayed, and then they fought, and the great host of Cadwallon was broken, and Cadwallon killed.
With his throne won, Oswald did the thing he had crossed back over the sea to do. He sent to Iona, the island that had raised him, and asked for a bishop to bring his people to Christ. After some initial difficulties, Iona consecrated Aidan as a missionary bishop, and he would stay and faithfully lead the people to Christ side by side with Oswald. The king gave him the island of Lindisfarne as his seat, within sight of the royal fortress at Bamburgh. In the early days, when Aidan preached in his native Irish and the English nobles could not understand him, the king himself stood beside the bishop and served faithfully to translate his words into English. A king stooped to be a missionary's interpreter to save his people.
He kept the same devotion in private. He rose with the monks at midnight and often prayed on till daylight, and those who knew him said that wherever he sat, his hands rested on his knees turned upward, as if he had never quite stopped praying. Oswald was open-handed with the poor as few kings are. On Easter one year, he sat at the feast with Aidan beside him and a silver dish of fine food before him. His almoner (an official over royal generosity) came in to say that a crowd of the poor was sitting in the road outside. Oswald sent out his own food at once, and ordered the silver dish itself broken up and the pieces shared among them. Aidan, seeing his generosity, caught the king's right hand and said, May this hand never perish.
Oswald reigned only eight years. The pagan king Penda of Mercia rose against him, and in the year 642 the two met at a place the English called Maserfield, near what is now Oswestry on the Welsh border, whose very name still keeps Oswald's. There the Christian king was overwhelmed and cut down. Bede records that as the weapons closed around him Oswald's last thought was not for himself but for his men: "'Lord have mercy on their souls,' said Oswald as he fell to the ground." Those words have become a common blessing in England. Penda had the king's body hacked apart, and the head and the hands that had once held the cross upright at Heavenfield were set up on stakes. But the church remembered Aidan's blessing of Oswald's generous hand, and when Oswald was killed his right arm and hand were cut from his body by his enemies. But the faithful gathered them, and traditionally, they did not decay and several reports of miraculous healings were associated with his hand.
But where the faith had faltered when Edwin died, Oswald's faith that had carried home from Iona was not cut down with him. His brother Oswiu recovered his remains and laid him to rest at Lindisfarne in a coffin with Saint Cuthbert; pilgrims carried away the earth from the field where he fell, and the sick were healed by it; and his name traveled with the English mission across the sea until it was sung in churches as far off as Italy and Germany. The cross he had raised with his own hands at Heavenfield stood over a Northumbria that was now, and would stay, Christian. He had asked God to defend a small army from a fierce enemy; God gave him in the end a far more lasting kingdom than the political one he died for.
Almost everything known of Oswald comes from, Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English PeopleEcclesiastical History of the English People — Judith McClure and Roger Collins, Oxford World's Classics, and a bit from writings of the monks of Iona, all written within the century following his death. Bede was a Northumbrian himself, devoted to Oswald's memory, writing while men still living had heard the story from those who had known the king. His account is warm and devotional, and also the careful work of the finest historian of the age, who names his informants and marks off what he was told from what he himself could vouch for unlike many writers of his age. Early source exists as well from the Ionians, Adomnan's Life of Saint Columba, written about 697 even before Bede in 731.
Oswald was born about 604, a son of Aethelfrith, the pagan king who had made Northumbria the strongest power in the north. When Aethelfrith fell in 616 to Edwin, the young Oswald was taken into exile among the Irish of Dal Riata and the community of Iona, where he was baptized. He returned about 634, after Edwin's death had thrown Northumbria into a year of disaster under Cadwallon of Gwynedd. Oswald defeated and killed Cadwallon at the battle Bede places at Heavenfield, near Hexham by Hadrian's Wall. As king he brought Aidan's Irish mission to Lindisfarne in 635 and reunited the Northumbrian kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira. He was killed by Penda of Mercia at Maserfield, traditionally identified with Oswestry in Shropshire, whose name still carries his name; the date is traditionally given as 5 August 642, though Bede's own regnal-year arithmetic leaves some modern historians preferring 641. He was revered as a saint almost at once.
The story Adomnan tells and Bede does not is this: that on the night before Heavenfield, Columba appeared to Oswald in his sleep, so tall his head seemed to brush the clouds, and comforted him with words like the ones God had once spoken to Joshua, promising him the victory. Adomnan says he had it from his own predecessor as abbot, Failbe, who as a young man had been present when Oswald himself told the story to Abbot Segene, an unusually short chain for a medieval vision. Bede's silence about it likely means only that the story belonged to Iona's own memory of the foster son it had raised and baptized, a memory that had not reached Jarrow, a full generation and the length of Britain away, by the time he wrote. The church has held the story since Adomnan first set it down, and holds it still: that the victory at Heavenfield belonged, from the night before it was won, to the God Columba had first proclaimed to Oswald as a boy in exile.
Oswald is kept on 5 August, the day he fell in battle, and the church has counted him among the martyrs from the first, a king who died defending a Christian people from a pagan enemy; his liturgical color is the red of martyrdom.
His traditions and remembrance were among the widest of any English saint. His head was buried at Lindisfarne and later placed in the coffin of Cuthbert, where it is generally believed to lie still, in the cathedral of Durham. His incorrupt right arm, the hand Aidan had blessed, was kept at the royal stronghold of Bamburgh. Other relics traveled astonishingly far: to Gloucester, where a priory was founded in his honor, and across the sea to the Continent, so that churches in Germany, Switzerland, and northern Italy came to keep an English feast. He is one of very few Anglo-Saxon saints honored so far from home.
