Wilfrid’s Early Episcopal Career in Northumbria

As recorded in Stephen’s Life and in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, Wilfrid’s career seems remarkably lacking in any clear purpose or direction other than his desire for episcopal authority, which was variously satisfied or thwarted by members of Northumbria’s ruling families. He was seen by eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth-century scholars as a proud and wealthy member of the Northumbrian elite whose life contrasted sharply with that of his humble, self-effacing contemporary, St Cuthbert.Footnote ¹¹ In recent decades there has, however, been greater focus on the long-term struggle for episcopal power in Northumbria between Wilfrid, his supporters and successors on the one hand, and the community of Lindisfarne, in Wilfrid’s time under the leadership of Abbot (later Bishop) Eata, on the other.Footnote ¹² Neither Bede nor Stephen was willing to describe explicitly the unedifying competition between these two ecclesiastical parties, preferring instead to attribute the events that they were unable to ignore to clashes between individual churchmen and members of Northumbria’s ruling families.Footnote ¹³ Yet there was a more fundamental conflict between the two sides, based on their incompatible views about God’s intention for the development of the Northumbrian Church, and about the roles they were required to perform in order to achieve it.

The hypothesis offered here is that whatever his personal characteristics, Wilfrid was a man on a mission: an apostolic mission to bring all parts of Britain under the authority of the apostolic see at Rome. It included his well-known championing of Roman doctrine and practice at the synod of Whitby in 664, the one aspect that Bede was willing to recount in detail because it promoted a message that he himself was keen to convey; but it also informed Wilfrid’s approach to the Northumbrian episcopate. Wilfrid’s actions are most easily understood if he believed his divinely inspired role was to fulfil Pope Gregory the Great’s instructions, issued at the beginning of the seventh century, for establishing and developing the church in Northumbria by creating a network of dioceses subject to a metropolitan bishop based at York. As Alan Thacker has pointed out, this is certainly how Wilfrid seems to have behaved once he had gained control of York.Footnote ¹⁴

By the mid-seventh century, Northumbria was home to two competing traditions of church mission and ecclesiastical organization. The earlier of them, the Roman tradition, had been initiated towards the end of the sixth century by Gregory the Great, and was led by Augustine, prior of Gregory’s own monastery of St Andrew the apostle in Rome.Footnote ¹⁵ It resulted, a generation later, in the creation of an episcopal see at York, in effect the re-establishment of a see known to have been located in the Roman provincial capital of Eboracum in the early fourth century.Footnote ¹⁶

The intention to re-establish a see at York is evidenced in a letter issued by Pope Gregory in 601, in which he notified Augustine, by then bishop of Canterbury, that he would send him the pallium, so he could consecrate additional bishops within his own jurisdiction. It also expressed Gregory’s wish that Augustine should consecrate a bishop who could be sent to establish a see at York, and that if the places surrounding York also received the Word of God, its bishop should consecrate further bishops and enjoy the rank of metropolitan.Footnote ¹⁷ His wish was partly fulfilled by 627, when King Edwin of Northumbria was baptized by the new bishop of York, Paulinus, in the church of St Peter the Apostle, which had been rapidly constructed in York.Footnote ¹⁸

In the event, no further sees were created by Paulinus. His episcopate lasted only a few years, ending in 633 when he fled to Kent after Edwin had been defeated in battle and killed by the pagan king Penda of Mercia.Footnote ¹⁹ After a short period of apostasy, the renewal of Christian mission in Northumbria, in the time of King Oswald, was undertaken, not from Kent, but by monks representing the Irish tradition and originating from the community on Iona. They founded a monastic community at Lindisfarne in the province of the Bernicians, to the north of Deiran territory; and it was at Lindisfarne, not York, that Aidan, bishop of Northumbria from 635, was based.Footnote ²⁰

York was re-established as an episcopal see some thirty years later, when Alhfrith, sub-king of the Deirans under his father King Oswiu of Northumbria,Footnote ²¹ sent Wilfrid to Gaul to be consecrated bishop for himself and his people.Footnote ²² The phrasing strongly suggests that he was to be bishop for the province of the Deirans, rather than for the whole of Northumbria.Footnote ²³ Even a geographically limited diminution of its authority seems, however, to have been intolerable to the Lindisfarne community; and while Wilfrid was absent from Northumbria, a rival bishop, Chad, was installed at York. Chad had been, like Abbot Eata, one of Bishop Aidan’s pupils at Lindisfarne,Footnote ²⁴ and had succeeded his brother Cedd to become abbot of Lastingham, a monastery in Deiran territory that, Bede tells us, followed Lindisfarne’s rites.Footnote ²⁵

Chad’s promotion to York, as bishop of the whole of Northumbria, will have required the support of Alhfrith’s father Oswiu, who was perhaps wary of his son’s separatist tendencies; but it is not difficult to detect the influence of Eata behind this politically adroit move, nominating as bishop a fellow pupil of Aidan who was also abbot of a monastery which, though evidently affiliated to Lindisfarne, was located in the territory ruled by Alhfrith. This state of affairs seems to have persisted until 669, when a new archbishop of Canterbury, Theodore of Tarsus, ejected Chad from the Northumbrian episcopate and gave it to Wilfrid, who then administered ‘the see of the church at York and of all the Northumbrians and Picts, as far as Oswiu’s power extended’.Footnote ²⁶ This reversal may be connected to Theodore’s lengthy visit to Bishop Agilbert of Paris on his way to England to take up his appointment.Footnote ²⁷ Agilbert had been closely associated with Wilfrid for some years: he had ordained Wilfrid into the priesthood in Ripon, had supported him at the synod of Whitby, and had participated in his consecration as bishop, in Gaul.Footnote ²⁸

Once installed in his Northumbrian see, Wilfrid embarked on a programme of building and rebuilding major churches, and of acquiring estates for their support. Stephen records that Wilfrid restored Paulinus’s now ruined church at York, and rescued it from poverty by endowing it with estates which he had acquired for God.Footnote ²⁹ Between 671 and 678 he built a new church of St Peter at Ripon, once again furnishing it with estates which had been donated by the kings.Footnote ³⁰ Between 672 and 678 he also built a new church at Hexham, in the province of the Bernicians, named for the apostle Andrew and endowed with lands that probably constituted the ‘shire’ territory later recorded as Hexhamshire.Footnote ³¹

