On 12 October 633, according to the monk and historian Bede, King Edwin of Northumbria, who ruled over English and Britons alike, was defeated and killed in a great battle on the plain of Hatfield by the British king Cadwallon of Gwynedd and the Mercian warlord Penda. His son Osfrid fell with him, Northumbria was ravaged, and the Christian mission Edwin had welcomed fled south to Kent. The date, the year and even the place of the battle are all open to question.
The overking of Britain
Bede says that Edwin reigned for seventeen years over the English and the Britons and was forty-seven years old when he died. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle also gives him a reign of seventeen years. Bede tells at length how Edwin, at the urging of his Kentish wife Ethelberga and her bishop Paulinus, accepted Christianity, so that his fall was also a disaster for the young church in the north.1
Against him, Bede writes, rose Cadwallon, king of the Britons, supported by Penda, a most warlike man of the royal house of the Mercians, who went on to rule the Mercians for twenty-two years. The Chronicle names the same two men as Edwin's killers. Britannica describes Penda as the king who made Mercia one of the most powerful kingdoms in England and says that the victory over Edwin carried him into the Mercian kingship.2
The battle and the dates
Bede's account is brief. A great battle was fought on the plain called Haethfelth, and there Edwin was killed on 12 October in the year 633. His son Osfrid, a warlike youth, fell before him; another son was forced to go over to Penda, who later killed him despite an oath.3
The other sources do not quite agree. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle places the battle on Hatfield moor in 633, but on 14 October. Britannica gives the year as 632, and so does the Battle of Hatfield Investigation Society, a local history group, in its reading of Bede. The day is therefore given here as Bede gives it, with the year uncertain; like all dates of the period it is a Julian date.4
Nor is the place certain. The traditional site is the village of Hatfield just northeast of Doncaster in South Yorkshire, which the map above marks. The Battle of Hatfield Investigation Society points out that this identification rests on the word of the Elizabethan antiquary William Camden, writing some 900 years after the battle, and argues that Bede's Haethfelth was a much wider region that also took in north Nottinghamshire, where Cuckney has been proposed as the battlefield.5
Ravaging the north
Both Bede and the Chronicle say that Cadwallon and Penda then ravaged the land of the Northumbrians. Bede describes Cadwallon, though a Christian, as so cruel that he spared neither women nor children and meant to wipe the English out of Britain. Edwin's head was taken to York and placed in the church of St Peter that he had begun to build.6
Seeing the kingdom in ruin, Paulinus took Queen Ethelberga and her children by ship back to Kent, as both sources record. The Chronicle records that in 634 Northumbria was divided again, with Osric ruling Deira and Eanfrith Bernicia, before Oswald took the throne and reigned for nine years. Britannica adds that Penda was forced to recognize Northumbrian overlordship in 633, and did not recover his independence until his army killed Oswald in 641.7
Also on this day
- 1459: Rout of Ludford Bridge. At Ludford Bridge near Ludlow, the Yorkist army faced the royal Lancastrian forces early in the Wars of the Roses.
