# Battle of the Winwaed

655 battle

United Kingdom

Battlefield. 655 CE

## Story

• On 15 November, in a year given as 655, 654, 656, or 657, Penda of Mercia was killed in battle by Oswiu of Bernicia beside a river called the Winwæd.
• The river has never been identified. It has been placed near Leeds, on the Cock Beck, on the Went, on the Aire, and much farther away.
• Penda’s allies included Æthelhere of East Anglia. Cadafael of Gwynedd left in the night, and Æthelwald of Deira stood aside. Heavy rain drowned more men in the flight than the fighting killed.
• Oswiu gave his infant daughter to a religious life and set aside twelve small estates for monasteries, then divided Mercia. His hold on the kingdom lasted only about three years.
• No weapon or grave from the fighting has been found. A metal-detecting survey published in 2020 along the East Leeds Orbital Route recovered no trace of the battle, and one Bronze Age flat axe that does not belong to it.

## History

The Battle of the Winwaed was fought between Oswiu of Bernicia and Penda of Mercia beside a river whose modern course has never been fixed. The day is given as 15 November. The year is given as 655, as 654 if the count began in September, as 656 if the count is one year early, and as 657 in a Welsh annal. One reading separates that November day, when the campaign was closed in the district of Loidis, from the fighting itself, and allows the battle to have been earlier and far from Leeds.

Penda had come north with allies from East Anglia and Wales, among them Æthelhere of East Anglia, and with support from Deira. Oswiu met him with a very small force, helped by his son Ealhfrith, while another son, Ecgfrith, was a hostage in Mercia with Queen Cynewise. Cadafael of Gwynedd left in the night, and Æthelwald of Deira waited out the result from a safe place. Rain had filled the river and spilled the banks, so that more men drowned in the flight than were killed in the fight, and Penda’s head was cut off.

Before the fighting, Oswiu had offered a great treasure for peace. One account says Penda refused it and meant to destroy his people from the highest to the lowest. Another says the treasure was accepted and shared among the British allies. Oswiu then vowed that, if he won, he would give his daughter, scarcely a year old, to a religious life, and twelve estates for monasteries.

He kept the vow. Six of the estates lay in Deira and six in Bernicia, with ten families in each, a hundred and twenty in all. The child was placed at Hart Island under Abbess Hilda, and two years later a house of ten families was begun at Streaneshalch, where she lived as a pupil and then as a teacher until she was sixty. Oswiu, her mother Eanflæd, and her grandfather Edwin were later buried in that same church.

Mercia was split after the defeat. The southern part, reckoned at 5,000 families and divided from the north by the Trent, went to Penda’s Christian son Peada, while Oswiu took the northern part, reckoned at 7,000 families. Peada was killed at Easter the next spring, said to be by the treachery of his wife. About three years after Penda’s death, Mercian nobles brought out the young Wulfhere, whom they had hidden, and drove Oswiu’s officers from the land.

The kings who ruled Mercia after Penda were Christian, though Penda himself had stayed pagan and had not stopped preaching among people willing to hear it. The battle has been treated as the effective end of Anglo-Saxon paganism as a public power. Older practice is also described as fading only as the kingdoms converted through the seventh and eighth centuries.

The river-name has been explained as an English compound of strife and a ford, and as a Celtic word for whiteness. Welsh and Latin notices call the place Caius’s field. Proposed waters include the Cock Beck east of Leeds, which gave a housing estate the name Pendas Fields, the Went north of Doncaster, and the Aire. Oswestry and Winwick have been suggested as well, though Oswestry belongs to an older argument about a different battle.

Earthworks beside the Cock Beck are a separate monument. They have been read as a boundary of Elmet, as a Deiran line against Mercia, or as an older work, and Roman pottery from one ditch shows that stretch was open in the Roman period. They are not the battlefield.

A survey published in 2020, along seven kilometres of the East Leeds Orbital Route from Red Hall to Wood Lane, recovered 2,216 metal objects, almost all of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and one Bronze Age flat axe. No evidence of the fighting was found. An empty result does not by itself prove that the armies stood somewhere else.

## Photographs

- [Alfred Pearseː Battle of the Winwaed in 655 (Hutchinson's Story of the British Nation, 1922). — Alfred Pearse](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2f/Alfred_Pearse%CB%90_Battle_of_the_Winwaed_in_655_%28Hutchinson%27s_Story_of_the_British_Nation%2C_1922%29.jpg)
- [Stained glass window in the cloister of Worcester Cathedral representing the death of Penda of Mercia — Violetriga](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/Penda_of_Mercia.jpg)

## Sources

- [Battle of the Winwaed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Winwaed) — Wikipedia
- [Penda of Mercia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penda_of_Mercia) — Wikipedia
- [Oswiu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswiu) — Wikipedia
- [Æthelhere of East Anglia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%86thelhere_of_East_Anglia) — Wikipedia
- [Anglo-Saxon paganism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_paganism) — Wikipedia
- [Bede](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bede) — Wikipedia
- [Battle of Alclud Ford](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Alclud_Ford) — Wikipedia
- [Battle of Argoed Llwyfain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Argoed_Llwyfain) — Wikipedia
- [Battle of Aylesford](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Aylesford) — Wikipedia
- [Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, Book 3](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ecclesiastical_History_of_the_English_Nation_(Scudder)/Book_3) — Wikisource
- [The Battle of the Uinued and the River Went, Yorkshire](https://doi.org/10.1179/nhi.2004.41.2.377) — Northern History
- [655: Treasure Lost on the Uinued or River Went, Yorkshire](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/british-battles-493937/655-treasure-lost-on-the-uinued-or-river-went-yorkshire/E850D9D2AF0DBFED60AAF95DD757096D) — Cambridge University Press
- [The road to Winwæd? Penda’s wars against Oswiu of Bernicia, c. 642 to c. 655](https://doi.org/10.1017/S0263675100080042) — Cambridge University Press
- [East Leeds Orbital Route, Leeds, West Yorkshire: Archaeological Metal Detecting Survey](https://doi.org/10.5284/1129201) — Archaeology Data Service
- [Length of linear earthworks known as Becca Banks and The Ridge, part of the Aberford Dyke system](https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1016951) — Historic England
- [The Battle of Winwaed: Location](https://www.winwaed.com/history/winwaed/location.php) — Winwaed
- [Wulfhere](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_National_Biography,_1885-1900/Wulfhere) — Wikisource
- [Alfred Pearseː Battle of the Winwaed in 655 (Hutchinson's Story of the British Nation, 1922).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alfred_Pearse%CB%90_Battle_of_the_Winwaed_in_655_(Hutchinson%27s_Story_of_the_British_Nation,_1922).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Penda of Mercia.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Penda_of_Mercia.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

