TRINITY · 5 AUGUST King & Martyr
Saint Oswald of Northumbria
King & Martyr · Patron of the Northumbrian Mission · c. 604–642
Maserfield — MAY-zer-field · Heavenfield — HEV-en-field · Penda — PEN-da · Oswiu — OZ-wee-oo
O God, who didst call thy servant Oswald from a throne to be the patron and protector of thy Gospel in the North, and didst crown his faithfulness with a martyr’s death; Grant that we, like him, may spend our gifts and our authority in the service of thy Church, and count no cost too great that is laid upon us for the sake of thy name; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Before Aidan came to Lindisfarne, there had to be a king willing to invite him. Before the monastery could be built, there had to be a man willing to give the island. Before the mission could go out on foot into the Northumbrian countryside, there had to be a Christian kingship within which it could move freely and be heard. That man was Oswald, and without him the entire Northumbrian flowering — Aidan, Cuthbert, Hild, Chad, Bede, the Lindisfarne Gospels, all of it — would have had no ground in which to take root. He is the soil as well as the patron: the kingly generosity that made everything else possible.
He had been formed in exile. When the pagan Æthelfrith was driven from Northumbria, the young princes of the royal house were scattered, and Oswald spent his exile among the monks of Iona. He received baptism there, learned the faith not from a court chaplain but from the community that Columba had built, and carried back to Northumbria when he returned a Christianity shaped entirely by the Celtic monastic tradition — by the love of scripture and solitude, by the habit of prayer as the ground of action, by the understanding that a Christian king’s first obligation is the conversion and care of his people. He returned to reclaim his kingdom in 634, and on the eve of the Battle of Heavenfield (HEV-en-field) he raised a wooden cross with his own hands and held it upright in the earth while his army knelt and prayed. It was the first cross, Bede tells us, ever erected in Bernicia. He won the battle. The cross remained standing. Pilgrims were still visiting it in Bede’s own lifetime, breaking off splinters of the wood and mixing them with water to give to the sick.
He sent at once to Iona for a bishop, and when the first man returned in defeat, it was Oswald who presided at the council where Aidan spoke his quiet, decisive words about milk before meat. He gave Aidan Lindisfarne — the tidal island that mirrored Iona in its geography and its character — and in the early days of the mission served as Aidan’s interpreter, the king translating the Irish bishop’s words into the Northumbrian tongue for the assembled people. The image is extraordinary and unrepeatable: the king of Northumbria standing beside the bishop, rendering the Gospel into the language of his own subjects, the secular and the sacred power working in such intimacy that no distance remained between them. Bede says that this sight — the king interpreting for the bishop — was itself a kind of sermon, more powerful than any words.
He was killed at the Battle of Maserfield (MAY-zer-field) on 5 August 642, cut down by the pagan Penda (PEN-da) of Mercia, who had his body dismembered and his head and arms mounted on stakes. His brother Oswiu (OZ-wee-oo) recovered the relics the following year. The head of Oswald was eventually laid in the coffin of Cuthbert at Lindisfarne — the patron’s skull travelling with the saint whose mission he had made possible, both of them carried by the wandering monks through the long centuries of Viking devastation, arriving together at last in Durham. They rest there still, the martyr-king and the hermit-bishop, in the same cathedral where Bede’s bones also lie: the root, the stock, and the leaves gathered into one house, the whole tradition held in the stone that Benedict Biscop’s vision made possible and Oswald’s sacrifice made free.
O Almighty God, who didst call thy servant Oswald to be a king and martyr, and through his faith and generosity didst open the kingdom of Northumbria to the light of thy Gospel; Grant that we who have received so great an inheritance of faith may be faithful stewards thereof, spending ourselves in its service as he spent himself, and trusting thee for the victory; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.