Book review: The King in the North, Max Adams (2013)

I bought this sometime after November 2013. I was living in Queensland and that year my daughter had come out to visit. I was looking after my mother at the time; the following year she’d be diagnosed with dementia. My father had died two years prior.

Up north I met a lawyer whose surname was Oswald, which is possibly what prompted me to buy this book. It cost $40. On occasion I would drive mum up the mountain to Buderim. She liked the bookshop there as she could potter around looking at things while supported by her walker, which has three wheels and so concertinas closed when you pull the handles together. Since that time, the book has sat unread on one or another of my bookshelves.

For people moved by such shows as ‘Game of Thrones’, this book can provide ballast. Robb Stark appeared first in George R.R. Martin’s 1996 novel, then in the TV series that followed from 2011. In both of which he is known as “king in the north”. Adams was clearly intent on capitalising on the success of such inventions, and he also knew that Oswald inspired J.R.R. Tolkien in making Aragorn for ‘The Lord of the Rings’ (the novels were published between 1954 and 55, and the films were released in the years spanning 2001 to 2003). Adams’ book has a strong sense of drama and is anything but dry. It has a well-shaped narrative arc – you want to find out what happens to Edwin and Oswald and Oswiu and Aidan – but it differs from its brethren in important ways. While ‘Game of Thrones’ and ‘The Lord of the Rings’ are merely animated by ideas derived from history, ‘The King in the North’ gives you that history in black and white. 

Adams creates nuance. His prose is flexible and often beautiful, able to convey the most subtle meanings with, sometimes, long secondary clauses dropped into the flow of words to capture an idea or to suggest further possibilities evident in the series of facts, along with their revelations. He also spent a good deal of time in the north of England, tramping around and getting acquainted with the buildings, rivers and hills he wanted to talk about in the book. 

To make it comprehensible to us, and to fill in the gaps left in extant records, Adams often interpolates an opinion as to what may have happened at any given point in time, and borrows from more modern dramatic art, for example suggesting a tactic used as part of a dynastic struggle. On page 288 he makes his method explicit:

Early Medieval kings were not much more prone to sentiment than tyrants of any other period. They ruled by expedient in an expedient world. Their political decisions were made, by and large, on the sort of criteria familiar to observers of modern politics. Political histories tend to consist of the repayment, when in power, of pledges made on the way up. Presidents, prime ministers, dare one say archbishops and popes, media barons and bankers, all face the dilemma posed by a system of patronage whose rules are as unchanging as human nature. What one pays to whom over how long is a nicety of the game. Selling one’s soul to the Devil is a trope with a long pedigree.

Where concrete evidence is lacking, Adams will suggest the route used for a voyage, or the site of an important battle. But beyond such bellicose or political concerns – though religion was, as the passages quoted below shows, used to govern as much as to enlighten – Oswald’s story is really the story of the Christianisation of England. 

And while Adams is at pains to find similarities between us and them, confusingly, at other points, he says that people of the British Isles in the Dark Ages were different from modern Westerners, particularly in respect of their ideas about the divine and the eternal. For example on page 242, Adams tells of what happens following King Oswald’s death, when his brother Oswiu went to Mercia to reclaim his body:

We do not know if Oswald’s brother Oswiu fought with him at Maserfelth … What we do know is that he brought up Oswald’s infant son Oethelwald, probably at his own court and that, a year after Oswald’s death at Maserfelth, he ‘came thither with an army’ and took Oswald’s remains away with him. Oswald’s head – with its gaping sword-slash wound – was given to the community on Lindisfarne and buried in the church there; his hands and arms were encased in a shrine, suitably made from silver, and interred in the fortress at Bamburgh, probably below the church dedicated to Saint Peter, now ruinous, which may have had an early crypt. Here they became, Bede tells us, objects of great veneration. As Aidan had predicted, they remained ‘incorrupt’ until the time of Bede.

And on the next page we read this: 

In keeping the arms and hands Oswiu was ensuring that some of his brother’s luck passed to him; in donating the king’s head to Lindisfarne he was aiming to ensure the continuing success of Aidan’s mission. Christian as he was, Aidan would not have been in any doubt of the potency of that gift and the continuing promise and virtus which came with it.