The Battle of the Winwaed was the fight in which Oswiu of Bernicia killed Penda of Mercia beside a river called the Winwæd. The day is 15 November. The year is given as 655, and also as 654, 656, and 657. The river itself has never been identified. Few details of the fighting survive, yet the result changed the balance between the northern and southern English kingdoms and has been treated as the effective end of Anglo-Saxon paganism as a public power.

The year depends on how the count was begun. One manuscript of the year-by-year English chronicle, and the Northumbrian history, both give 655, and the history adds 15 November. R. L. Poole argued that the year used in that history began in September, so that November 655 would fall in 654. Frank Stenton, in 1943, dated the events on that September reckoning. Other readers take the year as beginning on 25 December or on 1 January, and so leave the November in 655. D. P. Kirby allowed 656 as well as 655, in case the dates stand one year early. A Welsh annal gives 657. Philip Dunshea has argued that the wording of the history makes it possible the battle was fought some time, even years, before Oswiu brought the campaign to a close, and that the place could have been far from Leeds. The sentence that carries the November date says that Oswiu closed the campaign in the district of Loidis on 15 November in the thirteenth year of his reign, to the benefit of both peoples, because he freed his own subjects from the devastations of a heathen people and brought the Mercians and the neighbouring kingdoms into the Christian faith after destroying their heathen ruler.

The name of the river has been read in two ways. From the nineteenth century, winwœd or winwæd was taken as an Old English compound, from winnan or win, strife or fight, and wæd, shallow water or a ford. In 2004 Andrew Breeze set that English reading aside. He took the name as Celtic, answering to modern Welsh gwenwedd, whiteness, and he treated an older explanation of the first element as fight as impossible. A later chapter of his returns to the same water and the treasure said to have been lost there. The Welsh name is Maes Gai, and the medieval Latin is campus Gai or Strages Gai Campi, Caius’s field. An Old English version of the history places the fight near the Winwæd stream. Charles Plummer, commenting in 1896, gathered earlier guesses from Camden onward, rejected a site in Lothian, and called the place obscure. He also wrote that the battle was decisive as to the religious destiny of the English.

Because Oswiu closed the campaign in Loidis, the district that gave its name to Leeds, the Winwæd is usually sought near Leeds or on a tributary of the Humber. Edmund Bogg placed the fighting on the high tableland of Whinmoor, about a mile above the village of Seacroft and near the source of the little river Cock. The housing estate called Pendas Fields, east of Leeds, takes its name from Penda because his death has been associated with that city, and in the twentieth century the same name was given to a railway station, since closed, and to a street. The Cock Beck runs through that ground and later joins the Wharfe, which feeds the Humber. The same beck, in flood, was also part of the Battle of Towton in 1461, a different war. Against the Cock as the Winwæd it has been said that the stream looks too small to drown an army. The answer offered is that the land has since been drained and farmed, and that boulder clay, common on that ridge, could have held a flood higher than the beck holds now. Aaron Thompson, translating a medieval British history, proposed the River Aire instead.

Andrew Breeze argued for the River Went, a tributary of the Don north of present-day Doncaster, in the country of Wentbridge and East Hardwick, south of Pontefract. John William Walker had already proposed that river in 1951. Breeze connected the Celtic whiteness with an older name of the Went, Weneta, and with other white-water names. He pictured Penda’s army, tired from a long campaign and laden with spoil, withdrawing south and forced by winter rain onto a narrow dry approach to a marshy crossing, where a smaller force could meet it. He compared that ground with later battles decided by a funnel of high land, and he compared the choice of ground with later victories won by position rather than by numbers. Those comparisons are his. They are not a description written in the seventh century. He also noted that a nephew of Oswiu, Talorcan son of Eanfrith, was a Pictish king, so Pictish warriors may have stood with the Northumbrians, and set against that possibility the statement that Oswiu’s army was tiny. A Welsh historian, John Lloyd, placed the fight in the West Riding and told of Oswiu bursting upon hosts who were going home in a careless mood. That, too, is a later telling.

Wilder suggestions put the Winwæd at Oswestry or at Winwick. Oswestry is a traditional place for the Battle of Maserfield, fought on 5 August thirteen years earlier, when Penda killed Oswald. It should not be folded into this river. Winwick is only a speculation here. James Fraser has read the siege that preceded the battle as standing at Maes Gai, in Loidis, and has thought that district then lay in the sphere of the British kingdom of Rheged. Other readers put the siege at a place called Urbs Iudeu, identified, perhaps doubtfully, with Stirling, far to the north. Iedeu is also a historic name for Jedburgh. These are different maps of the same campaign, and none of them has been proved by a find on the ground.

