The Synod of Whitby — History for Humans

A companion to the Synod of Whitby scenario in Ecclesiastical Politics. The game never reads this file. It's here for anyone who wants the history behind the season, before, during, or after playing it.

The short version

In 664 King Oswiu of Northumbria called the leading churchmen of his kingdom to the double monastery of Streanæshalch, ruled by the abbess Hild, on the headland we now call Whitby. The question was when to keep Easter. Northumbria had been converted twice, by a Roman mission from Kent and by Irish monks from the island of Iona, and the two traditions calculated the date of Easter by different tables and cut their clergy's hair in different shapes. In some years the king kept Easter while the queen, who followed the Roman use, was still keeping Palm Sunday.

Bishop Colmán of Lindisfarne spoke for the tradition of Iona. Wilfrid, the young abbot of Ripon, spoke for the Roman use. The debate ended when Wilfrid invoked the keys of the kingdom of heaven given to St. Peter, and the king ruled that he would not contradict the doorkeeper of heaven. Colmán resigned his see and withdrew to Iona, and later to Ireland, with all his Irish monks and about thirty English ones. The same year brought a total eclipse of the sun and a great plague that killed Colmán's successor within months. The ruling bound the Northumbrian church to Roman practice and, over the following generation, drew the whole English church closer to Canterbury and Rome.

How it got here

The Roman mission. Pope Gregory the Great sent Augustine to Kent in 597, and Canterbury became the seat of the English mission. It reached Northumbria through a marriage. The Kentish princess Æthelburh married King Edwin of Northumbria and brought the priest Paulinus north with her. On Easter eve of 626 she bore a daughter, Eanflæd, who was baptized that Pentecost as the first Northumbrian Christian; at Easter 627 Edwin himself was baptized at York, and among his household was his great-niece Hild, then thirteen. For six years Paulinus baptized crowds in the rivers. Then, on 12 October 633, Edwin was killed at Hatfield, and Paulinus took the queen and her children, Eanflæd among them, south to Kent by sea. One member of the mission stayed behind: James the deacon, who kept teaching the Roman chant in Deira for the rest of his long life.

The Irish mission. Edwin's fall let the exiled sons of the rival royal line come home. They had grown up among the Irish of western Scotland and been baptized there. One of them, Oswald, won the kingdom at Heavenfield in 634 and asked the monastery of Iona, founded by St. Columba, for a bishop. The first man sent came home complaining that the English were stubborn barbarians. At the meeting that heard him, a monk named Aidan suggested that he had asked too much too soon, offering meat where milk was needed, and the meeting sent Aidan instead. Aidan fixed his see on the tidal island of Lindisfarne in 635 and walked the kingdom for sixteen years, while the king, who had learned Irish in exile, interpreted his sermons for the nobles. His poverty, gentleness, and schools formed the northern church: its monasteries, its clergy, and its Easter, which was Iona's. When Hild resolved to become a nun and meant to join her sister in a convent in Gaul, it was Aidan who called her back and set her over a house in the north.

Two memories. Aidan died in 651 and was succeeded by Finan, and Finan in 661 by Colmán, all three from Iona. By then Northumbria had two Christian memories: a Roman one, kept by the queen's chapel, old James, and the south, and an Irish one, which was nearly everything else.

The kings. Northumbria was two older kingdoms under one crown, Bernicia in the north and Deira in the south; Streanæshalch lay in Deira. Oswald was killed in 642 and his brother Oswiu succeeded him. Oswiu married Eanflæd, bringing Edwin's line and the Roman use into his household. In 651 he had Oswine, the popular king of Deira and Eanflæd's kinsman, murdered, and at the queen's request founded a monastery at Gilling where prayers were offered for both men's souls. In 655, facing the pagan king Penda of Mercia at the river Winwaed, Oswiu vowed his infant daughter Ælfflæd to God and twelve estates for monasteries. He won, kept both vows, and for a few years was overlord of much of Britain. Two years later Hild founded Streanæshalch, and the little princess was raised there. Oswiu's son by an earlier marriage, Alhfrith, ruled Deira under him.

Ripon. Alhfrith became the Roman party's patron. He had given land at Ripon to monks from Melrose, among them the abbot Eata and a young Cuthbert, and when he required them to adopt the Roman Easter they chose to go home rather than conform. He gave Ripon to Wilfrid instead. Wilfrid, a Northumbrian noble born around 634, had been placed at Lindisfarne as a boy through the queen's favor, then travelled to Kent, to Rome, where an archdeacon taught him the Roman Easter reckoning, and to Lyon, where he spent three years and took the Roman tonsure. He came home convinced that the English church must keep the customs of the universal Church. The expulsion at Ripon, in the early 660s, turned an old difference into a quarrel between parties.