On page 362 Adams elaborates on this point:

Throughout this period [from the late 7th to the late 11th century] the potency of the relics of Cuthbert, Aidan and Oswald was maintained, enhanced by miracles of healing and prophecy and by donations to the community. The relics contained in the shrine embodied not just the virtue and God-given power of the ancient kings of Bernicia but something of the ancestral luck of the Northumbrian race. It is difficult for a sceptical and cynical twenty-first century secular society to fully grasp the power and importance of such objects and the places associated with them unless one turns to face Mecca, or Jerusalem. This is powerful magic.

There’s no reason why both a hard-nosed pragmatism and a distinctly animistic sense of divinity embodied by physical things can’t both apply, each at different times. Adams throws up his hands trying to sort it out as this, from page 371, shows:

Whatever the complex psychological reasons for attaching personal success in health and fortune to the veneration of the relics or memory of a read royal martyr, it seems that Oswald’s luck did not run out on the battlefield at Maserfelth: his presence, potency and charisma were still being felt hundreds of years after his passing, reinforced by Bede, Alcuin and other chroniclers and by the preservation and multiplication of the physical properties of those virtues.

The kings might have wanted to benefit from the rationality of the Roman mindset but they knew that their subjects’ loyalty was easier maintained by catering to their taste for hallowed loci. International and local. Stick and carrot.

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Christianity had been brought to Ireland earlier than Oswald’s reign, but it wasn’t within the orbit of Rome. There is also evidence from archaeological digs that other Christians lived in pockets in the part of the island (that would become England, Wales, and Scotland) before changes took place as a result of Oswald becoming ruler of Northumbria and overlord of other kingdoms.

Adams took upon himself a herculean task. To make his story about an English warlord (due to realpolitik at this point in time it’s inaccurate to call England a “country”) he used a wide variety of materials, sourced from different places including chronicles of the Middle Ages – the period immediately following the period in question – as well as more recent information, such as that produced as a result of archaeological and textual studies. 

Herculean because so much conjecture is required to make sense of it all. The chronicler known as Bede was often unreliable because he sought to produce a sophisticated account of events of the past in order to demonstrate to his readers that the adoption of Christianity was divinely ordained. Unlike in ‘Game of Thrones’, much cannot be known with any degree of confidence, but by speculating aloud Adams produces a nuanced and entertaining narrative filled with such tropes as a warlord who strikes savagely at dawn, a victorious atheling who bestows charity on his loyal subjects, and a vindictive warrior intent on eliminating his rivals in power. What makes such dramas as ‘Game of Thrones’ so compelling is that, at the time, the identity of the polis existed solely in the person of the king. The fragile nature of the polis meant that people’s idea of their world was different to what obtains in people’s minds now. This difference lies at the root of the compulsion to watch such TV shows. It’s an atavistic yearning for the simpler dynamic of the schoolyard. The staid dynamics of office politics, with its allegiances, untold secrets, and harboured grudges, are transposed onto an antique setting where differences of opinion are sorted out not by email or in a meeting, but at the point of a sword. 

It’s a Romantic and nihilistic craving for absolutes that relishes the assurance available from the closure implicit in death – the TV show was so wildly successful the Australian distributor a year ago installed fake graves in a popular Sydney park – but the Dark Ages were not, as some like to think, a time of unalloyed horror and savagery. The term, in any case, is a 19th century one, and belongs to a time about which, now, we have our own opinions. On the other hand, people’s relationship with their world in the year 630 AD was not the same as it is now. Magic was actual and spirits existed in people’s imaginations as vivid beings. So the appeal of the Bible’s message must’ve been compelling as it would have let the common folk see the world through different eyes. 

Even if a taste for holy relics indicates that some things about paganism survived into the Christian era, enlighten Oswald did, though a lot of the excesses of his successors would eventually be overturned in the Renaissance as Henry VIII reprivatised monastic land holdings. 

Nevertheless, under Oswald, the establishment of a monastery at Lindisfarne was pivotal for England from the point of view of its idea of itself as it allowed for the production of records. Records which, later, could serve as material in the making of such ideas as the nation. Kings would also mimic the monks, and start to keep records, so engendering the first traces we have of a stable polity in England. The marriage of religion and the king represents the beginnings of the idea of the kingdom as something separate from the person of the king. The nation – or, as we now call it, the state – as a continuing and versatile institution would become one able to harbour further innovation and would enable the realisation of the individual’s full potential.