The armies belonged to a political world that was already old. Two earlier fights in the north are not this battle and do not belong to Penda’s reign. The Battle of Alclud Ford was fought around 580 between the Britons of Rheged and Bernicia, perhaps at a ford near Alt Clut, the rock at Dumbarton, a name also used for the kingdom of Strathclyde. Poems in the Book of Taliesin say that an Anglian king, Ulph, came with violence and was killed by Urien map Cynfarch, king of Rheged, probably in what is now Cumbria or Galloway or both, and by his son Owain mab Urien. The Rhegedian warriors in that telling are horsemen armed with spear and javelin, and the Bernicians are mostly infantry. Ulph has been taken as Theodulf, a son of Ida of Bernicia, which would put the fight about 574 or about 590, or as Frithuwolf, also called Freothulf or Frithuwald, which would put it about 580. Rheged was then at its height. The Battle of Argoed Llwyfain, known from Taliesin’s poem Gwaith Argoed Llwyfain, was another clash of the same generation. On a Saturday, a Bernician leader called Fflamddwyn, Firestealer or Flamebearer, surrounded a seat of power in Rheged and demanded hostages. Owain refused, calling on the memory of his ancestor Ceneu son of Coel. Urien stirred his men, Fflamddwyn was killed, and Rheged was for a time free of Anglian domination. Far to the south, and two centuries earlier, the Battle of Aylesford, also called Epsford, was entered under the year 455. Hengist and Horsa fought Vortigern near the place called Agælesþrep, presumed to be Aylesford in Kent. Horsa was killed, and Hengist and his son Oisc, also written Æsc, took the kingship of Kent. Another early history says that Vortimer, not Vortigern, fought four battles, and that the third was at the ford called Epsford or Set thirgabail, where Horsa fell and so did Vortimer’s brother Catigern. Neither account names the winner of that ford. The same history says the Saxons sometimes advanced and sometimes were driven back, and that a fourth fight, near a stone on the shore of the Gallic sea, drove them out until Vortimer’s death undid the gain. The year-by-year chronicle says the Britons forsook Kent after a bloody defeat at Crayford in 457. Two Neolithic tombs near Aylesford, Kit’s Coty House and the White Horse Stone, are only locally said to be the graves of Catigern and Horsa. A modern guess that Agælesþrep was Rochester, because the name might mean the place of the eagle-troops, remains a guess. None of these three battles is the Winwaed.

Anglo-Saxon paganism was the religion Penda still held when those later English kingdoms were already turning Christian. It was the practice of the Anglo-Saxons from the fifth century to the eighth, a varied form of the Germanic religion brought in the migration of the mid fifth century, with much local difference. Christian writers called it paganism or heathenism. The Old English word was hæðen, kin to the Norse heiðinn, and both pagan and heathen were words of blame. There is no evidence that the people who followed it used either name, or that they thought of one single religion set against Christianity. What can be known comes from Christian writers, of whom Bede is the most important for this battle, from place-names, from the remains of cult, and from comparison with the better-recorded beliefs of neighbouring peoples, including the Norse. The gods were the ése. The leading god was probably Woden, and Thunor and Tiw stood beside him. Elves, nicors, and dragons were also spoken of. Devotion included the sacrifice of objects and of animals, especially at festivals. There is some evidence of timber temples, and also of open-air cult at trees and standing stones. The dead were buried or burned, often with grave goods. Ideas of magic and of witchcraft belonged to the same world. The English names of the days still carry those gods. Penda remained inside this religion while kings around him accepted baptism. After he was killed, the Mercian kings were Christian. Bede treated the battle as the moment when that older public religion failed. The longer view is that practice faded as each kingdom converted between the seventh century and the eighth, and that some of it passed into folklore. Both statements can stand. The battle ended a pagan kingship. It did not, on the longer view, empty the country of older custom in a single afternoon.

Penda of Mercia was the king who carried that pagan kingship. He was a son of Pybba, and he was claimed for the Iclingas, a line recited back through Cryda, Cynewald, Cnebba, Icel, Eomer, Angeltheow, Offa, Wermund, and Wihtlæg to Woden. A British history says Pybba had twelve sons, of whom Penda and Eowa were the best known, though many of the twelve may be later claims of descent. A brother called Coenwalh in the pedigrees may instead be Cenwalh of Wessex, Penda’s brother-in-law. The name Penda is unexplained. He is the only person of that name in the collected record of Anglo-Saxon people. The name has been taken as British, and it appears in a ninth-century list of a Northumbrian religious community classed among British names. John Koch noted that Penda, Pybba, and Peada look more Brythonic than German, without matching known Welsh names. A firm alliance with British princes has been put down, as a suggestion only, to a shared background. Continental German forms, a woman’s name Penta and a place Pentilingen, have also been offered, implying a name Pendi. Place-names in the West Midlands, among them Pinbury, Peddimore, and Pinvin, have been thought to keep names from his family. A Welsh praise poem, perhaps of the seventh century, seems to call him Panna ap Pyd, and says of Cynddylan that when the son of Pyd wished, he was ready.

When he began to rule is disputed, and so is the length of the reign. Another Mercian king, Cearl, is named as ruling in the time of Æthelfrith of Bernicia. Whether Penda followed him at once, and whether they were kin, is unknown. Henry of Huntingdon, in the twelfth century, called Cearl a kinsman of Pybba. They may instead have been rivals. The chronicle says Penda became king in 626, ruled thirty years, and was fifty at his accession. Thirty years does not sit with a death in 655 unless the thirtieth year is meant loosely. An age of fifty at accession is widely doubted, because his son Wulfhere was still a youth three years after the father’s death. It has been suggested that the chronicle meant he was fifty when he died, and so about twenty in 626. The infobox of a modern summary puts his birth about 606 and his death on 15 November 655 at about forty-eight or forty-nine, which is yet another count. Bede says he was a most warlike man of the royal race of the Mercians, and that after Edwin’s defeat in 633 he ruled the Mercians for twenty-two years with varying fortune. Frank Stenton read that sentence as proof that Penda, though of the royal family, became king only after Edwin’s fall. The British history gives him only ten years, perhaps counting from Maserfield around 642, though even that start would be more than ten years on the usual count. Nicholas Brooks noted that the three lengths come from three peoples, West Saxon, Northumbrian, and Welsh, and may mark the moments when each first met him in war, rather than the true start of a reign. Bede’s twenty-two years are the figure most historians have preferred.