These initiatives were, however, followed by another complete reversal of fortune for Wilfrid, who was evicted from office. Bede records that, in 678, Archbishop Theodore divided the Northumbrian diocese into two parts: one to serve the Deirans with its seat at York, and the other to serve the Bernician people, with its episcopal seat at Hexham or Lindisfarne.Footnote ³² Though Bede ascribes the motivation for this division to ‘a dissension’ between King Ecgfrith and Wilfrid,Footnote ³³ the choice of bishops to control the new dioceses indicates a strategic alignment between Theodore and Lindisfarne. Bosa, the bishop selected as head of the Deiran see, had been a pupil of Hild, the Whitby abbess who had taken the part of the Irish in opposition to Wilfrid at the synod of Whitby in 664; and the bishop selected to head the Bernician see was none other than Eata. They were consecrated by Theodore at York, presumably (and pointedly) in the church recently restored by Wilfrid, who was now again without a diocese of his own.Footnote ³⁴

Theodore’s new diocesan arrangements and appointments raise a number of important questions. First, what led him to evict from office the bishop whose cause he had promoted less than ten years earlier against the interests of the Lindisfarne community and, probably, against the inclination of the late King Oswiu? Secondly, why did he now appoint someone who was probably a Lindisfarne affiliate to one of the new dioceses, and a leading member of the Lindisfarne community to the other? Thirdly, why did he offer the church of Hexham as an alternative to Lindisfarne as the seat for the new bishop of the Bernicians?

The third of these questions is, perhaps, the key to understanding the first two. It seems highly unlikely that Theodore would have included Hexham as a possible diocesan seat unless it already had some claim, however recent or tenuous, to such status; and, therefore, highly likely that Wilfrid had attempted, in 678 or shortly before, to create a new diocese based on his new church at Hexham. It should be admitted at once that our earliest source does not refer to the Hexham donation as being intended to facilitate the creation of a new diocese. In Wilfrid’s Life, Stephen simply says that he acquired from Queen Æthilthryth, first wife of King Ecgfrith, a ‘region’ in Hexham;Footnote ³⁵ but Prior Richard of Hexham’s History, composed almost five centuries later, claimed that the donation was ‘for the creation of a see for himself’.Footnote ³⁶

Prior Richard’s claim has been regarded as a myth, propagated to support the archbishops of York who took possession of Hexham church and Hexhamshire in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, to the detriment of the bishops of Durham.Footnote ³⁷ It is, however, much easier to understand York’s jurisdictional claim if Wilfrid, when bishop of York, had, indeed, attempted to institute a diocese based on Hexham, as a means of giving effect to Gregory the Great’s command at the beginning of the century, that if the localities surrounding York also received the Word of the Lord, its bishop should consecrate further bishops and enjoy the rank of metropolitan.Footnote ³⁸ Had Theodore allowed such a move to stand, he would in effect have conceded to Wilfrid metropolitan control of Northumbria.

The boundaries of the new Hexham diocese are unknown from near contemporary records, but relying again on Prior Richard’s much later account, they seem to have extended from the sea on the east to Wetheral near Carlisle on the west, and from the river Tees in the south to the river Aln in the north (see Fig. 1).Footnote ³⁹ The river Tees is very likely to have divided the Bernicians from the Deirans,Footnote ⁴⁰ and therefore equally likely to have formed the southern boundary of Hexham diocese. If its northern boundary was the river Aln, it would have been, at the coast, only about 48 km (30 miles) from Lindisfarne. For the community based there, once home to prelates whose diocese extended across the whole Northumbrian kingdom, Bishop Wilfrid and his associates at Hexham had been uncomfortably close.

The creation of Hexham diocese may have been a direct, frontal attack on Lindisfarne’s control of the southern part of the Bernician province, but the conflict between Lindisfarne and Wilfrid was not confined to Northumbria north of the Tees: it was also fought in the Deiran province to the south. To assess its impact south of the Tees, it is worth reviewing what Stephen tells us about Wilfrid’s activities and possessions there, and about his relationships with Deiran religious communities and their leaders.

Wilfrid’s Pastoral Activities, Estates and Interactions in the Deiran Province

Stephen’s record of Wilfrid’s pastoral activities in Northumbria focuses on his work in the territory of the Deirans rather than in the land of the Bernicians, notably in the western parts of Deiran controlled territory where people he identified as British evidently still formed communities on both the east and west sides of the Pennines. One specific account relates to a community occupying an area called On Tiddanufri where, according to Stephen, he performed a miracle while riding out to ‘to fulfil the various duties of his bishopric, baptizing and also confirming the people with the laying on of hands’.Footnote ⁴¹ The miracle concerned an infant whom he had resuscitated and then baptized, a British child who was subsequently hidden away ‘among others of the British race’.Footnote ⁴² On Tiddanufri has been identified with the township of Tidover, located about 20 km (12 miles) to the south of Ripon,Footnote ⁴³ on the ridge above Baffle Beck which flows into the River Wharfe about 6 km (4 miles) west of Collingham.

Stephen also recounts that Wilfrid, at the dedication of his new stone church in Ripon, in the presence of King Ecgfrith of Northumbria and his brother King Ælfwine, read out a list of the lands which those kings had presented to him on that day and previously, to which bishops and all the chief men had consented and subscribed,Footnote ⁴⁴ as well as a list of the consecrated places in various regions that the British clergy had deserted when faced with Anglian warriors.Footnote ⁴⁵ Stephen names some of the regions where many lands had been given to Wilfrid for the service of God: iuxta Rippel, Ingayedene, in regione Dunutinga and Incaetlaevum. Footnote ⁴⁶

The principal focus of this discussion is inevitably the identification of these named places, but there are two other aspects of the record that should be noted. First, David Woodman has emphasized how Stephen’s account of these proceedings seems to follow charter diplomatic, and ‘if not relying on an actual charter, deliberately recalled the style of such a document’.Footnote ⁴⁷ This might imply that, as suggested below, the places named by Stephen were specifically selected by him, for a particular purpose, from a longer list of named places.