The two Easters

Christians agreed that Easter was the Sunday after the first full moon of spring. They disagreed about how to calculate it, because the answer depended on tables that predicted the moon, fixed the start of spring, and limited which days of the moon a lawful Easter Sunday could occupy.

Iona and its daughter houses used an eighty-four-year table the Irish called the latercus. It allowed Easter on the fourteenth to twentieth days of the moon and between 26 March and 23 April. Modern scholars trace it to Gaul around the year 400; its keepers believed it came from the third-century scholar Anatolius, through a book, the Liber Anatolii, that was in fact a later Irish work under his name. Because it allowed the fourteenth day, the day of the Jewish Passover, its opponents sometimes called its keepers "Quartodecimans," heretics who kept Easter with the Jews. The charge was unfair: the Irish always kept Easter on a Sunday.

Rome and most of the Latin West had moved to other tables. Victorius of Aquitaine had produced a 532-year table at Rome's request in 457, and Gaul adopted it by law in 541. Dionysius Exiguus had put the nineteen-year cycle of Alexandria into Latin in 525, allowing Easter on the fifteenth to twenty-first days of the moon, and by the mid-seventh century Rome followed it. One recent study argues that Northumbria's "Roman" party was itself divided, with the queen's household keeping Victorius's table and Wilfrid bringing Dionysius's from Rome.

The quarrel was old. Around 600 the Irish missionary Columbanus defended the Irish reckoning to Pope Gregory and to the bishops of Gaul with memorable rudeness. The southern Irish examined the question at the synod of Mag Léne around 630 and, after a famous letter by the scholar Cummian, adopted the Roman reckoning. In 640 Rome wrote to the northern Irish urging the same. Iona held out, and did not conform until 716.

The tonsure was the quarrel's visible twin. Roman clergy shaved the crown of the head and left a ring of hair, in honor of St. Peter; the Irish form is usually reconstructed as a head shaved at the front from ear to ear, though the sources disagree. A cleric's head declared his allegiance at a distance, which is why so small a thing mattered so much. Later polemic called the Irish style "the tonsure of Simon Magus."

The dates in 664. Because no copy of the Irish table was known, scholars long reconstructed it from indirect evidence. In 1901 Bartholomew MacCarthy's reconstruction put the Irish Easter of 664 on 14 April and the Roman on 21 April, so that the king would have celebrated while the queen kept Palm Sunday. Daniel O'Connell's reconstruction of 1936 gave different results and far fewer divergences. In the 1980s Daniel McCarthy and Dáibhí Ó Cróinín identified a genuine copy of the eighty-four-year table in a manuscript at Padua, the only one known to survive, covering the years 438 to 521. Because the table repeats every eighty-four years, it gives 14 April for 664, agreeing with MacCarthy. On both, the two reckonings coincided in 665, when Easter fell on 6 April by either table. The sky took sides too: a small lunar eclipse on 16 April 664 shows that the moon was truly full two days after the Irish Easter, which is exactly the fault Wilfrid charged, that the Irish sometimes kept Easter before the full moon.

The synod

Two early accounts survive. Stephen of Ripon wrote a Life of Wilfrid soon after the saint's death in about 710, and Bede completed his Ecclesiastical History of the English People in 731, using Stephen's work and other informants. Both give the speeches in the classical manner, as composed summaries rather than transcripts, and the two differ in details. Bede's is longer and better known.

In Bede's account, King Oswiu opened by saying that those who served one God should keep one rule of life. He asked Colmán to speak first. Colmán said he kept the Easter his elders had kept, which was that of St. John the Evangelist. The king then asked Agilbert, a Frankish bishop who had studied in Ireland and had been bishop of the West Saxons until his poor English cost him the see, and Agilbert asked that his pupil Wilfrid speak for him in English rather than through an interpreter. Wilfrid argued that Rome, where Peter and Paul had lived and died, and all the churches of the world kept the Roman Easter, and that only the Irish, the Picts, and the Britons, on the two remotest islands of the ocean, obstinately opposed it. He answered Colmán's appeals to John, to Anatolius, and to Columba, allowing that Iona's founders had been holy men whose error was pardonable in ignorance, but not in those who had now heard better. Finally he asked whether Columba could be preferred to Peter, to whom Christ gave the keys of heaven. The king asked Colmán whether Christ had said this to Peter, and whether any such authority had been given to Columba. Colmán agreed to the first and denied the second, and the king declared that he would obey the doorkeeper of heaven, lest he arrive at its gates and find no one to open them. Those present agreed.

Cedd, bishop of the East Saxons, a Northumbrian trained at Lindisfarne, interpreted for both sides. Hild and her community sided with the Irish, and afterward conformed. Stephen's version adds a detail Bede leaves out: the king smiled as he asked his decisive question.

