Oswin of Deira
The Holy King and Martyr Oswin of Deira
Martyr · King · Passion Bearer · b. early 7th century, son of Osric of Deira — d. 20 August 651, at Gilling in Yorkshire
Commemorated 20 August — His betrayal and killing at Gilling, 651
Oswin, king of Deira — the southern half of Northumbria — from about 644 until 651, is the humblest of the royal saints of the English conversion, and the one whose story Bede tells with the most evident affection. Tall, handsome, generous and courteous to everyone, he was so beloved that nobles came from every province to serve him; and the one anecdote of him that survives entire is of his kneeling on the floor before Aidan of Lindisfarne to beg forgiveness for having questioned the bishop's gift of a royal horse to a beggar. When his kinsman and rival Oswiu of Bernicia marched against him, Oswin disbanded his army rather than spend his people's lives on a battle he could not win, and went into hiding with a man he trusted; that man betrayed him, and he was killed on 20 August 651. Aidan, who had said that so humble a king would not live long, died twelve days after him.
King of Deira
Northumbria in the seventh century was two kingdoms uneasily joined: Bernicia in the north, the land of the house of Æthelfrith, and Deira in the south, around York, the land of the house of Ælle. Oswin was son of Osric, the Deiran king who had apostatised after Edwin's death and been killed by Cadwallon; the boy was sent for safety into Wessex, where he was brought up and baptised. When Oswald of Bernicia fell at Maserfield in 642, Northumbria divided again: Oswald's brother Oswiu took Bernicia, and Oswin was received as king of Deira.
He reigned about seven years. Bede, writing within eighty years and drawing on Lindisfarne memory, gives him an unqualified panegyric: a man of handsome appearance and lofty stature, pleasant in speech and courteous in manner, open-handed to noble and commoner alike, so that men of the best birth came from almost every kingdom to be in his service. And to all these gifts, Bede adds — as though it were the greater wonder — was joined the crown of humility.
The king, the bishop and the horse
The story that carries his memory is told by Bede in the third book of the Ecclesiastical History. Oswin had given Aidan, the Irish bishop of Lindisfarne who went everywhere on foot, an excellent horse with royal trappings, so that he might cross rivers and travel in haste when he needed to. Meeting a beggar on the road who asked alms, Aidan at once dismounted and gave him the horse and its harness.
The king heard of it as they were going in to dinner, and said, not unreasonably: had he no less valuable horse, or nothing else, that he must give away the horse chosen for the king's own use? The bishop's reply was immediate: "What is it you say, O King? Is that son of a mare dearer to you than that son of God?" They went in; Aidan sat down, and the king, who had come in from hunting, stood a while warming himself at the fire. Then he suddenly ungirt his sword, gave it to his servant, and threw himself at the bishop's feet, asking pardon and promising never again to question what Aidan gave of the king's property to the sons of God. Aidan, alarmed, raised him up and swore he would be perfectly content if only the king would sit down and be merry.
At the king's insistence he sat, and the king grew cheerful; but the bishop, on the contrary, became sadder and sadder, and at last wept. His priest asked him in Irish, which the king and his household did not understand, why he wept. "I know," said Aidan, "that the king will not live long; for I never before saw a humble king. Therefore I think that he will very quickly be snatched out of this life; because this nation is not worthy of such a ruler." The prophecy was fulfilled within a few months.
The betrayal at Gilling
Peace between Oswiu and Oswin broke down, for reasons Bede does not fully explain, and in 651 the two kings raised armies against one another. They came in sight near Wilfaresdun, "Wilfar's Hill," about ten miles north-west of Catterick. There Oswin looked at the force opposing him, saw that it was much the larger, and made the decision for which the Church remembers him: he disbanded his army and sent every man home, choosing to lose his kingdom rather than have his people killed for it.
With a single soldier, Tondhere, he went into hiding at Gilling — Ingetlingum — in the house of an earl named Hunwald, whom he believed to be his greatest friend. Hunwald betrayed him to Oswiu, and Oswiu's reeve Ethilwin put the king and his companion to death, "a detestable deed," Bede writes, on 20 August 651, the ninth year of the king's reign.