Secondly, Bede’s HE records that Pope Gregory’s instructions had given authority over all the bishops of Britain to Augustine, the first metropolitan at Canterbury,Footnote ⁴⁸ presumably thereby constraining Wilfrid’s episcopal role in areas north of the Humber and the Mersey where the British church continued to function. This may explain Stephen’s reference to the list of consecrated places that had been deserted by their British clergy: if Wilfrid was in a position to claim that numerous British communities had been abandoned by their own priests and bishops, it would have been difficult to prevent him assuming responsibility for their pastoral care.

There has been debate about the locations of some of the regiones named by Stephen, but the identifications here largely follow those accepted by Glanville Jones and more recently by Thomas Pickles and others:Footnote ⁴⁹ Rippel is probably the River Ribble, and Ingayedene perhaps Yeadon, to the west of Leeds; in regione Dunutinga has been identified as Dent, and Incaetlaevum as Catlow. Yeadon would be the outlier of the group, the township of that name now occupying the high ground between the River Aire and the River Wharfe – though, notably, only about 5 km (3 miles) to the south of Otley in the Wharfe valley. The rest of the names are all identifiable with places much further to the west, associated with the upper reaches of rivers draining westwards from the Pennines into the Irish Sea.

The village named Dent is in the valley of the River Dee, which drains north-westwards into the River Lune via the River Rawthey. About 32 km (20 miles) further south is a farm named Catlow, south-east of Catlow Fell on the east side of the River Hodder, which drains southwards into the River Ribble.Footnote ⁵⁰ Mary Higham has pointed out that the area to the south of Catlow, between the Hodder and the Ribble, was a ‘multiple’ or ‘shire’ estate at Domesday, then centred on Grindleton.Footnote ⁵¹ Its northernmost dependency named in Domesday, Hammerton [Hall], is only 5 km (3 miles) south of Catlow Farm. It is therefore tempting to link together the regions named Incaetlaevum and iuxta Rippel as descriptions of the region now known as Bowland.

The remaining donation recorded by Stephen is in fact the earliest one, having been made by King Alhfrith shortly before he gave Wilfrid the monastery in Ripon, in about 660. The estate was named Aetstanforda, and Jones suggested that it should be identified with Stamford [Bridge] east of York, partly on the basis that York was Alhfrith’s capital. Footnote ⁵² There is, however, no evidence that York actually was a royal residence at this period;Footnote ⁵³ and given the suggested locations for most of the other recorded donations, Aet Stanforda seems more likely to have been at Stainforth in Ribblesdale (see Fig. 1).

The donations named and geographically located by Stephen evidently formed only a small proportion of the Deiran grants actually made to Wilfrid and to the religious communities associated with him before his ejection from the York episcopate in 678. Stephen refers to Alhfrith’s grant of thirty hides to support Ripon when he gave Wilfrid the monastery there, and he notes that many territories had been acquired by Wilfrid a decade later, to support the restored St Peter’s church at York.Footnote ⁵⁴ The lists that Wilfrid read out at the dedication of his new church at Ripon included, as well as regions named by Stephen, the un-named consecrated places noted above and other un-named locations.Footnote ⁵⁵

Why were some places named by Stephen, and others not? The inclusion of the place-name On Tiddanufri was probably intended to authenticate the story of the miracle that Wilfrid performed there, and the reference to British people living in that and neighbouring communities is likely to have been meaningful rather than incidental.Footnote ⁵⁶ Given the purpose of Stephen’s Life, which is discussed below, it seems highly probable that he aimed to nudge his audience’s perception and appreciation of Wilfrid in particular directions, one of them being the bishop’s relationships with British communities in the western parts of the Deiran kingdom, communities that had once belonged to the British kingdoms of Elmet and Craven.

The former kingdom of Elmet, encompassing much of what is now West Yorkshire, seems to have been incorporated into Deiran territory in the early seventh century, and the British territory of Craven, perhaps a small kingdom or province, to the north-west of Elmet, in the mid-seventh century.Footnote ⁵⁷ Advances across the Ribble, towards the rivers Lune and Hodder, and into the British kingdom of Rheged,Footnote ⁵⁸ were perhaps still in progress in the third quarter of the century. This would have enabled Wilfrid to orchestrate a mission to bring renewed pastoral care to the ‘abandoned’ British communities of these areas, and to correct the rites and customs of the British Church, some of which were, according to Bede,Footnote ⁵⁹ at variance with those of the apostolic see at Rome.

Turning to the Northumbrian religious leaders known to have interacted with Wilfrid, Stephen and Bede offer few potential supporters. At some point in the 660s, when Wilfrid was abbot of Ripon, he invited Tunberht, abbot of the monastery in Gilling, Ingetlingum, to join him in Ripon, along with those in his community who also wished to come with him, a measure to help them evade the plague.Footnote ⁶⁰ In Getlingum has been identified by most commentators with Gilling West, about 16 km (10 miles) north-west of Catterick,Footnote ⁶¹ a location close to one of the main trans-Pennine routes, the Roman road from Brough in Cumbria, over Stainmore to Catterick in North Yorkshire, and perhaps more at risk from plague than the Ripon community (Fig. 1).

Tunberht’s close relationship with Wilfrid continued after the latter’s expulsion from York in 678. In 681, Archbishop Theodore appears to have reversed his decision to link Hexham and Lindisfarne as alternative seats for the Bernician diocese by appointing Tunberht as bishop of Hexham, with Eata confined to the Lindisfarne see.Footnote ⁶² This appointment may have been Theodore’s response to Wilfrid’s petition to Pope Agatho over his ejection from York and the division of his Northumbrian see: Wilfrid had asked (as a last resort) that ‘if again it has been decided to appoint bishops in the same see over which I have been ruling, at any rate let your Eminence order that it be decided that only such be preferred with whom I can serve God in unity’.Footnote ⁶³ Tunberht would have been such a bishop, a member of Wilfrid’s parrochia. Footnote ⁶⁴

If so, it failed to put an end to the dissension over Hexham diocese. In 684 Tunberht was deposed. Bede does not give a reason for this, but the Vita Sancti Eatae claims that his removal was on the grounds of disobedience.Footnote ⁶⁵ It is difficult to think of anyone to whom Tunberht could have been disobedient other than his metropolitan at Canterbury. The Lindisfarne community once again took over both Bernician dioceses.