In 628 the chronicle records a battle at Cirencester between Penda and the West Saxon kings Cynegils and Cwichelm, after which they came to an agreement. Kirby thought the fight almost certainly fell a few years later than 628, while still showing how widely Penda was already acting. If he was not yet king, Stenton called him a landless noble of the Mercian royal house fighting for his own hand. He may instead have been one of several Mercian rulers. The agreement has been read as a victory that gave him Cirencester and the lower Severn, lands the West Saxons had taken from the Britons in 577, the country that later formed the subkingdom of the Hwicce. Stenton thought Penda founded that subkingdom. The evidence that he did so is lacking, though the Hwicce existed later in the century.

In the late 620s or early 630s Cadwallon ap Cadfan of Gwynedd was at war with Edwin of Northumbria, then the most powerful king in Britain. Cadwallon was at first unsuccessful. He joined Penda, who is thought to have been the lesser partner, and on 12 October 633 they defeated the Northumbrians at the Battle of Hatfield Chase. One manuscript of the chronicle gives 14 October. If the year began in September, October 633 falls in 632, and Stenton sometimes dated it so. Kirby allowed 634. Edwin was killed. His son Eadfrith fell into Penda’s hands. One manuscript says Cadwallon and Penda then ravaged the whole land of the Northumbrians. Cadwallon certainly went on. How far Penda went with him is unclear. The pagans who had slain Edwin, probably the Mercians, though the phrase might be a slur on Christian Britons, burned a church and a town at Campodonum, at a time that is not fixed. About a year after Hatfield, Oswald killed Cadwallon at the Battle of Heavenfield. Penda is not said to have been there, nor at the earlier defeat and death of Osric of Deira. He may have gone home to secure Mercia. Kirby wrote of these years as the emergence of a Mercian leader whose exploits far passed those of his obscure predecessors.

Oswald then held Northumbria. Penda’s place in those years is obscure, and his later fame may have been read backwards into them. He is presumed to have acknowledged Oswald in some sense, while remaining an obstacle south of the Humber. Higham pointed to the failure of Bernician Christianity to enter the central Midlands as a sign that Oswald’s authority there was limited. Kirby wrote that Oswald was as powerful as Edwin, but faced a more entrenched challenge from Penda in the midlands and the east. At some point in Oswald’s reign Penda had Eadfrith killed, contrary to his oath. The killing has been blamed on pressure from Oswald, for whom Eadfrith was a rival, or on Penda’s own fear that the captive would seek vengeance, or on Mercian dynastic rivalry, since Eadfrith was a grandson of Cearl. While Eadfrith lived he might have been useful to Mercia, so his death was not an obvious gain.

It was probably also in Oswald’s reign that Penda defeated the East Angles and killed their king Ecgric and the former king Sigeberht. Sigeberht had left the kingship for a monastery and was brought out against his will, carrying only a wand, in the hope that his presence would steady the army. He and Ecgric were both killed. The date may be as early as 635, or not before 640 or 641, because one source still has Sigeberht alive then. If this defeat came before Maserfield, it may have shown Oswald that Penda had to be broken if Northumbria was to hold the south.

Eowa, Penda’s brother, is called a Mercian king at the time of Maserfield by the British history and by the Welsh annals. He may have been a sub-king, or a joint king, the two brothers perhaps dividing north and south. Joint kingship was not rare. After Penda’s death his son Peada was allowed the south while the north went under direct Northumbrian rule, which has been used to suggest that Penda’s own strength had lain in the south, near the Hwicce. Brooks offered another reading. Penda’s fortunes, on Bede’s own words, were mixed across twenty-two years. Eowa may have ruled for at least part of the time after Heavenfield, from about 635 until 642, as an ally or a dependant of Oswald, and Penda may not have been the constant master of Mercia between Hatfield and Maserfield.

On 5 August 642 Penda defeated the Northumbrians at Maserfield, near Welsh lands, and Oswald was killed. The year is also given as 641, if Hatfield was 632, as 643 in Kirby’s one-year shift, and as 644 in the Welsh annals. The day, 5 August, is agreed by Bede and by one manuscript of the chronicle. Welsh poetry indicates allies from Powys, perhaps including Cynddylan ap Cyndrwyn. If Oswestry is the right place, Oswald had taken the offensive against a hostile alliance of Penda and Powys. Reginald of Durham, in a twelfth-century life of Oswald, says Penda fled into Wales and Oswald, feeling safe, sent his army away. That has been called plausible, and also an invention, because no earlier account has it. Penda had Oswald’s body cut apart, and the head, hands, and arms set on stakes. That display may have had a religious meaning, perhaps as an offering. Oswald came to be revered as a martyr, a Christian king killed by pagans. Eowa died in the same battle. Which side he fought on is unknown. If he had been Oswald’s man, his death left Penda supreme over Mercian rivals as well as over Northumbria. The British history may mean this battle when it says Penda first separated the Mercians from the Northumbrians. A Humbrian confederacy including Mercia has been proposed. It has also been doubted, because Cearl had married a daughter to Edwin while Edwin was still the exiled enemy of Æthelfrith, which a subject king would have found difficult. Kirby called Penda, after Maserfield, without question the most powerful Mercian ruler yet seen in the midlands. Stenton called him the most formidable king in England. There is no evidence that he became, or tried to become, the lord of every southern king, but none of them matched his reputation. The British history says he prevailed at Maserfield through diabolical agency. That is the religious judgment of a later Christian writer, not a report of the tactics.

