Free A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons by Geoffrey Hindley

the skeleton of his horse, legs flexed, lying at his side. 11
    The most famous of all Oswald relics was the right forearm and hand (important in the pagan cult of the praying sacral king), which apparently remained fleshy and firm long after death. At one Easter banquet, Bede tells us, the king had been distributing food to a crowd of beggars. When supplies ran out, he called his smith to break up the silver platter into coin-size pieces for distribution. Bishop Aidan made a blessing: ‘May this arm never perish.’ Four centuries later, transported south from its shrine at Bamburgh, the right arm was still working its magic in Peterborough Abbey. The cult was to become widespread on the Continent. In one version a raven is mysteriously involved and the pagan Germanic associations are echoed in other ways.
    From the battle of Maserfelth to the Synod of Whitby
     
    From the start, dynastic and religious policy were enmeshed: the church hoping to exploit court influence to win converts and acquire endowments; kings supporting the missions as a way of projecting their influence. In 643 Oswiu recovered the severed head and arms of his dead brother, intending to create a royal cult. He founded a new church to St Peter on the rock at Bamburgh, the ancestral home of the Bernician dynasty, to accommodate the arms, which were enshrined there in a silver reliquary before the 730s. The head was assigned to Lindisfarne. One feels that the popular allure of this royal cult owed a good deal to its association with pre-Christian beliefs and customs and that the church’s version aimed to sanitize it.The imperishable forearm (testified as incorrupt by Alcuin in the late eighth century) remained at Bamburgh until the 1050s.
    Politically, the death of Oswald split the two kingdoms once again. While his brother Oswiu succeeded in Bernicia, Deira broke away under their cousin Oswine, whose father, Osric, had been the ruler who had led the kingdom back to paganism during the dark days after Maserfelth. Despite this ancestry, Bede considered Oswine the perfect Christian king, while the Deirans themselves long resisted the rule of Oswiu. He, however, was determined to achieve a united kingdom.
    Setting aside an earlier British/Irish wife, Oswiu now embarked on a marriage that made dynastic sense but had religious complications. He sent south to the court of Kent where his cousin, the Roman Catholic Eanflæd of Deira, was still living in exile. The two were well within the degrees of kinship considered incestuous by church law, but Rome made no objections, although the pope would surely have been informed about the marriage of this Christian princess. Oswiu saw the marriage as the way to affirm his dynastic rights in Deira; Rome may well have hoped for more far-reaching consequences. Either way, the Deirans were not impressed. Oswiu prepared to invade. What followed involved breaches of both the Christian and pagan codes that governed the world of the Anglo-Saxon noble. Oswine disbanded his army in the face of the enemy, itself shameful, and then went into hiding with one of his honoured companions, a gesith for whom loyalty to one’s lord was supposed to be an absolute obligation. In fact this man betrayed Oswine to his enemy, King Oswiu, who had him killed. Still the Deiran nobles refused to accept Oswiu as king and chose a remote cousin of Oswine’s to lead them.
    Oswiu married one of his daughters to Penda’s son Peada, who converted to Christianity, and a son to Penda’s daughter Cyneburh. He also persuaded Sigeberht, king of the East Saxons, to be baptized. Penda’s response to what we might call Oswiu’s ‘religiousdiplomatic offensive’ came on 15 November 655. At the head of a massive army, and with the East Angles and the men of Deira at his side, he confronted the heavily outnumbered Bernician king at the River Winwaed, possibly near Leeds, and was himself destroyed.
    The Northumbrians’ success in battle was, no doubt, an