More numerous in the written records are Wilfrid’s opponents. They included not only Eata and other members of the Lindisfarne community, but also the monastery at Whitby, whose founding abbess, Hild, seems to have been a consistent opponent of Wilfrid. As noted earlier, she took the side of the Irish at the Synod of Whitby in 664; and in 679, shortly before her death, opposed Wilfrid’s appeal to Rome.Footnote ⁶⁶ Furthermore, the bishops appointed to York after Wilfrid’s eviction – Bosa, John of Beverley and Wilfrid II – had all received instruction in the Whitby community.Footnote ⁶⁷ On the basis of the details recorded in Bede’s HE and Stephen’s Life, there is nothing to suggest that Deiran religious communities east of the Vale of York were supportive of Wilfrid: Whitby, Lastingham, and York itself after his expulsion, seem instead to have had a long-term alignment with Lindisfarne.Footnote ⁶⁸

This does not mean that Wilfrid, after rebuilding St Peter’s church at York, had failed to perform pastoral duties among the eastern Deirans. Nor does it signify that he had avoided venturing out from St Andrew’s church into Hexham diocese, either immediately after its creation or when he regained the bishopric in later life. Stephen’s focus on Wilfrid’s episcopal activities and regional interests to the west and south-west of Ripon is, instead, an indication of the messages he, and his sponsors,Footnote ⁶⁹ intended to convey to their audiences, messages that would promote a new cult centred on Stephen’s own monastery in Ripon, where Wilfrid’s remains were curated after 710. In order to comprehend those messages, it is necessary both to look more directly at Stephen’s Life as a prospectus for St Wilfrid’s cult,Footnote ⁷⁰ and to compare with it a broadly contemporary Life, one that was devoted to Pope Gregory the Great.

Stephen’s Life, and St Wilfrid’s Cult

The key message of Stephen’s prospectus for Wilfrid’s cult is provided by Wilfrid’s abbots and followers who, shortly after his death, gathered together from all parts of his parrochia, and ‘fearing the snares of their old enemies’, resolved that:

As Thacker has remarked, ‘Most characteristically, Wilfrid was apostolus. He had a special relationship with St Andrew, formed on his first visit to Rome’.Footnote ⁷² It was Andrew the apostle whose intercession he had sought so that he might have a ready mind to teach the words of the Gospels among the nations, and it was in St Andrew’s name that he dedicated his churches at Hexham and at Oundle in Northamptonshire.Footnote ⁷³

Whilst Wilfrid’s equal status with the apostles Peter and Andrew was the direct and unambiguous message of VW, clear to all who read or heard it, Mark D. Laynesmith’s analysis of the Life’s biblical allegory and typology indicates a further, though less immediately apparent apostolic equivalence. He has argued that, in the chapters dealing with Wilfrid’s experiences after his eviction from the York episcopate in 678, including his exiles and imprisonment, Stephen figures him as a type of the apostle Paul: both suffered persecution at the hands of their own people; and ‘like Paul, Wilfrid is an apostle and evangelist to non-believers’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Assuming that an understanding of Stephen’s typology would have been confined to members of religious or clerical communities with the appropriate exegetical skills, this suggests that VW was constructed in layers which addressed different audiences, but with the same message: Wilfrid should be seen as an apostle.

Stephen’s focus on apostolic status can be seen more generally in the number of occasions on which he uses the words ‘apostle(s)’ and ‘apostolic’, the latter usually referring to the apostolic see in Rome. In total, there are about 170 such references, clearly part of the message that VW was intending to project as a core element of Wilfrid’s cult, even though it does not assign the title apostolus to him directly. In contrast, the Anonymous and Prose Lives of St Cuthbert, designed to promote an alternative and ultimately much more successful cult, can between them muster fewer than ten references to the apostles.Footnote ⁷⁵ This does not mean that St Cuthbert’s congregation took no interest in such matters: representations of the apostles were, after all, inscribed on his reliquary coffin.Footnote ⁷⁶ It does, however, suggest that they are unlikely to have featured prominently in the promotion of his cult.

The Life of Gregory the Great, on the other hand, focuses very clearly on apostolic mission, and it has been seen as a counter to Stephen’s attempt to frame Wilfrid as apostle of the Northumbrians. Produced by one of Whitby’s monks between 704 and 714, it emphasized Gregory the Great’s role in bringing Christianity to the English.Footnote ⁷⁷ VG identifies Gregory as this apostolic saint of ours, and appears to cite Gregory himself in its claim that, in the Day of Judgement, Gregory would bring his people – the English people – into the presence of the Lord.Footnote ⁷⁸ As Walter Goffart argued, the Whitby Life minimized Wilfrid’s role by portraying Gregory ‘as though he were almost exclusively the apostle of Northumbria … However unanswerable Wilfrid’s claims to historical significance might be, he was merely the second propagator of Roman customs’.Footnote ⁷⁹

More particularly, VG focuses on the Deirans of southern Northumbria rather than the Bernicians further north. This is evident in the well-known series of puns used to link Gregory to the Deiran youths whom he had supposedly met in Rome. They identified themselves as Angles, but more specifically gave the name of their king as Ælli (king of the Deirans) and their tribe as Deire. Footnote ⁸⁰ Subsequently, VG also records that the bones of Ælle’s son, King Edwin, who had been baptized in York by Bishop Paulinus, but had subsequently been killed by the pagan King Penda of Mercia at Hatfield Chase, were brought to Whitby.Footnote ⁸¹

The audiences to whom these messages were addressed were being led to believe that Gregory was the apostle of the Deirans, trumping any claims to such status that might have been made either on behalf of Paulinus, who had represented the Gregorian mission in Northumbria and had re-established the see at York, or on behalf of Wilfrid, on the basis of his renewal of Paulinus’s Gregorian mission. The suggestion that, as their apostle, Gregory would lead the Christian Deirans into the presence of the Lord, might have done much to undermine adherence to Wilfrid’s cult.