Northumbria split. Deira, between the North York Moors and the Humber, took its own king, Oswine, son of Osric. Bernicia, from the Tees to the Firth of Forth, passed to Oswald’s brother Oswiu, then about thirty, who held the kingship for twenty-eight years with much trouble. The Deirans had accepted Oswald, apparently because his mother Acha was of their royal line. They resisted Oswiu. Oswiu had been born about 612. Bede says he was fifty-eight at his death on 15 February 670. He was a son of Æthelfrith of Bernicia and probably of Acha, and a younger brother of Eanfrith and Oswald, with a sister Æbbe. In 604 Æthelfrith had taken Deira, killed the previous king, apparently Æthelric, married Acha, and exiled her brother Edwin. His reach ran from the Picts and Dál Riata to Wales and the midlands, and it ended in 616 at the Battle of the River Idle, where Edwin, backed by Rædwald, killed him. Rædwald’s son Rægenhere is also named in that fight. Æthelfrith’s sons fled to the Gaels and the Picts and did not return until Edwin’s death at Hatfield in 633. Oswiu left at about four and came back at about twenty-one, Irish in his speech and in his faith. He may have received his arms from a king of Dál Riata, such as Eochaid Buide, son of Áedán mac Gabráin, whom Æthelfrith had defeated at Degsastan. An Irish annal names an Osric, described as a Saxon royal heir, among the dead at the Battle of Fid Eóin. Whether that is Oswiu’s kin is uncertain. A marriage to Fín of the Cenél nEógain, and the birth of their son Aldfrith, may belong to the exile or to a later year. Oswiu may have returned with Eanfrith in 633. Eanfrith abandoned Christianity and was killed by Cadwallon, whom Oswald then killed.

Oswiu’s first recorded act as king was to marry Edwin’s daughter Eanflæd, then in exile in Kent, between 642 and 644. He is known to have had three marriages. Eanflæd bore Ecgfrith, born in 644 or 645 and killed in 685, Ælfwine, born about 660 and killed in 679, Osthryth, who died in 697, and Ælfflæd, born about 654 and dying in 714. Fín was the mother of Aldfrith, who died in 705. Rieinmelth, a British princess of Rheged, named in the British history and also as Rægnmæld in a Durham book, is thought to have been the mother of Ealhfrith, and perhaps of Ealhflæd. Unlike Eanfrith and Osric, Oswiu did not abandon his faith after a pagan victory. His upbringing may explain that, and so may Bishop Aidan of Lindisfarne.

For about a decade Deira had its own king, Oswine, Oswiu’s maternal second cousin. Around 651 they gathered armies. Bede blames Oswiu. Oswine saw that he had fewer auxiliaries, dismissed his men at Wilfaresdun, Wilfar’s Hill, almost ten miles north-west of Catterick, and hid with one soldier, Tondhere, in the house of the comes Hunwald. Hunwald betrayed him. Oswiu’s commander Æthelwine killed him. To make amends, Oswiu founded Gilling, where prayers were said for both the dead king and the king who had caused his death. Queen Eanflæd, Oswine’s kinswoman, asked that Trumhere, also his kinsman, be given the place. Oswine was later reckoned a saint. Oswald’s son Æthelwald followed him in Deira.

Between Maserfield and the Winwaed, Penda’s pressure on the south and the north continued. Defeat at Maserfield weakened Northumbria’s hold on the West Saxons. The new king Cenwealh, still pagan, was married to Penda’s sister and so sat, in Kirby’s phrase, in a Mercian orbit. When he set her aside for another wife, Penda drove him into exile among the East Angles. The exile is three years, begun in 645. He found baptism there and, in one account, returned in 648 as a Christian king. Who ruled the West Saxons in his absence is unknown. Kirby thought that ruler was subject to Penda, and he also thought Cenwealh may not have returned until after Penda was dead. In 651 Penda’s forces drove the community of Foillan from Cnobheresburg, a house some identify with Burgh Castle, and exiled Anna, who had met him there. The Irish monk Fursey had already left for Gaul, having foreseen the heathen threat. In 653, or early in 654, Penda struck East Anglia again. At Bulcamp, near Blythburgh, Anna and his son were killed and the East Anglian army was slaughtered. Anna had sheltered Cenwealh and had seen him converted. His reputed burial-place is Blythburgh.

Æthelhere of East Anglia then became king, from 653 or 654 until his death, a Christian of the Wuffingas, son of Eni and nephew of Rædwald. He was probably the second of Eni’s sons to matter here. Four sons are known: Æthilric, father of Ealdwulf, then Anna, Æthelhere, and Æthelwold. Æthilric married Hereswith, a Christian and a great-niece of Edwin. The brothers ruled as Christians. Rædwald, the first of the dynasty of whom more than a name is known, had reigned from about 599 for about a quarter of a century. His son Eorpwald was killed around 627 by a pagan, Ricberht, who may have ruled for a few years, and the kingdom slipped back from the baptism Rædwald and Eorpwald had accepted. Sigeberht restored Christianity and was the first East Anglian king to act as a patron of the church, then abdicated in favour of his co-ruler Ecgric. Little East Anglian writing survived the later Viking attacks on the monasteries and the loss of the two sees. Barbara Yorke has suggested that Æthelhere and Æthelwold may have ruled jointly, because both are called Anna’s successor. He has also been called Penda’s client-king, and it has been suggested that Penda put him in. During the short reign, Brigilsus was bishop of Dommoc, and Botolph’s monastery at Iken was built, in the country of Rendlesham and Sutton Hoo. Æthelhere would have arranged his brother’s funeral. Steven Plunkett has argued that Æthelhere joined the last campaign in order to turn Penda’s attention away from East Anglia and spare his own kingdom. Penda’s East Anglian wars have also been read as struggles inside East Anglia, and as a way to hold Middle Anglia, where he set his son Peada as ruler.

