War: Sense and Nonsense
Menewood is the second novel about Hild, known today as St Hilda, Abbess of Whitby. Almost everything we know of her comes from a single document, the Ecclesiastical History of the English People (HE), written fifty years after her death by Bede, a monk. Hild was born circa 614 AD, probably in Elmet, now West Yorkshire. At 13 she was baptised in York alongside her great-uncle, Edwin, king of Northumbria (the combined sub-kingdoms of Deira and Bernicia), and was recruited into the church at 33.
Of the rest of the first half of her life—including January 632 to March 635, the years covered in Menewood—we know only that she was “living most nobly in the secular habit.” We don’t know where, or with whom, or doing what. We can assume she was sharp and well-informed, for later in life kings and princes not only sought but took her advice. Whatever she was doing, though, it included living through times of history-shaping war.
Menewood is a story of war—trying to avoid it; surviving loss and defeat; and what it takes to plan and win the next. There are many other, quieter moments, but the novel is book-ended by two major battles—and only one of those battles, as Bede relates it, makes sense.
The first, the Battle of Hatfield, Bede dates to Oct 12, 632. Edwin and the Northumbrian ætheling (royal heir) Osfrith are killed by Penda of Mercia and Cadwallon of Gwynedd at a place Bede names Hæðfeld—Hatfield Chase, near Doncaster. Edwin and Osfrith are dismembered and staked out in pieces on the battlefield. Over a year of chaos follows, with the thrones of Deira and Bernicia variously claimed by Osric (Hild’s cousin), and Eanfrid (a son of Æthelfrith—the king of Northumbria Edwin killed to take the throne in the first place). Both claimants are slaughtered by Cadwallon, who was “utterly barbarous in temperament and behaviour. He was set upon exterminating the entire English race in Britain, and spared neither women nor innocent children putting them all to horrible deaths with ruthless savagery, and continuously ravaging about the whole country.” He was so thorough that this destruction is still visible in the archaeological record of the north nearly 1400 years later.
The second, the Battle of Deniseburna, occurs at an unknown date in 634. Oswald, another son of Æthelfrith, returns from exile in Dál Riata (what is now the western seaboard of Scotland and north-eastern Ireland) with a small warband. The day before the battle he raises a cross at a place “called in English Hefenfeld.” Then, in a surprise attack, Cadwallon is killed by Deniseburna, now Rowley Burn, just south of Hadrian’s Wall, and Oswald becomes king of Northumbria.
As Bede writes it, the first battle, Hæðfeld, makes sense: the combined armies of Mercia and Gwynedd march up the Roman road (even 200 years after the tax-and-maintenance structure of Roman occupation collapsed, these roads were still the best routes for overland troop movement) between their respective territories to the border of Northumbria where Edwin’s army is waiting. Edwin loses. As Bede makes no mention of the relative strength of the opposing forces, there is no reason to suppose Edwin wasn’t simply overwhelmed by superior numbers.
Bede’s story of the second battle, Deniseburna, however, is difficult to accept. Bede tell us Oswald mustered an army “small in numbers but strong in the faith of Christ.” Yet, despite Cadwallon’s “vast forces, which he boasted of as irresistible,” he was defeated and killed. Oswald was an ætheling in exile; if he had a warband at all it would have been a small number of personal followers. Cadwallon, on the other hand, was already a proven commander with a large, well-rested army, accustomed to winning. He had been accumulating men and materiel for over a year while based in territory he knew very well. From Dál Riata to Hadrian’s Wall is a long, difficult journey. How could Oswald travel so far and arrive both in good enough shape to beat an enemy who heavily outnumbered him and unnoticed enough for his attack to be a surprise? It defies logic—Bede certainly must have thought so, too, because he, like the author/s of the ninth-century Historia Brittonum, uses divine intervention to explain it.
A historical novelist, however, can’t rely on deus ex machina to save the day. In Menewood, then, the Battle of Deniseburna turns on the weather, and on Hild—her smarts, her leadership, and her knowledge of terrain.
Is this how it really happened? We’ll never know. But unlike Bede’s version, it could have.
Nicola Griffith is the author of Menewood, the new book in The Hild Sequence.