The uncertainties around the chronological relationship of these two Lives, as discussed by Goffart,Footnote ⁸² are not, perhaps, as crucial as might be anticipated. Stephen’s Life, if dated to between 712 and 714,Footnote ⁸³ could represent the formalisation of the cult’s central messages, rather than their initial composition and early propagation. Indeed, the initial moves towards constructing Wilfrid’s sanctity could have been made in the years after his near-death experiences in 705 and 708.Footnote ⁸⁴ The Whitby VG could be seen as a way of countering such messages before they were formalized in VW. In fact, given the focus of VW, it is more likely that VG was the earlier of the two: its formulation would have forestalled any attempt to position Wilfrid as apostle of the Deiran Angles, accounting for Stephen’s negligible coverage of Wilfrid’s activities in eastern Deiran territory, and his focus on British people further to the west.

Wilfrid had, of course, undertaken episcopal and pastoral duties outside Northumbria, for example in the Mercian kingdom,Footnote ⁸⁵ and had carried out missions to the pagan South Saxons in southern England, and to the pagan Frisians on the Continent. Both Bede and Stephen recount Wilfrid’s work in evangelising the South Saxons in southern Britain,Footnote ⁸⁶ but Bede’s HE records Wilfrid’s mission in Frisia in subtly different terms from those used in Stephen’s Life. Bede implies that Wilfrid’s evangelisation of pagan Frisians was an unplanned and unauthorized mission, beginning the work which ‘the most reverend bishop of Christ, Willibrord, afterwards completed with great devotion’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Bede is also very clear that Willibrord, before undertaking his own mission to Frisia, first went to Rome to seek the permission and approval of Pope Sergius to do so; and Sergius subsequently consecrated him archbishop of the Frisians.Footnote ⁸⁸

Stephen’s VW, in contrast, says of Wilfrid in Frisia that ‘Like the Apostle he first laid the foundation of the faith there’, and that Bishop Willibrord was still building upon it.Footnote ⁸⁹ For Stephen, Wilfrid’s Frisian mission was further evidence of his apostolic status; for Bede, it was an important first step in the evangelisation of a pagan population, but, unlike Pope Gregory’s mission to the Anglo-Saxons in Britain, it had been fortuitous and had not been authorized by the apostolic see in Rome.

Throughout HE, it is clear that Bede avoided narratives that might have been used by the supporters of Wilfrid’s cult to burnish their saint’s apostolic credentials. He made no reference to Stephen’s account of Wilfrid rebuilding St Peter’s, York, a church which had become ruinous since its foundation by Paulinus:Footnote ⁹⁰ this was a story that would have fed neatly into a narrative of Wilfrid renewing the failed Gregorian mission to Northumbria. Nor did he refer to Stephen’s account of Wilfrid’s interactions with the British inhabitants of Deiran controlled territories: this might have undermined the authority of the archbishops of Canterbury who, according to Bede, had been charged with oversight of all the bishops of Britain.Footnote ⁹¹ Bede may have been even more anxious to avoid this topic as, again by his own account, the British Church’s erroneous rites and customs, notably in the calculation of the date of Easter and in the performance of the rite of baptism, had still not been extinguished by the time HE was completed in 731.Footnote ⁹²

This does not mean that Bede was wholeheartedly an adherent to Lindisfarne’s cause, as can be seen in his prose Life of St Cuthbert (VCP). This follows closely the text of the earlier anonymous Life of St Cuthbert (VCA) compiled at Lindisfarne, but omits the names of a number of people and places recorded in VCA. In his comparative analysis of these works, A. Joseph McMullen has argued that Cuthbert’s interaction with named places in VCA was a way by which his community could claim them for the parrochia of Lindisfarne; whereas VCP’s omission of many of them indicates Bede’s resistance to such claims, especially those involving places ‘that might be more appropriately under the influence of the diocese of Hexham than Lindisfarne’.Footnote ⁹³ Bede seems to have navigated a course between, on the one hand, Lindisfarne’s ambitions to extend its authority southwards and, on the other, Ripon’s attempts to promote Wilfrid’s apostolic status on the basis of his renewal of the Gregorian mission.

It is therefore of considerable interest that Bede’s HE provides an unambiguous justification for Wilfrid’s acquisition, in about 660, of the monastery in Ripon (Inrhrypis) at the expense of Eata and his community, including St Cuthbert, who had taken up residence there at the invitation of King Alhfrith, but were now evicted by him. Bede’s VCP, written in about 721,Footnote ⁹⁴ records that Eata, Cuthbert and their brethren were driven from Ripon, and that the site of their monastery was given to other monks to inhabit; but he simply ascribes their expulsion to the frailty and instability of the secular world, and does not name the beneficiaries. A decade later, however, Bede’s HE names Wilfrid as the recipient, and justifies Eata’s expulsion on the basis that Wilfrid’s Roman doctrines were to be preferred to Eata’s Irish traditions.Footnote ⁹⁵ One wonders whether the Lindisfarne community had attempted, in the interim, to destabilize Wilfrid’s cult centre by renewing their claim to Ripon, a move that Bede found it necessary to resist.Footnote ⁹⁶

Evidence for Wilfrid’s cult in the later eighth century is minimal. Thacker’s review noted Wilfrid’s commemoration on 24 April, his dies natalis, in the mid-eighth-century York metrical calendar, as well as in the martyrology of Tallaght, ‘a ninth-century compilation but one with much earlier Northumbrian antecedents’.Footnote ⁹⁷ In addition, the consecration of Archbishop Ælberht of York was held on 24 April 767, the choice of date perhaps influenced by St Wilfrid’s cult.Footnote ⁹⁸ Ælberht had been the mentor of York’s great scholar, Alcuin, and Peter Godman has suggested that the cult may have influenced Alcuin’s favourable portrayal of Wilfrid in his poem on the bishops, kings and saints of York, written perhaps in the final decade of the eighth century.Footnote ⁹⁹

The lines of the poem devoted to Wilfrid cast him as ‘a missionary renowned for his work among the pagan [South] Saxons and Frisians’ who ‘spread the light and teaching of eternal salvation through many places, nations, and peoples’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Alcuin did not, however, award him the title apostolus. Cuthbert, by contrast, was described as doctor apostolicus, even though he ‘strove to serve the one true God in isolation that worldly honour might not sway his intent mind’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Godman’s assessment of the poem as biased in favour of Wilfrid probably goes too far. By omitting the trials and tribulations of Wilfrid’s episcopal career, which had involved the Lindisfarne community, the Whitby community and York itself, Alcuin was, like Bede before him, protecting the reputation of the Northumbrian Church as a whole, not necessarily of Wilfrid individually.

