The finest centre of scholarship was Northumbria. There Celtic and classical influences met: missionaries brought books from Ireland, and many Englishmen went to Ireland to study. Other Northumbrians went abroad, especially to Rome; among them was Benedict Biscop. Benedict returned from Rome with Theodore (668–669), spent some time in Canterbury, and then brought the learning acquired there to Northumbria. He founded the monasteries at Wearmouth (674) and Jarrow (682), where Bede spent his life. Benedict and Ceolfrith, abbot of Jarrow, brought books from the Continent and assembled the fine library that was available to Bede.
Bede (c. 672–735) is remembered as a great historian whose work never lost its value; but he was also a theologian regarded throughout the Middle Ages as second only to the Church Fathers. Nonetheless, even though he was outstanding, he did not work in isolation. Other Northumbrian houses—Lindisfarne, Whitby, and Ripon—produced saints’ lives, and Bede was in touch with many learned men, not only in Northumbria; there are also signs of scholarly activity in London and in East Anglia.
Moreover, in this period religious poetry was composed in the diction and technique of the older secular poetry in the vernacular. Beowulf, considered the greatest Old English poem, is sometimes assigned to this age, but the dating is uncertain. Art flourished, with a combination of native elements and influences from Ireland and the Mediterranean. The Hiberno-Saxon (or Anglo-Irish) style of manuscript illumination was evolved, its greatest example—the Lindisfarne Gospels—also showing classical influence. Masons from Gaul and Rome built stone churches. In Northumbria stone monuments with figure sculpture and vine-scroll patterns were set up. Churches were equipped with precious objects—some from abroad, some of native manufacture (even in heathen times the English had been skilled metalworkers). Manuscripts and works of art were taken abroad to churches founded by the English missions, and these churches, in turn, became centres of production. The great Sutton Hoo ship burial, discovered in 1939 at the burial site of the East Anglian royal house and perhaps the cenotaph of the bretwalda Raedwald (d. c. 625), is further evidence of influences from abroad, revealing important Anglo-Saxon contacts with Scandinavia, Byzantium, France, and the Mediterranean. The heptarchy The supremacy of Northumbria and the rise of Mercia
When Northumbria became eminent in scholarship, its age of political importance was over. This political dominance had begun when Aethelfrith, ruling over the united Northumbrian kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira, defeated the Dalriadic Scots at Degsastan in 603 and the Welsh at Chester in 613–616. Aethelfrith was himself defeated and killed in 616 by Edwin, the exiled heir to Deira, with the help of Raedwald of East Anglia, then overlord of the southern peoples.
Edwin continued to defeat the Welsh and became the acknowledged overlord of all England except Kent: he annexed the British kingdom of Elmet, invaded North Wales, and captured Anglesey and the Isle of Man. But he fell at Hatfield in 632 before the forces of Cadwallon, king of Gwynedd, and of Penda, a Mercian chieftain. A year later Aethelfrith’s son Oswald destroyed Cadwallon and restored the kingdom of Northumbria, and he became overlord of all the lands south of the River Humber. But Mercia was becoming a serious rival; originally a small kingdom in the northwest Midlands, it had absorbed the peoples of the Severn valley, including the Hwicce, a West Saxon people annexed in 628 after a victory by Penda at Cirencester.
Penda threw off Northumbrian control when he defeated and killed Oswald in 641. He drove out Cenwalh of Wessex, who took refuge in East Anglia from 645 to 648. Penda’s control of Middle Anglia, where he made his son subking in 653, brought him to the East Anglian frontier; he invaded this kingdom three times, killing three of its kings. He was able to draw an army from a wide area, including East Anglia, when he invaded Northumbria in 654; nevertheless, he was defeated and killed by Oswiu, Oswald’s successor.
For a short time Oswiu was overlord of southern England, but a Mercian revolt put Penda’s son Wulfhere on the throne in 657, and he greatly extended Mercian power to the southeast and south. Wulfhere became overlord of Essex, with London, and of Surrey. He also held the West Saxon lands along the middle Thames and blocked any eastward advance of the West Saxons by capturing the Isle of Wight and the mainland opposite and giving them to his godson, Aethelwalh of Sussex. Yet Wulfhere’s reign ended in disaster; the Kentish monk Aedde, in his Life of St. Wilfrid, said Wulfhere roused all the southern peoples in an attack on Ecgfrith of Northumbria in 674 but was defeated and died soon after.
Ecgfrith took possession of Lindsey, a section of modern Lincolnshire, but he lost it to Aethelred of Mercia after the Battle of the Trent in 678. Thenceforward Northumbria was no threat to Mercian dominance because it was occupied in fighting the Picts in the north. After Ecgfrith was slain by them in 685, his successors took little part in external affairs.
Yet Mercian power was threatened from the south. Caedwalla had added Surrey, Sussex, and the Isle of Wight to the West Saxon kingdom and thus came near to uniting all lands south of the Thames into a single kingdom that might have held its own against Mercia. But this kingdom was short-lived. Kent became free from foreign interference in 694, two years after the accession of Wihtred, who reestablished the Kentish royal line. Sussex appears again as an independent kingdom; and Caedwalla’s successor, Ine, was mainly occupied in extending his territory to the west. After Wihtred’s death in 725 and Ine’s abdication in 726, both Kent and Wessex had internal troubles and could not resist the Mercian kings Aethelbald and Offa. The great age of Mercia
Aethelbald succeeded in 716 to the rule of all the Midlands and to the control of Essex and London. By 731 all provinces south of the Humber were subject to him. Some of his charters use a regnal style suited to this dignity, such as “king not only of the Mercians but also of all provinces . . . of the South English” and rex Britanniae (a Latinization of bretwalda). Aethelbald held this position, with only occasional warfare, until his death, in 757—far longer than any previous holder of the imperium. St. Boniface praised the good order he maintained in his kingdom, though complaining of his immoral life and his encroachment on church privileges. Aethelbald was murdered by his own household.
Offa did not at once attain the powerful position that later caused Charles the Great (Charlemagne) to treat with him on equal terms; Cynewulf of Wessex recovered West Saxon lands by the middle Thames and did not submit until 779. Offa was overlord in Kent by 764, in Sussex and the district of Hastings by 771; he apparently lost his authority in Kent after the Battle of Otford in 776 but recovered it in 785. His use of an East Anglian mint shows him supreme there. He claimed greater powers than earlier overlords—subkings among the Hwicce and in Sussex dropped their royal titles and appeared as ealdermen, and he referred to a Kentish king as his thegn. The English scholar Alcuin spoke of the blood shed by Offa to secure the succession of his son, and fugitives from his kingdom sought asylum with Charles the Great. Charles treated Offa as if he were sole king of England, at least of the region south of the Humber; the only other king he acknowledged was the Northumbrian ruler. Offa seemed not to have claimed authority beyond the Humber but instead allied himself with King Aethelred of Northumbria by giving him his daughter in 794.