Images: Phil Cope. As featured in John Connell’s ‘The Man Who Gave His Horse to a Beggar’ (from his home county of Northumberland).

The wooden cross hard by the roadside of the B6318, east of Chollerford commemorates Oswald’s victory at Heavenfield, outside Hexham, fought in 633 or 634AD. It marks the area where he is said to have raised the Christian symbol on the eve of the battle.

The cross recalled not only Christ’s victory over death and Satan, his breaking down of the gates of hell, but also the military triumphs of the first Christian Emperor who invoked his name, Constantine the Great (the historian Eusebius described how the Emperor Constantine was said to have seen cross of light in the heavens accompanied by a phrase which is usually translated as “in this sign, you will conquer”, heralding his victory at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312AD).

Bede portrays Oswald as a ‘new Constantine’, a righteous ruler with divine support, marshalling his army under the shadow of one of the greatest monuments of Imperial Rome – a wall stretching from sea to sea. Hooded monks from Iona may also have been in attendance, chanting in Latin and offering up prayers for victory. Scots, in later centuries, carried into battle a reliquary known as the Brecbennoch (‘embossed peaked-thing’), which probably contained a relic of Columba. 

When Oswald fled Northumbria with his war-widowed mother, he was a whey-faced boy in fear of his life, but he returned as a battle-hardened warrior who had seen action in Ireland fighting for the hosts who had fostered him. Groomed for kingship during his years of exile, he must have been every inch the early medieval warlord, fluent in Gaelic and in English, the heir to the kingdom of Bernicia through his father and Deira through his mother. The monks of Iona and the lords of Dál Riata who had taken him under their wing had high hopes, and now, at long last, the opportunity had arrived for him to step into the breach and make good on their investment. He did not disappoint.

Oswald returned with an army at his back, surprising his enemies in an audacious dawn raid, driving them before him in a bloody rout. The battle started at Heavenfield [NY 937 696] in the shadow of Hadrian’s Wall, less than five miles from Hexham in Northumberland. This is the stuff from which legends are made: a king forced into exile by fate returns to reclaim his rightful throne and deliver his people. The narrative influenced Tolkien’s ‘The Lord of the Rings’, and is found, too, in the story of King Arthur’s return, rumoured to be sleeping underground at Sewingshields, less than ten miles away from the battle site. It is said that he will come again when his people’s need is greatest and lead them to victory over the forces of darkness. This is, of course, the Christian story, too.

The Welsh king who had murdered Oswald’s half-brother and ravaged his people was hacked down at a place called Deniseburn (‘Denis’ Brook’), identified with Rowley Burn, a stream that flows into the valley of Devil’s Water, between Hexham and Corbridge, several miles south of the wall. Fragments of human bone and weaponry found by the B6318 suggest the battle started close to Hadrian’s Wall and ended several miles south of it. The slain were strewn across the ground like autumn leaves, from the fells of Fallowfield and Acomb to the haughs of Dilston.

This victory for Oswald was a vindication of the powers of the battle god of, and of its model of kingship. He had become the most powerful man in Britain, an overlord known in the late ninth-century Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as a “Bretwalda” (possibly ‘broad-ruler’ or ‘Britain-ruler’), now with a kingdom that stretched from the banks of the Humber in the south right up into what is now southern Scotland, and from the North Sea coast possibly as far as the Irish Sea. His triumph allowed him not only to re-unite the war-ravaged kingdom of Northumbria but to re-invent it as a Dál Riata-style theocracy aligned with what is now Ireland and Scotland. 

   

Bede describes Oswald as “the most holy and victorious king of the Northumbrians”, his triumph and holiness indivisible. Adomnán (c.624 -704) goes even further in his ‘Vita Columbae’ (‘Life of Columba’), claiming that Oswald was “ordained by God as emperor of the whole of Britain”. Christianity offered much to kings like Oswald, not only improving their prospects in the next life but allowing them to extend their imperium in this one, providing them, in addition, with models of tribal warrior kings like Saul and David.

Passing through a gate and a field, the visitor comes to a small church surrounded by trees. The original cross raised by the king on the eve of the battle is long-gone, the final piece taken away perhaps by a relic-hunter hoping for one last miracle. 

Bede describes the name of the battle site, Hefenfeld (‘Heavenfield’) in English, and ‘caelestis campus’ in Latin (also meaning ‘heavenly field’), as an omen of future happenings. But he glosses over the obvious inference to be drawn that this was a sacred site long before Oswald erected the cross, and it being chosen for the cross-raising precisely for that reason. Studies suggest that outdoor sanctuaries and holy trees, wells and rocks were thought to retain their supposed supernatural powers even when control of them passes from one group to another; while the sharing of contesting holy sites suggests a tendency towards continuity.  

The Saxons on the Continent, cousins of the English settlers, venerated a sacred pillar known as ‘Irminsul’, representing the ‘World Tree’.  When Oswald raised the cross, he was tapping into something that struck at the very heart of both pagan and Christian belief.  In Christian legend, the cross was conceived of as a great tree identical with Christ and the Church, the ‘abor vitae’ or ‘tree of life’ embracing and sustaining creation, uniting heaven and earth, providing spiritual food and healing. It was also a symbol of the sacrifice that renewed the world, described in the later Anglo-Saxon The Dream of the Rood as the ‘sigebeam’, or ‘victory tree’. An Old Norse poem known as the ‘Havamal’ describes Odin (‘Woden’) hanging on the world tree, pierced with a spear – an image that conjures up the dying and reviving god who sacrifices himself to renew the world, with clear echoes of the Crucifixion. It is not easy to disentangle ‘Christian’ and ‘pagan’ imagery, for both gave life to one another and drew their water from the same well of human experience. 

Oswald’s victory would have been regarded as part of a covenant between Oswald and Iona. They would do their best to ensure God was on-side to decide the outcome of battles in Northumbria’s favour through their own prayers and the intercessory powers of their founder, Saint Columba. In return, Oswald would act as patron for the mission and allow Northumbria to effectively become a cultural and spiritual province of Dál Riata, a point that is made explicitly in Adomnán’s ‘Vita Columbae’ (‘Life of Columba’):

“And in the terrible crashings of battle, by virtue of the prayer he obtained from God that some kings were conquered, and other rulers were conquerors. This special favour was bestowed by God, who honours all saints, on him, not only while he continued in this present life, but also after his departure from the flesh, as on a triumphant and powerful champion.”

Adomnán describes a dream vision experienced by Oswald in his tent on the eve of the battle. The king spoke of a shining being whose head scraped the clouds. The figure exhorts him to go forth into battle, telling him his enemy, Catlon (‘Cadwallon’) would be delivered into his hands and he would be victorious.

Relating his dream to the council, the group is heartened and the pagans among them agree to receive baptism following the triumph. The being in the vision is identified by Adomnán as Columba. But a shining giant appearing in dreams, endowed with the gift of prophesy and the power to grant victory may have had other associations, too. The battle god Woden from whom Oswald claimed descent has a name related to the Latin ‘vātēs’ and Old Irish ‘fáith’, both meaning ‘seer’ or ‘prophet’; and to the Gothic word ‘woþs’ or ‘possessed', the Old Norse óðr, 'mad, frantic, furious', and the Old English wōd, or 'mad'.