If Alcuin had wished to promote the bishop’s personal reputation he could have provided information included in HE but omitted from the poem, most notably about Wilfrid’s success at the Synod of Whitby.Footnote ¹⁰² He could probably also have used information excluded from HE, for example Wilfrid’s rebuilding of St Peter’s, York. Godman has pointed to the poem’s omission of any information from VW that was not transmitted by Bede, and surmised that this could be either because Alcuin deliberately suppressed it, or because he simply did not know about it.Footnote ¹⁰³ It is difficult to believe that Alcuin had no knowledge of the rebuilding, a century earlier, of the most prominent church tended by his own community; more likely, he chose not to promote Wilfrid’s saintly reputation.

Alcuin had been born during the second quarter of eighth century into a Deiran family of moderate social rank, one that controlled lands east of York on the north bank of the Humber; and as a youth he entered the York community in the time of Archbishop Ecgberht.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ As noted earlier, that community had drawn its early eighth-century bishops from the monastery at Whitby; and Whitby had traditionally been aligned with Lindisfarne. The York community may not have been wholly aligned to Lindisfarne, but there is no indication that it sought to promote St Wilfrid’s cult.

It seems, therefore, from the very limited available evidence, that St Wilfrid’s cult remained focused on the Deiran lands referenced by Stephen: those to the north, south and west of Ripon, some of them still supporting populations of Britons. These territories had been incorporated into the Northumbrian system of ‘shire estate’ administration, in which extensive groups of settlements located in widely varying arable and pastoral landscapes were controlled from administrative centres strategically positioned in relation to main lines of communication – often the courses of Roman roads. Such estates were initially provided with pastoral care by religious communities based in what came to be known as ‘mother churches’, located either in the administrative centre itself, or in a separate, often neighbouring location.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Several of them have produced examples of Lang’s apostles sculptures.

The Locations and Local Contexts of Deiran Apostles Sculptures

The southernmost location of Lang’s Deiran apostle pillars is Dewsbury, in the valley of the River Calder (Fig. 1). Its medieval church was the mother church of an enormous parish, projected to have encompassed over 1000 sq. km (over 400 sq. miles). It extended westwards from Dewsbury along the Calder and its tributaries, and across the Pennines. The administrative unit which it served was centred, at least by the mid-eleventh century, on nearby Wakefield. The known extent of the royal manor of Wakefield correlates strongly (though not entirely) with Dewsbury’s projected parochial area.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Peter Ryder has identified pre-Conquest fabric in the present All Saints’ church, and there is a suggestion that a second possible pre-Conquest church formerly stood a short distance from it. In 1337 Archbishop Melton granted the rector of Dewsbury licence to demolish a disused chapel in the graveyard, and to use its building materials for repairs to the parish church. An enquiry ordered by the archbishop had found that the former chapel had been built in honour of the Apostle Peter for some unknown purpose.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Given its dedication, it is conceivable that this ‘chapel’ was the earliest stone church at Dewsbury, and that the apostle pillar identified by Lang was demolished at the same time as the chapel, its pieces then also used for repairs to All Saints.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Moving northwards, Otley All Saints was the focus of another major estate, extending along the middle reaches of the River Wharfe. Its components were first recorded in the period 975 × 992, when it belonged to the archbishop of York, though its most westerly recorded township, Addingham, had already provided a place of refuge for Archbishop Wulfhere of York in 867.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Otley itself seems to have been both the parochial and administrative centre for the estate; it was the location of an archiepiscopal manor house by the twelfth century,Footnote ¹¹⁰ and perhaps much earlier. The estate included Guiseley, a township adjoining Yeadon which is, as noted earlier, a suggested identification of In Gaeydene, one of the regions named in the donations to Wilfrid.

Collingham church is lower down the Wharfe, beyond the eastern end of the townships recorded as members of the Otley estate. It is not known to have been the centre of a major estate, though its place-name, probably containing a personal name specific and the generic ‑ingahām, suggests that, administratively, it was once the centre of a folk territory.Footnote ¹¹¹ It has been suggested that might have been a small community in a network of religious centres along the Wharfe.Footnote ¹¹²

Masham, to the north of Ripon on the River Ure, was the centre of a small ‘shire’ estate recorded as Mashamshire from the twelfth century.Footnote ¹¹³ Its ecclesiastical parish formerly extended westwards from St Mary’s, Masham for a distance of about 16 km (10 miles) to the furthest reaches of Masham Moor in the Pennine uplands, and southwards from the River Ure for about 10 km (6 miles). It incorporated twelve medieval townships, some of them amalgamated by the late eighteenth century.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Masham was also the administrative centre of a Domesday soke estate,Footnote ¹¹⁵ and therefore seems to have combined both lay and ecclesiastical functions.