When it met. Neither source gives the month, and even the year has been questioned. Sir Frank Stenton argued for 663; Bede gives 664, the twenty-second year of Oswiu's reign, and most historians accept it. The traditional reading places the synod soon after the divided Easter of that spring. Richard Abels argued in 1983 that it met in late summer or early autumn, after the death of the archbishop of Canterbury on 14 July had left the English church without a primate and given Oswiu a political reason to align himself with Rome. The game follows the spring reading and sets the synod in the last week of April, just before the eclipse of 1 May; that is a choice, not a record.

Why it happened. Bede presents the synod as a matter of conscience, and many historians see more at work. Alhfrith's zeal made the Easter question a test of loyalty between father and son; Oswiu's overlordship over the southern kingdoms, which looked to Canterbury, gave him reasons to avoid being seen as out of step with Rome; and the Irish reckoning was already a minority practice even in Ireland. The historian Peter Brown has called Wilfrid's case "a triumphant push against an open door." Bede's own picture of an anxious king persuaded by the keys of Peter remains a real possibility, and the game keeps it open.

The plague year and its sky

On 1 May 664 the moon's shadow crossed the Atlantic, Ireland, and northern Britain. Modern calculations put the center of the path of totality almost directly over Whitby in the late afternoon, with the sun low in the west and more than two minutes of darkness. The Irish annals record darkness on the first of May at the ninth hour, and Bede records the eclipse at about the tenth hour but dates it 3 May, two days off. The same annals report that during that summer the sky seemed to be on fire, and an earthquake in Britain, which one scholar has suggested may be a garbled memory of the upheaval at Whitby itself.

Plague followed. Bede says it struck the south first. In Kent, Archbishop Deusdedit and King Eorcenberht died on the same day, 14 July, and Canterbury remained without an archbishop for years. Part of the East Saxons abandoned Christianity in their terror until a Mercian bishop brought them back. The plague reached Ireland on 1 August, where it was remembered as the buide Chonaill, the yellow plague, and it swept the monasteries where many young English students were studying; Bede notes with gratitude that the Irish had fed, taught, and lent books to those students without charge. In Northumbria it killed Tuda, Colmán's successor, within months of his appointment. At Melrose it killed the prior Boisil, while the young Cuthbert caught it and survived. Cedd died of it at his monastery of Lastingham, on 26 October according to a twelfth-century chronicle, and about thirty monks from his Essex community who came north to live near his grave all died of it too, except one small boy.

After Whitby

Colmán asked the king for one favor as he left: that Eata of Melrose, one of the twelve English boys Aidan had trained, become abbot of the monks who stayed at Lindisfarne. The king, who loved Colmán, agreed. Colmán took part of Aidan's bones with him, left the rest at Lindisfarne, and went to Iona with all the Irish monks and about thirty English ones. In 668 he settled on Inishbofin, an island off the west coast of Ireland. There the Irish monks spent the summers visiting their home places and came back in winter expecting to share the harvest the English had gathered, and Colmán resolved the quarrel by founding a separate monastery for the English at Mayo, which became famous as "Mayo of the Saxons." He died about 675.

Tuda, an Englishman educated and consecrated in southern Ireland, where the Roman Easter was already kept, briefly succeeded Colmán before the plague killed him. Alhfrith then sent Wilfrid to Gaul to be consecrated by bishops he considered canonical, and Agilbert, by now bishop of Paris, consecrated him with great ceremony at Compiègne. Wilfrid lingered abroad. Oswiu sent Cedd's brother Chad to Kent to be consecrated bishop of York instead; finding the archbishop dead, Chad was consecrated by Wini of the West Saxons, with two British bishops assisting. Alhfrith, meanwhile, rebelled against his father at some unrecorded date and disappears from history.

Oswiu and the king of Kent sent a priest named Wighard to Rome to be consecrated archbishop, but he died there of plague. The pope chose instead Theodore of Tarsus, a Greek monk of sixty-six, who reached Canterbury on 27 May 669. Theodore became the first archbishop the whole English church obeyed. He completed Chad's irregular consecration, made him bishop of the Mercians, and restored Wilfrid to York. Oswiu died in 670, having planned, if he recovered, to go to Rome with Wilfrid as his guide. Cuthbert later became prior of Lindisfarne, where he won over monks who preferred the old customs through patience, and died as bishop in 687. Hild's school at Streanæshalch produced five bishops, and in her time the house also produced Cædmon, the first English religious poet known by name. Iona itself accepted the Roman Easter in 716, persuaded by the English monk Egbert, who had survived the plague of 664 in Ireland and vowed never to return home.

The people

Oswiu (about 612–670). King of Northumbria from 642, raised and baptized among the Irish, whose language he spoke fluently. He presided over the synod and gave the ruling.