On Bernician ground the same years were violent, and also, at moments, diplomatic. Before Bishop Aidan died on 31 August 651, Penda ravaged Northumbria far and near and besieged Bamburgh, the royal stronghold named from a former queen, Bebba. Unable to take it by storm or by a long siege, he stacked planks, beams, wattles, and thatch on the landward side and fired them when the wind served. Aidan, on the inner Farne, nearly two miles off, is reported to have said, Behold, Lord, how great mischief Penda does. The wind turned the fire back on the Mercians, some were hurt, and they gave up the attempt. An Irish annal of a battle of Oswiu against Penda, about 650, may be this campaign. Some years after Aidan’s death, Penda burned the district where the bishop had died. The church burned, but the post he had leaned on did not, and it did not burn when the church was fired a second time. No open battle between Oswiu and Penda is recorded before the Winwaed. Oswiu may have refused battle because he felt weaker, in arms and perhaps in the reputation of his God. Higham wrote of Penda’s standing as a warrior-king whom his gods seemed to protect.

The two houses were also bound by marriage. Oswiu’s son Ealhfrith married Penda’s daughter Cyneburh. Penda’s son Peada married Oswiu’s daughter Ealhflæd. Bede dates that match to 653, and makes it depend on Peada’s baptism. Peada accepted, and said he would have done so even if the bride were refused. He was baptised by Bishop Finan, Aidan’s successor, at a royal place called Ad Murum, At the Wall, with his earls, soldiers, and servants. Four priests went back with him: Cedd, Adda, Betti, and Diuma, the last a Scot and the others English. Adda was a brother of Utta, abbot of Gateshead. Many of the Middle Angles, noble and common, were baptised, giving up what the history calls the abominations of idolatry. Penda did not obstruct preaching among the Mercians if anyone would hear it. He hated and despised those who, once they had received the faith, did not do its works, and he called them contemptible and wretched who did not obey their God, in whom they believed. This began two years before his death. The marriage and the priests can be read as tolerance. Higham read them as politics on both sides, a Bernician reach into Mercia and Middle Anglia that Penda may later have felt as religious colonialism. Middle Anglia itself may have been Penda’s creation, gathering smaller peoples under Peada. In the west, toward Wales, the districts of later Shropshire and Herefordshire probably fell under Mercian domination, and a king called Merewalh ruled the Magonsaete. Later centuries called Merewalh Penda’s son. Stenton thought him a local dynast who went on ruling under Mercia. A later list names five sons, Peada, Wulfhere, Æthelred, Merewalh, and Mercelmus, sometimes written Mercelinus, and two daughters, Cyneburh and Cyneswith. The queen is Cynewise, also written Cynwise. Later writers call her Kyneswitha, which is also a daughter’s name, so the queen and the daughter should not be collapsed into one person. Cyneburh married Ealhfrith. Cyneswith became a nun. Some accounts say the daughters kept their virginity inside marriage. A later story tells of an infant grandson, Rumwold, who preached for three days and died. That story is pious report, not a record of the battle.

In 655 Penda invaded Bernicia with a large army. Bede’s account speaks of thirty royal commanders, duces regii, who had come to help, and a translation reports that the pagans had three times the Northumbrian number, in thirty companies under noted leaders. The round figures sometimes printed as eight hundred Bernicians, fourteen hundred Mercians, and eight hundred East Angles, with five hundred, four hundred and fifty, and five hundred drowned, are not in that narrative, and they are not used here. The commanders included Cadafael ap Cynfeddw of Gwynedd and Æthelhere of East Anglia. Æthelwald of Deira, who had followed the murdered Oswine, supported Penda. He was Oswald’s son, and an alliance with the man who had killed his father needs a reason. He may have wanted Bernicia for himself. The cause of the war is otherwise uncertain. A sentence in Bede has been read as making Æthelhere the occasion of the war, the author of the conflict himself. J. O. Prestwich, in 1968, argued that the blame belongs to Penda, and that the punctuation of a manuscript of about 737, written in haste, had misled readers, while a manuscript of about 746 keeps Bede’s sense. Higham suggested that Bernician sponsorship of Christianity in Mercia and Middle Anglia provoked the campaign. Another reading is that Penda meant to stop Oswiu from reuniting Northumbria and restoring the power Edwin and Oswald had held.

The British history says Penda besieged Oswiu at Iudeu. Oswiu tried to buy peace with a great quantity of treasure and gifts, greater than can be imagined, if Penda would go home and stop destroying the provinces. Bede says the offer was refused, and that Penda resolved to extirpate the whole people, from the highest to the lowest. The British history says the treasure was accepted and distributed among the British allies. Both cannot be simply folded together. Oswiu is also said to have handed over his young son Ecgfrith, then about ten if the birth in 644 or 645 is set against a fight in 655, into the keeping of Queen Cynewise in Mercia. The age is a reckoning from those two dates, not a figure stated as his age on the day. The recorded events can be read as a bargain at Iudeu, after which Penda turned south for home, and then as a second meeting at the river. Breeze argues that the Went would have been a bad place for a withdrawing army and a good place for Oswiu to strike. Kirby thought allies might desert a homeward march, or might have been dissatisfied with what had been gained at Iudeu.

Before the fight Oswiu prayed and vowed. If the pagan would not take the gifts, they would be offered to God. If he won, he would dedicate his daughter to holy virginity and give twelve farms for monasteries. He then fought with a very small army. The history calls it perparvus, very small. His son Ealhfrith, written Alhfrith and Aifrid, fought with him. Æthelwald, who ought to have helped his uncle, was on the other side and is even said to have led the enemy on, and then, during the battle, withdrew and waited in a place of safety. Cadafael rose in the night and escaped with his army, and was afterwards remembered as Cadomedd, the battle-shirker. The pagan force was defeated. The thirty commanders and those who had come to help were put to flight, and almost all of them were killed. Æthelhere died with his soldiers. He had been leading the East Anglian part of the allied force. The river, written Vinwed and Winwæd and Uinued, had been filled by great rains until it overflowed its banks. Many more were drowned in the flight than were destroyed by the sword. Penda’s head was cut off. A link has been drawn with the staking of Oswald’s body at Maserfield. Henry of Huntingdon, writing in the twelfth century, enlarged the scene with supernatural intervention and dwelt on Penda dying by the violence he had dealt to others. He set the Winwaed down as vengeance for the slaughter of Anna, of Sigeberht and Ecgric, and of Oswald and Edwin. Barbara Yorke called it a major set-piece battle.