The recorded extent of Masham’s shire estate from Domesday onwards indicates a much smaller unit than that indicated by Dewsbury parish, home to the other known cylindrical apostle pillar. Mashamshire may, of course, have encompassed a much larger territory in the early ninth century, when its pillar was probably erected, but there is no sign of a significant, subsequent diminution as there is at Dewsbury. Masham occupies a territory immediately north of a far more extensive multiple estate analysed by G. R. J. Jones, the one recorded in Domesday as Burghshire wapentake. Burghshire seems then to have encompassed three main component territories: two royal estates centred on Aldborough and Knaresborough, and the church estate of Ripon which, by the final quarter of the tenth century, was a possession of the archbishops of York.Footnote ¹¹⁶

Two further examples of Lang’s apostle shafts come from Melsonby and Easby, to the north of Masham. Both of these townships are located in the territory of an estate called Gillingshire,Footnote ¹¹⁷ which broadly extended between the River Swale on the south and the River Tees in the north, the latter probably also marking the northern limit of the Deiran province. Eastwards it perhaps extended as far as the River Wiske in the Vale of Mowbray, and westwards as far as Stainmore, along the Roman road from Catterick to Brough.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Easby church, on the north bank of the River Swale, has produced the late eighth or early ninth-century cross-shaft now in the Victoria and Albert Museum.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Melsonby church, about 10 km (6 miles) farther north, contains a late eighth or early ninth-century shaft, possibly a furnishing or a monument that Lang suggested might have stood in a baptistry.Footnote ¹²⁰

Between Easby and Melsonby lies the township of Gilling West, the one that preserves the shire name. Its church and surrounding area have produced numerous pre-Conquest sculptural fragments, all of them dated to the ninth and tenth centuries but none of them belonging to Lang’s group of apostle sculptures.Footnote ¹²¹ Yet the church at Gilling West, set in a curvilinear churchyard, is usually assumed to be the site of the religious community In Getlingum which, Bede tells us, was founded in atonement for the murder of the Deiran King Oswine, in 651.Footnote ¹²² Added to this is the further complication that Melsonby and Easby both have Old Norse place-names,Footnote ¹²³ names that must have been coined half a century or more after the creation of the sculpture. Thus, the two locations which have produced pieces of apostle shafts have no extant place-names that could have been formed in or by the early ninth century; and the church site associated with the one religious community recorded as having been founded in the seventh century has, as yet, produced no pieces of apostle shaft.

Three points should be made in relation to these uncomfortable discrepancies. First, apostle shafts are not known from every putative pre-Scandinavian mother church site in this part of Yorkshire: most notably they are absent, so far, from Ripon. Secondly, the territory covered by Bede’s Ingetlingum could well have been far bigger than the township now named Gilling West. In the mid-seventh century, it is more likely to have referred to Gillingshire’s inland, its extensive core area which supported particular estate functions.Footnote ¹²⁴ Melsonby township, adjoining Gilling West on the north, and perhaps Skeeby and Easby to the south, may all have been In Getlingum in the seventh to early ninth centuries, only later to be divided off to create new townships for Scandinavian settlers.Footnote ¹²⁵ Thirdly, clusters of religious communities are known elsewhere, including that noted below in the Lune valley of Lancashire, one that has also been linked to Wilfrid.

As far as the Easby cross is concerned, there is a further possible, though highly speculative context. When, in the mid-twelfth century, Easby was granted to canons of the Premonstratensian order for the purpose of founding an abbey, it was not named Easby, but was described as the monastery of St Agatha and all its appurtenances.Footnote ¹²⁶ This indicates that there was already, at that time, a religious house in this location, dedicated to St Agatha. The monastery was given no other name, and the newly founded Premonstratensian abbey was subsequently described as the abbey of St Agatha of Richmond.Footnote ¹²⁷ St Agatha was a fourth-century virgin martyred at Catania in Sicily, and the dedication to her of a religious house in Yorkshire is unusual, but not inexplicable.Footnote ¹²⁸

One possible explanation is to be found in the story of St Everild, which appears in an entry in the eleventh-century York Breviary. Footnote ¹²⁹ It records that a convent was founded by St Everild, a virgin born to a noble family in or after the time of King Oswald. The place where she and two companions established a religious house for virgins was called the ‘bishop’s estate’ (predium episcopi), and its donation to them by God was confirmed by archbishop (sic) Wilfrid. It was known thereafter as mansio everildis: in English, Everildesham, and was claimed to have become a populous convent, occupied at times by upwards of eighty nuns.

Given the reference to the time of King Oswald, Everild may have been broadly contemporary with Bishop Wilfrid. The description predium episcopi, and the confirmation of the donation by Wilfrid, combine to suggest that the convent was established (or was later thought to have been established) on one of his estates. Its subsequent place-name, Everildesham, is no longer extant. Michael Roper suggested that the monastery was sited at Poppleton, about 6 km north-west of York, on the basis of Domesday Book’s entry for Nether Poppleton which records that Odi the deacon had held there 2½ carucates of St Everild’s land.Footnote ¹³⁰ It is, however, possible that the Poppleton holding does not represent the community’s home, but that it supported, instead, a residence used by the convent when its abbess was required at York.

A dedication to St Agatha, as found at Easby, would certainly have been appropriate for a community of virgins in Wilfrid’s era. Aldhelm, a contemporary and supporter of Wilfrid, who wrote to Wilfrid’s abbots at the time of their bishop’s exile in 678, listed Agatha third among the female virgins – after the Virgin Mary and Caecilia – in his prose De Virginitate. He recalled how Agatha and Lucia, another virgin martyr from Sicily, ‘were coupled together in the daily litany’ by Gregory the Great.Footnote ¹³¹ Stephen records that Wilfrid, during his various journeys to Rome, visited many shrines and ‘according to his habit’ collected holy relics, ‘writing down what each of the relics was and to which saint it belonged’.Footnote ¹³² It is not inconceivable that relics of St Agatha were among those acquired by Wilfrid, and were then given by him to a convent established in her name at the place later called Easby.