Aidan died at Bamburgh on 31 August, twelve days after the king whose humility he had wept over.
Atonement and cultus
The killing was felt as a crime from the beginning. Eanfled, Oswiu's queen — herself a Deiran, daughter of King Edwin, and thus Oswin's kinswoman — required of her husband, as compensation for the blood, the endowment of a monastery at Gilling, on the very spot, where prayer should be offered daily for both kings: for the murdered and for the murderer. It was the first English monastery founded in expiation of a killing, and it became a house of some importance before the Danish wars destroyed it.
Oswin's grave was lost in those wars and the memory of it faded. In 1065 it was, in the account of the northern chroniclers, revealed and his relics found at Tynemouth at the mouth of the Tyne; the priory there became the centre of his cult, and Tynemouth was thereafter his shrine. A rival claim was made by St Albans, to which relics were translated in 1103, and the two houses disputed possession for generations, as English monasteries habitually did. His feast was kept on 20 August, the day of his death, and the finding and translation of his relics on 11 March and in September at Tynemouth.
Feast and commemoration
August 20 (church date; New Calendar civil August 20, Old Calendar civil September 2), the day of his killing at Gilling. He is a saint of the undivided Church of the West and is kept among the pre-schism British saints received in Orthodox use, particularly in the calendars of the English parishes of the Russian and Antiochian jurisdictions; he has no Byzantine synaxarion notice and no proper Greek office. His shrine was at Tynemouth, where his commemoration is still observed, and he is honoured in the Anglican and Roman calendars of the northern English dioceses. Where the day is kept in a Byzantine parish it falls within the Afterfeast of the Dormition and is sung with the common of a martyr.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4
Having a kingdom, thou didst count it less than thy people's blood, and laying down thy sword thou wast slain by the hand of a friend, O royal martyr Oswin; and the bishop who wept over thy humility followed thee within twelve days. Entreat Christ God to grant our souls great mercy.
Iconography
Oswin is painted in the form given to the royal saints of England: a young king, beardless or lightly bearded, crowned, in a long mantle over a tunic, holding a sceptre in one hand and the martyr's cross or the palm in the other; a sword laid down or held reversed is his proper attribute, marking the disbanding of his army, and in some Western depictions he holds it point-downward for that reason. The Aidan story supplies the narrative scene: the bishop giving the horse to a beggar while the king watches, or the king kneeling at the bishop's feet before the fire.
No storable image has been located. A candidate on Wikimedia Commons ("Saint Oswine.jpg") was examined and rejected: its stated source is a defunct forum website, it carries no date, author or provenance for the underlying artwork, and the public-domain-art tag was applied by an uploader who could not have known the age of the image. Under the rule of §8 an undated image of unknown authorship cannot be assumed to be pre-1900, and the copyright in the underlying painting, if it is modern, is untouched by the uploader's tag.
Disputed questions
- Martyr or passion-bearer? Oswin was not killed for confessing Christ but murdered by treachery in a dynastic quarrel; the English calendars nevertheless style him king and martyr, as they do Edward the Martyr and as the Slavs style Boris and Gleb. The Orthodox category that fits the death exactly is passion-bearer — an unjust death accepted in Christ-like meekness, and in Oswin's case actually chosen, since he had an army and sent it away. Because the sources use the word martyr, both terms are carried in the classification, with passion-bearer marking the nature of the death.
- The cause of the war. Bede says only that the two kings "could not live in peace" and does not assign blame. Later writers have supplied dynastic, ecclesiastical and personal motives — the rivalry of the two royal houses, the ambition of Oswiu to reunite Northumbria, even the difference between Deiran and Bernician church allegiances — none of which is in the source.
- Not to be confused with Oswald of Northumbria (†642, August 5), Oswiu's brother and Oswin's predecessor as the Christian king of the Northumbrians, who fell in battle against the heathen Penda. The two names are constantly interchanged; Oswald was a warrior-king killed by pagans, Oswin a peaceable king killed by a Christian kinsman.