Oswiu kept the vow. He gave his daughter Ælfflæd, scarcely a year old, to be consecrated in perpetual virginity, and he delivered twelve small portions of land where earthly warfare should cease and monks should pray for the peace of his nation. Six lay in Deira and six in Bernicia. Each held ten families, a hundred and twenty in all. The child was placed in the monastery of Heruteu, the island of the Hart, under Abbess Hilda. Two years later Hilda acquired ten families at Streaneshalch, built a monastery, and there the king’s daughter was first a learner and then a teacher of the monastic life until, at sixty, she died. In that church, dedicated to Peter, she was buried with her father Oswiu, her mother Eanflæd, her mother’s father Edwin, and many other noble persons. The twelve estates and the later house at Streaneshalch are both part of this thank-offering. Gilling, founded earlier for Oswine, is a separate gift and should not be counted among the twelve unless a source says so. No source used here does.

The political result was sharp and short. Mercia’s dominance after Maserfield was broken, and Northumbrian dominance returned. Oswiu is described, for about three years, as holding an authority that earned him the name of bretwalda over much of Britain. He took the northern Mercians, a land reported at 7,000 families. He gave the southern Mercians, reported at 5,000 families and divided from the north by the Trent, to Peada, who had married into the Bernician line. Other subject rulers seem to have been set up elsewhere in Mercia. Æthelwald disappears from the record, and his stance in the campaign is the likely cause. Oswiu put his son Ealhfrith in as king of the Deirans. Farther south, Æthelhere’s brother Æthelwold may have been established with help from Oswiu and from Eorcenberht of Kent. Cenwalh of Wessex may have come home with Oswiu’s help. Sigeberht the Good of the East Saxons was Oswiu’s ally. He was later murdered and replaced by his brother Swithhelm, who remained Christian but drew away from Oswiu and from the Irish-Northumbrian church, and was probably subject to the East Angles. Talorcan may have been set up as a leading king among the Picts. Bede says that after Penda’s death Oswiu subdued the greater part of the Picts to English dominion. Welsh sources suggest that in the late 650s he campaigned in Wales and laid tribute on kings who had been Penda’s allies, Cadafael among them.

Peada was killed the next spring, during the Easter feast, by the treachery, as it is said, of his wife Ealhflæd. The year is given as 656, and also as 657 or 658. One reading gives him the Mercian title from 654, which belongs with the September reckoning of the battle rather than with a simple succession in the year after a fight in 655. Higham saw Ealhfrith’s hand in the sister’s killing of her husband. Oswiu then ruled through governors or subject kings. Diuma, one of the four priests, was made bishop of the Middle Angles and of the Mercians, ordained by Finan, because priests were scarce. He died in the country of the Middle Angles called Feppingum. Ceollach, a Scot, succeeded him and then returned to Iona. Trumhere, English but taught and ordained among the Scots, and abbot of Gilling, followed, in the days of Wulfhere.

Three years after Penda’s death, the Mercian leaders Immin, Eafa, and Eadberht rebelled, brought out Wulfhere, a youth they had kept hidden, expelled the officers of the foreign king, and recovered their liberty and their lands. The rising is also placed in late 659, and perhaps in 657. Wulfhere ruled seventeen years, a span also given as 658 to 675, and had as bishops Trumhere, Jaruman, Chad, and Winfrid. He extended Mercian power in the south and still, in one judgment, recognised Oswiu’s primacy, though Kirby notes that Wulfhere’s marriage to Eormenhild, daughter of Eorcenberht of Kent, tied him to a king over whom Oswiu had no sway. A dictionary account of his reign says he was kept hidden by loyal ealdormen, that the three who raised him were Immin, Eafa, and Eadbert, and that Lindsey was a point of friction: regained by Wulfhere in 657 and taken back by Ecgfrith before 675. His bishops and his southern wars lie outside this river, except as proof that Northumbrian control did not last. Æthelred, another son of Penda, ruled Mercia from 675 to 704. The line of Penda’s descendants ended, for the kingship, with the grandson Ceolred’s death in 716, after which descendants of Eowa held most of the eighth century. All three reigning sons, Peada, Wulfhere, and Æthelred, were Christian. In 660 Oswiu married Ecgfrith to Æthelthryth, a daughter of Anna. The hostage of 655 had become a king’s son-in-law of the house Penda had crushed.

What the battle changed, on the widest reading, was the chance of a lasting pagan over-kingship and the chance of an early Northumbrian supremacy over all the English. Higham wrote that Penda’s destruction sounded the death-knell of English paganism as a political ideology and a public religion. Stenton wrote that, without Penda’s resistance, a loosely compacted kingdom of England under Northumbrian rule would probably have been established by the middle of the seventh century. He also called Penda a great fighting king of the kind most honoured in Germanic saga, lord of many princes, leader of a vast retinue drawn by success and generosity, and he noted that the stories of his dealings with other kings have not survived, so that his wars can only be described from the standpoint of his enemies. Damian Tyler has argued for an early Mercian hegemony like the over-kingship of other seventh-century rulers, holding lesser kings, English and British, Christian and not, by personal ties and by marriage, and he pictured a court that was cosmopolitan, of more than one people and language, and tolerant. Penda had called Christians contemptible when they did not obey their God, which is not the same as forbidding the faith. Bede’s hostility is part of the record. The history was finished about 731, or in one notice in 732, by a Northumbrian monk and priest who had no wish to paint a pagan Mercian kindly. Penda has been called the villain of the third book. Prestwich put that judgment on the page. The reader is left with a ruler of the first rank whose importance was as much political as religious, and with a battle whose religious meaning was written by the winners.