The final example of Northumbrian apostle shafts identified by Lang is at Halton, in the valley of the River Lune, to the west of the Pennines, at a church dedicated to St Wilfrid (Fig. 1). The monument known as Halton St Wilfrid 7 includes a panel featuring twelve sheep that may symbolize the apostles; it has been dated to the ninth century.Footnote ¹³³ Halton St Wilfrid is one of a group of five churches in the valley that have produced pre-Viking Age sculpture, some in significant numbers, and Richard Bailey has commented that ‘No other area of Northumbria has such a heavy concentration of sites producing Anglian carvings’.Footnote ¹³⁴ Felicity Clark has suggested that the Lune valley might represent one of the territories donated to Bishop Wilfrid in the 670s.Footnote ¹³⁵ In the late pre-Conquest period, Halton was the head of a ‘shire’ estate that extended along both sides of the lower Lune as far as its estuary.Footnote ¹³⁶

The Apostle Pillars and the Rite of Baptism

One aspect of the apostle pillars still to be addressed is Lang’s suggestion that they may have been linked to the rite of baptism. It is worth considering this suggestion in relation to the circumstances that led Pope Hadrian to dispatch a legation to Britain in 786. The leader of that legation was Bishop George of Ostia, and he was supported by Bishop Theophylact of Todi. They travelled first to Canterbury to meet Archbishop Jænberht, then to the court of King Offa of Mercia, after which they held their first council, attended by Offa and King Cynewulf of Wessex.

Thereafter, the two bishops undertook separate journeys: Theophylact to Mercia and then to British parts;Footnote ¹³⁷ George to Northumbria, where he was joined by Alcuin and where a second legatine council was held. The twenty canons emanating from that council were then taken back to the Mercian kingdom where a third council was held, and where the canons that had been formulated in Northumbria were attested by Archbishop Jænberht, King Offa, and leading figures of church and state south of the Humber.Footnote ¹³⁸

Within a year of Bishop George’s arrival, Offa had divided the province of Canterbury in two, setting up a new archbishopric with its see at Lichfield, and it has been suggested that there was a link between these events.Footnote ¹³⁹ As Catherine Cubitt has emphasized, however, such a link can only be assumed: there is no direct evidence for one. Furthermore, she argued that the legation may have been as much interested in Northumbria as in Mercia.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ We might venture a little further, and suggest that the primary purpose of the legation was to address abuses in Northumbria, abuses that had perhaps been identified and communicated to the pope by Alcuin.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Bishop George and his companions, on formal papal business, could hardly have ignored Archbishop Jænberht, King Offa and the other major players in the kingdoms south of the Humber, while on their way from Francia to Northumbria.

Bishop George’s written report to Pope Hadrian contains twenty canons, or capitula, that were formulated during his Northumbrian mission. His preamble explained that they were intended to correct each abuse about which he had been informed, in the order in which they had been brought to his attention, and that these vices had arisen because there had been no papal mission to Britain since Augustine’s time. The first capitulum required the bishops to ensure that their priests in each church should confess and teach the apostolic faith as handed down by the holy Roman church. The second related to the rite of baptism: that it should take place according to the canonical statutes and not at any other time unless out of great necessity. It also set out the duties of those who sponsored infants for baptism, to ensure that, at the appropriate age, they would be taught the creed and the Lord’s prayer.Footnote ¹⁴²

The prominence of baptismal issues suggests that this was one of the areas of error that might have been identified by Alcuin in advance of the Northumbrian legatine council. The canonical seasons deemed appropriate for baptism in the early church were Easter and Pentecost. Given the further requirements placed on the baptismal sponsors of infants, it would seem that Bishop George intended infants, presumably along with adults, to be baptized only at Easter or Pentecost unless they were in danger of dying unbaptized.Footnote ¹⁴³ The implication is that, whatever the precise circumstances, custom and practice in Northumbria in the late eighth century had diverged significantly from these requirements.

Bishop George’s concerns may have resonance with Bede’s comments, noted earlier, about irregular baptism in the British church in Augustine’s time, and about the erroneous calculation of the date for Easter employed by the British both at the beginning of the seventh century and as late as the 730s.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ If Easter and Pentecost were timed in accordance with the Celtic Easter cycle, any baptisms carried out then would presumably have been seen as irregular by the apostolic see, and might even have resulted in a requirement for rebaptism.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

Yet it is hard to believe that clergy ministering to British populations in Northumbria, particularly those in the western parts of Deiran territory to whom Wilfrid himself had, according to VW, provided pastoral care, and where he had held estates, would still cling to Celtic rather than Roman calculations.

A more likely scenario is the wider dispute in the western Church between those who believed that baptism should be reserved to Easter and Pentecost, and those who held that, given the dangers of infants dying unbaptized in an age of high infant mortality, it was more important to baptize them at an early stage of life, irrespective of the season. The latter seem to have gained much ground in the seventh century.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Whatever the nature of the baptismal errors, there is a further indication that they may have particularly affected western Deiran populations. For the Northumbrian legatine council’s capitula were attested, after the king, the archbishop and the bishops, by only two abbots: Ecghard, whose community has not been identified, and Alberht, abbot of Ripon.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

The focus on Northumbrian baptismal issues towards the end of the eighth century, perhaps more specifically on practices among the inhabitants of western Deiran territory, aligns with Lang’s suggestion, noted earlier, that the Deiran apostle pillars may have been associated with baptismal rites, given their locations on some of the major Pennine rivers. This relationship may be indirect rather than direct, as some pillars seem to have been erected in or near the main administrative settlements of shire estates, settlements which had themselves been established close to those rivers. Furthermore, we should note Richard Morris’s scepticism about baptismal immersion in such fast-flowing rivers.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ On the other hand, Bede’s HE records that Paulinus baptized converts – most, presumably, adults – in some of the main rivers close to royal centres such as Yeavering and Catterick,Footnote ¹⁴⁹ and it is possible that such places became traditional baptismal locations, whether they involved total or partial submersion, affusion or aspersion.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

Jane Hawkes has argued that ‘the large-scale stone monuments set up in the landscape between the eighth and ninth centuries…[were] part of the public display of the presence of the Church’.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Such public displays would have been most influential in the administrative or ecclesiastical centres of the shire estates, where local populations would congregate for social, economic and judicial purposes. These might also, before the proliferation of local churches, have been occasions for baptismal events, bringing together families from all parts of the estate, not only for baptisms but also during the preceding scrutinies of catechumens.Footnote ¹⁵² The frequency of representations of the apostles with books, presumably the Gospels, is a further indication that the pillars might have been used in support of baptismal liturgy, which included the traditio legis, or handing over of the Gospels,Footnote ¹⁵³ a task to which, according to Stephen, Wilfrid had committed himself during his first visit to Rome.Footnote ¹⁵⁴