In art Oswald is shown as a crowned king, often holding the wooden cross of Heavenfield, and frequently with a raven at his side, the bird a twelfth-century legend gave him, reportedly carrying his incorrupt arm from the stake where it had been set to a nearby ash tree, where a healing spring broke from the ground. He is patron of the town that bears his name, Oswestry, which means Oswald's tree. In a patronage tradition, he is invoked against plague and for the sick, due to the healings Bede reports at the field of his death. Many English churches, most of them in the north, are dedicated to him.
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Ecclesiastical History of the English People(Latin, c. 731)
Recommended: Judith McClure and Roger Collins, Oxford World's Classics
Bede, finished about 731 within living memory of Oswald, is the source for nearly everything known of the king; the Oxford World's Classics edition is the standard in-print translation, Sellar's 1907 the freely readable one.
Public domain: A. M. Sellar's 1907 translation (Internet Sacred Text Archive), Fordham Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Book III
The King in the North: The Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria(English, 2013)
Recommended: Max Adams (Head of Zeus paperback)
A readable popular history that sets Oswald in the whole world of seventh-century Northumbria, sympathetic to the king and careful with Bede; the place to begin for the life and times.
Further reading. The standard scholarly account of Oswald and his cult is the collection edited by Clare Stancliffe and Eric Cambridge, Oswald: Northumbrian King to European Saint (1995), which gathers the historical, archaeological, and hagiographical evidence; it is out of print and best sought through a library. Adomnan's Life of Saint Columba, which preserves the vision before Heavenfield, is translated by Richard Sharpe for Penguin Classics and is freely readable in older translations online. Catherine Cubitt's essay "Sites and Sanctity: Revisiting the Cult of Murdered and Martyred Anglo-Saxon Royal Saints" (Early Medieval Europe, 2000) sets Oswald's cult beside the other Anglo-Saxon king-saints killed by violence and asks directly why the church came to call men in his position martyrs.
Online resources. Bede's account of Oswald, the principal source for everything above, is freely readable in A. M. Sellar's 1907 translation at the Internet Sacred Text Archive and at Fordham's Internet Medieval Sourcebook.
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Bede gathers further wonders around Oswald's death and relics, careful each time to say he reports rather than witnesses them: earth from the place where he fell healed the sick who carried it away; his right arm and hand, severed from his body when he was killed, were still, when Bede wrote nearly ninety years afterward, undecayed. Both claims attach to something locatable, a field near Oswestry, a relic kept at Bamburgh, that Bede's own readers could go and see for themselves. A much later legend, first told by the Durham monk Reginald in his twelfth-century Life of Saint Oswald, gave the story its most memorable shape: a raven carrying the arm from the stake where Penda's men had set it to a nearby ash tree, and a healing spring breaking from the ground where the arm at last came to rest. None of that, raven or ash or spring, is in Bede; it is Reginald's addition, five centuries on, and it gave Oswald the bird that has stood beside him in art ever since.
Oswald's title, king and martyr, is worth pausing on, because Bede himself never actually calls him a martyr. What earns Oswald his place in Bede's pages is his life: a king who prayed for hours with his arms held out, who gave Aidan the freedom to evangelize his people, who stood at the bishop's side translating Irish into English for him like a servant, who broke up his own dinner service to feed beggars at his gate. That is a confessor's holiness, proved in the ordinary acts of a Christian reign, not the holiness a martyr proves by refusing to deny Christ. Nor was Penda, on Bede's own telling, the kind of enemy who forced that particular choice: Bede says plainly that Penda did not forbid the preaching of the gospel among his own pagan Mercians, and that what he despised was false living in those who had already professed the faith, not the faith itself (like Cadwallon whom though purportedly a professing Christian, Bede recorded as more cruel than the pagans). Whatever set Penda against Northumbria in 642, the old rivalry between the two kingdoms for mastery of the English is the likelier reading than any settled hatred of the church.
And yet the church received Oswald's death, almost from the year it happened, in the shape a martyr's death takes. His body was divided and its parts sought out as relics; the field where his blood fell was held holy, its earth carried off for healing; his dying words, asking mercy not for himself but for the men who fell at his side, became a proverb, and an echo of Christ's own prayer for those killing him that the church could hardly have missed. Historians who study the Anglo-Saxon kings killed by violence in this period have given this its own name: not martyrdom in the narrower sense, dying rather than renounce the faith, but an older, wider sense in which a Christian ruler cut down by a pagan enemy while laboring for Christ's church was received as one who had given his life for it. That reading, is what the church's calendar has followed ever since, naming Oswald what his life and his death had already made him in popular piety.
Almighty God, you gave your servant Oswald boldness to confess the Name of our Savior Jesus Christ before the rulers of this world, and courage to die for this faith: Grant that we may always be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in us, and to suffer gladly for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
British (Received Pronunciation): Cadwallon /kædˈwɒl.ən/; Lindisfarne /ˈlɪndɪsfɑːrn/; Mercia /ˈmɜːrʃiə/; Dál /dɑːl/
Readings for a Martyr
Jeremiah 15:15–21Psalm 34Revelation 7:9–17Luke 12:4–12