Bede himself was not at the river. He was born in 672 or 673, on land of the twin monastery of Monkwearmouth and Jarrow, and he implies that the history was done in his fifty-ninth year. He went to Monkwearmouth at seven and later joined Abbot Ceolfrith at Jarrow. He and Ceolfrith survived a plague in 686 that killed most of the people there. His first abbot was Benedict Biscop. He travelled to other houses, and he visited the archbishop of York and King Ceolwulf. His name is a short form on the root of bēodan, to bid or command. Almost everything known of his life is in the last chapter of the history, with a letter by his disciple Cuthbert, not the saint, on his death on 26 May 735. He worked at biblical commentary and at computus, the reckoning of dates, including the disputed date of Easter, and he helped to spread the habit of counting years from the birth of Christ. His house had a library that included Eusebius and Orosius. A cult was forming by the tenth century and was widespread in England by the fourteenth. His body was taken to Durham Cathedral in 1020 and laid in the tomb of Cuthbert, then moved to its own shrine in 1370. The shrine was destroyed in the Reformation, and he was buried again in the cathedral. In 1899 Leo XIII canonised him and named him a Doctor of the Church, the first native of Great Britain to be so named. He is the reason this battle can be told at all, and he is also the reason the telling is a Christian one.

Oswiu lived fifteen years after the victory, and those years are the consequence, not a second battle. In 664 he presided at the Synod of Whitby and accepted Roman usages, after which Bishop Colmán of Lindisfarne left. The dispute had been pressed by his son Ealhfrith, taught by Wilfrid. Ealhfrith had been raised in Irish practice, and his rejection of it, with the removal of Cuthbert and Eata from Ripon, is read as politics as well as religion. In a year when Easter was kept twice, the king could finish Lent and celebrate while the queen and her household, following the Kentish reckoning, were still fasting and keeping Palm Sunday. Bede places that gathering in 664, the twenty-second year of the reign. Theodore of Tarsus, the new archbishop of Canterbury, came north to meet Oswiu in 669. Around 665 Pope Vitalian sent relics of Peter, Paul, Laurence, John, Gregory, and Pancras, and for Eanflæd a cross with a gold key made from the chains of Peter and Paul, by a party that had gone to Rome under Wighard and returned after Wighard’s death. Oswiu meant to go to Rome with Wilfrid. He fell ill and died, aged fifty-eight, on 15 February 670, and was buried at Whitby beside Edwin. Ecgfrith succeeded him in Bernicia, and the younger son Ælfwine in Deira. Eanflæd and Ælfflæd were later abbesses of Whitby and were buried there. His feast is kept on 15 February. Alcuin, about a century later, called him very just, a maker of equitable laws, unconquered in battle and trustworthy in peace, generous to the wretched, pious, and fair to all. The small army at the river is the foundation of that praise. The three years over Mercia are its limit.

The ground of the fight has not been found. No mass grave and no deposit of weapons has been tied to it. That absence is ordinary for a seventh-century pursuit in which many died by drowning rather than in a stood battle, and it is also a reason not to pin the dead to one beck. Beside the Cock Beck, east of Leeds, stand the Aberford Dykes, banks and rock-cut ditches running east and west, with the ditch on the south of the bank and, in places, a counterscarp. They have been identified as defences of the British kingdom of Elmet against the Anglo-Saxons in the late sixth and early seventh centuries, or as a boundary of Deira against the Mercians in the seventh century, or as a line of the Brigantes against Rome in the first century. There is no document that dates them, and the archaeological dates are sparse. They may not be of one period. A dig at Field Lane found Roman pottery in deposits of the ditch silt, so that stretch at least was open in the Roman period. Their size implies organised labour and a concern for territory, whether military, administrative, or symbolic. A length known as Becca Banks and the Ridge runs about two and a half kilometres along the scarp north of the Potterton and Cock Becks, with a bank up to two metres high and a ditch up to one and a half metres deep, each about eight metres wide, and a counterscarp about a metre high on part of Becca Banks. These earthworks are not the Battle of the Winwaed. They are a different monument in a district that has been proposed for the river.

In a survey published in 2020, metal detectors were used along a section of the seven-kilometre East Leeds Orbital Route from Red Hall to Wood Lane, expressly to test whether material from the Battle of the Winwaed, thought to have been fought in that vicinity in 655, was present or absent. The work sat inside a larger programme of trenches, one area of shovel test pits, a topographic survey, and later mitigation. The detectors recovered 2,216 metal objects. Almost all are certainly or probably post-medieval or modern, largely of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: coins and tokens, buttons and cutlery handles, nuts and bolts, lead cloth seals, horseshoes and harness fittings, generic fittings, and many scraps of bar, plate, and rod. A few pieces are of interest in themselves. As a group they are of limited significance, with few clear concentrations and little that can be tied to features underground. The only object securely dated before the post-medieval period is a Bronze Age flat axe, found near a possible ring ditch seen on aerial photographs. No other Bronze Age object turned up in the detecting or in the later evaluation and mitigation. The axe is anomalous, and its significance is unclear. It is not a weapon from 655. No evidence for the battle was found. The same report says that clearly recognisable military equipment of this period may be slight, and that the absence of evidence does not prove the fighting was somewhere else. That is the most recent examination of the ground most often proposed, and it leaves the river where the early writers left it, named and unlocated.

The stakes on the day were the survival of Bernicia, the Mercian supremacy built since Maserfield, and the public religion of the Mercian king. Oswiu, a Christian raised in exile, offered treasure, gave a son as a hostage, and vowed his infant daughter and twelve estates. Penda, a pagan who had killed Edwin and Oswald and Anna, refused or redistributed the treasure, lost allies in the night and on the morning, and died in a flood with his head taken. The Mercians were converted under his sons, and within a few years they had their own king again. The place of that death is a district, a set of proposed rivers, and a survey that found a Bronze Age axe and the debris of recent centuries, and did not find the battle.

Canonical page: https://getsitesee.com/places/battle-of-the-winwaed