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 convert his people. He gave Aidan the island of Lindisfarne and stood beside him as his interpreter, turning the monk's Irish into 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 king's son 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 took the throne, and 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 taught him Christ, and they baptized him. He grew up a prince without a kingdom and a Christian without a country.
While he was away, Northumbria had turned its back on the faith and fallen into ruin. The Christian king Edwin was dead, and 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.
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. The night before the battle, the tradition of Iona says, the great Columba appeared to Oswald in a dream and promised him victory in the words God had once given to Joshua. 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. The first monk they sent was a hard man who found the English stubborn and went home discouraged. The next was Aidan, and Aidan was gentle, and he stayed. Oswald gave him the island of Lindisfarne, within sight of the royal fortress at Bamburgh, for his seat. And in the early days, when Aidan preached in his native Irish and the English nobles could not follow him, it was the king himself who stood beside the bishop and turned his words into English. A king had made himself a missionary's interpreter for the saving of his own people.
Oswald was open-handed with the poor as few kings are. One Easter day he sat at the feast with Aidan beside him and a silver dish of fine food before him, when his almoner came in to say that a crowd of the poor was sitting in the road outside, begging. Oswald sent out the food at once, and ordered the silver dish itself broken up and the pieces shared among them. Aidan, seeing it, caught the king's right hand and said, May this hand never perish. And so, the church remembered, it came to pass: when Oswald was killed his right arm and hand were cut from his body, and they did not decay.
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. The words became a proverb in England. Penda had the king's body hacked apart, and his head and his arms set up on stakes.
But the faith Oswald had carried home from Iona was not cut down with him. His brother Oswiu recovered the head and the arms; the head was laid at Lindisfarne and came at last to rest in the coffin of 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 larger kingdom than the one he died for.
How we know. Almost everything known of Oswald comes from one source written within a century of his death, Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, finished at the monastery of Jarrow about 731. Bede was a Northumbrian himself, devoted to Oswald's memory, writing while men still living had the story from those who had known the king. His account is warm and frankly devotional; it is 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 could vouch for. A second early source, Adomnan's Life of Saint Columba, written on Iona about 697, independently preserves the tradition that Columba appeared to Oswald on the eve of Heavenfield and promised him victory.
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, and 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, probably Oswestry in Shropshire, on 5 August 642, and his cult began almost at once.
Bede gathers a great many miracles at the place of Oswald's death and around his relics, and reports them as miracles. Modern historians read them also as evidence of how fast and how far the cult of the martyr-king spread, out of Northumbria into Mercia, Ireland, and the Continent, carried by the English missionaries who took Oswald's name with them. The dismemberment, the relics divided between Lindisfarne and Bamburgh and later carried much farther, and the proverb of his dying prayer are all early. The harder reality beneath the holy king, a successful warlord in a violent age, Bede does not conceal either, and the two readings of Oswald, saint and strategist, have stood side by side from the beginning.
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 cult was 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 his 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, from a later legend that gave him a bird to carry his ring or his word. He is patron of the town that bears his name, Oswestry, which means Oswald's tree, after the stakes on which his body was displayed; he is invoked against plague and for the sick, after 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.
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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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): Oswald /ˈɒzwəld/; Cadwallon /kædˈwɒl.ən/; Lindisfarne /ˈlɪndɪsfɑːrn/; Mercia /ˈmɜːrʃiə/; Northumbria /nɔːrˈθʌmbriə/; Dál /dɑːl/
Readings for a Martyr
Jeremiah 15:15–21Psalm 34Revelation 7:9–17Luke 12:4–12