Colmán (died about 675). Irish monk of Iona and third bishop of Lindisfarne, 661–664. He argued for Iona's Easter, resigned rather than conform, and founded monasteries on Inishbofin and at Mayo.

Wilfrid (about 634–709 or 710). Abbot of Ripon, later bishop of York, and one of the most forceful and controversial churchmen of the age. His later life was a long series of exiles, appeals to Rome, and missions, including the conversion of the South Saxons.

Hild (614–680). Great-niece of King Edwin, baptized at thirteen, a nun from the age of thirty-three, and abbess of Hartlepool and then Streanæshalch. Everyone who knew her, Bede says, called her mother, and kings sought her advice. She is venerated as St. Hilda.

Cedd (died 664). Northumbrian monk, missionary bishop of the East Saxons, founder of Lastingham, and the synod's interpreter. His brother Chad became bishop of York and later of Lichfield.

Eanflæd (626–after 685). Daughter of Edwin, raised in Kent, queen of Oswiu, and keeper of the Roman Easter in the Northumbrian court. After Oswiu's death she retired to Whitby and shared its rule with her daughter after Hild died.

Alhfrith (flourished 650s–660s). Oswiu's son and under-king of Deira, patron of Wilfrid and of the Roman cause, who later rebelled against his father and vanished from the record.

Agilbert (died after 668). Frankish bishop who had studied in Ireland and served as bishop of the West Saxons, the senior cleric on the Roman side at Whitby, and afterward bishop of Paris.

James the Deacon (flourished 620s–660s). A member of Paulinus's mission who stayed in Northumbria after 633, kept the Roman Easter, and taught Roman chant for decades.

Tuda (died 664). An Englishman trained in southern Ireland, bishop of the Northumbrians for a few months after Colmán.

Eata and Cuthbert (about 634–687). Aidan's pupil and the abbot of Melrose who received Lindisfarne at Colmán's request, and the young Melrose monk who became England's most loved northern saint.

Record and legend

Much of the story comes from Bede, who was a Roman partisan and a master of Easter reckoning, and who nonetheless wrote of Aidan and the Irish monks with open admiration. The divided royal Easter is something Bede reports that "it is said" happened, not something he dates. The words of the speeches are his and Stephen's compositions, true to the arguments rather than to the sentences. The king's smile appears only in Stephen. The Irish annals preserve the portents of 664, and modern astronomy confirms the eclipse. Bede's loving description of Colmán's Lindisfarne, with no money, few buildings, and a church where even the king came with only a handful of attendants, is a tribute written decades later, true in substance and burnished in the telling.

Other stories belong to later centuries. Whitby's shore is rich in fossil ammonites, and a much later legend says St. Hilda turned the snakes of the headland to stone. The identification of Streanæshalch with Whitby itself is a tradition of long standing, generally accepted, though some scholars have argued for Strensall near York. And the idea of a "Celtic Church" opposed to a "Roman Church," popular since the Reformation, is a modern construction: in 664 both sides belonged to one Church and differed over customs, not creed.

What the game invents

The three player characters and their circumstances are invented, as are the guest-masters, boatmen, and clerks, and the three wavering monks, Tidwulf, Dægberht, and Wulfhard. So is the synod's date within 664 and its staging in the abbey church, which the sources do not describe. The table of who spoke which languages goes beyond the record, which attests only Oswiu's Irish, Agilbert's poor English, and Cedd's skill in both tongues. The game also decides afresh, in each playthrough, what history leaves unknown: what truly moved the king, whether the queen was present, what Alhfrith wanted, how Agilbert felt about yielding the floor, whether Tuda was in the hall, and who carried gossip between the parties. And it lets a player attempt things history did not allow, such as a ruling for Iona, a year's postponement, or a mercy that lets Colmán stay. Everything else aims to stay within the record.

Words you'll meet

Saying the names

In Old English, æ is the vowel of "cat," c before e or i sounds like ch, g before e or i sounds like y, and h in the middle or at the end of a word is the throaty sound of Scottish "loch." Streanæshalch is roughly STRAY-ah-nas-hahlkh. Oswiu is OZ-wee-oo, Eanflæd AY-an-flad, Ælfflæd ALF-flad, and Alhfrith AHLKH-frith. Cedd was probably CHED, just as his brother Ceadda became Chad. Colmán is KUL-mawn in Irish, Iona eye-OH-nuh, Inishbofin IN-ish-buh-FIN, and Deira DAY-ruh. Among the invented characters, Beornwine is BAY-orn-win-eh, Berhtgyth BERKHT-yith, Sigewine SEE-yeh-win-eh, Cuthwine KOOTH-win-eh, and Dægberht DAI-berkht.