Anglo-Saxon Era
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Anglo-Saxon Era’
Kings of Norway educated in England drew on the experience of English clergy to establish Christianity in their own land.
In the tenth and eleventh centuries, Norway’s Christian kings had close ties to Constantinople, capital of the Roman Empire, to Novgorod and Kiev, the chief cities of Rus’, and above all to England. The authorities in Rome chafed at it, wanting Norway to look to Germany and France instead; but for over two hundred years the bond with England was too strong to break.
Inspired by an avid interest in English warrior heroes, the fifteen-year-old Guthlac recruited a band of freebooting militiamen.
As a boy, so his biographer Felix tells us, St Guthlac (673-714) had been a mild-mannered child, a credit to his pious and well-to-do parents Penwald and Tette. But when he was fifteen, Guthlac began to be fascinated by stories of warriors and heroes and deeds of arms, and soon it became apparent that they were having a very negative effect on the blithe and innocent boy.
St Pega welcomed a royal servant with a serious eye condition to the monastery founded by her brother, St Guthlac.
After the death of St Guthlac in 714, his sister St Pega was left in charge of his hermitage at Crowland in modern-day Lincolnshire. For many years, exiled Mercian prince Æthelbald had been a frequent guest, so when one of his servants developed an eye problem which had all the doctors baffled, Crowland was their first thought.
The monks of the monastery on Iona are all keeping the same secret from one another.
Columba brought twelve monks to Iona in 563. His little community supported itself by farming a fertile plain on the western side of the island, but the monastery stood on the eastern side, and to get home the monks had to trudge across a mile of tumbled upland moors. By half way, the loads they bore at harvest time felt decidedly heavy.
Edmund, King of the East Angles, is given a stark choice by the Viking warrior who has ravaged his realm.
Some four years after the Great Heathen Army of the Vikings landed in 865, Hingwar ravaged the Kingdom of the East Angles with indiscriminate bloodshed. He then sent a messenger to their lord, King Edmund, in his now silent Hall, bearing an ultimatum: to live and be Hingwar’s vassal, or to die. What follows is said to be the story as told by an eyewitness.
Anglo-Saxon poet Cynewulf reminds us that God’s gifts to men are many and varied, and nobody ever gets them all.
‘Now there are diversities of gifts,’ St Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 12, ‘but the same Spirit.’ Cynewulf (possibly the eighth-century bishop Cynewulf of Lindisfarne) confirms that the gifts given by God to mankind are many and different, and also explains why it is that no one should expect to be good at everything.