In my last post I talked about the totems Hild would have used as Lady of Elmet at the beginning of Menewood. None of this is a spoiler as we find out at the end of the first book that this will be her new role. But as the book progresses she acquires a series of new bynames, and therefore symbols—but talking about these will be a kind of spoiler, so I’ll save that discussion until closer to or maybe just after publication. Before I get there, though, I want to get back to Edwin and then his sister-son, Oswald.

Edwin

Edwin is descended from Yffi; he’s an Yffing. Working from admittedly very scanty hints, and because I just like the Benty Grange helmet, I decided he and his forebears used a boar as their totem on arms and armour—a suitably Anglisc and warlike symbol. But Edwin wanted to be admired for more than martial prowess. He wanted to be associated with Romanitas and thereby arrogate to himself the associational power of Rome’s majesty and might. Accordingly, in addition to the usual banners, flags, shields and so on, he also used a standard:

“So royally was [Edwin’s] dignity maintained throughout his realm that whether in battle or on a peaceful progress on horseback through city, town, and countryside in the company of his thanes, the royal standard was always borne before him. Even when he passed through the streets on foot, the standard known to the Romans as a Tufa, and to the English as a Tuf, was carried in front of him.” — Bede, HE II.16¹

As far as I’m aware there is no definitive description of a þúf or thuuf. Opinions range from a knockoff of a Roman legionary standard to a spear with a tuft of feathers tied to the blade and/or a winged globe. (Though of course all this is rather recursive, as a legionary standard might very well have begun as a spear with things tied to it, such as eagle feathers, and evolved into the pole, banner, aquila—the eagle with spread wings—circle and identifying plaque that I picture when I imagine the tramp of hobnailed sandals up Dere St.)

My assumption is that Edwin would have wanted a standard that was simultaneously practical and awe-inspiring. It would need to be utterly unlike other contemporary flags or totems: unique and unmistakeable. It should embody both the power and might of Rome and the Anglisc love of wealth display, speaking of wealth and power to both the folk and any visiting dignitaries. Gaudy, unsubtle, and heavily decorated; rare, royal, and brightly-coloured; precious yet profligate. The basic shape must be a pole-with-a-point that could be jammed into the turf outside a campaign tent (therefore tall, but not too tall to make it unwieldy on the march). The banner must glitter with Anglisc gold and garnets and gold-thread tassels. And then there should be some kind of circle or globe.

• The pole I imagined as two parts: the upper part gilded wood, light but thick enough to hold steady, two-handed; with a slender iron lower half part ending in a blade-like point. The iron would counterbalance the otherwise top-heavy standard, and the point could be used both to plant the standard deep enough in the dirt to be free-standing, and, in the last resort, as a weapon.
• The banner, I decided, should be royal purple (more on that below) with, of course, an Yffing boar in either thinly-beaten gold or gold thread, with a red garnet eye, and tassels made of twisted gold thread. And then some dangling amethysts for added sparkle.
• In Hild I established that both Edwin and Hild liked blue, and what could be more spectacular, rare, precious, and profligate—because fragile—than blue glass?
• Finally, once Edwin married Æthelburh and was baptised, then his Romanitas could be reinforced by Christian symbolism, a cross, which, to pander to his Anglisc sensibilities, would be excessively decorated.

Adding it all together I came up with this:

I chose the background colour of the banner with care. Although to me it looks more of a dark wine red I think this might be what early seventh-century inhabitants of Britain knew as the Imperial Purple of Rome.³ As far as I can work out, this is the shade you might get from processing Nucella Lapillus, or the Atlantic dogwinkle. This carnivorous whelk is found on rocky shores in and around the Atlantic—abundantly so on the west coasts of Ireland and Scotland but also to a lesser extent on other northwest European coastlines. There is archaeological evidence of dogwinkle being processed for dye in 7th-century Co. Mayo and in Brittany, with other evidence of dye-processing from Romano-British Cornwall and perhaps Thanet. (This isn’t the place for an in-depth assessment of process and the resulting colour; go read Biggam’s thoughts on the matter, they’re fascinating.) For now let’s just say this red-purple I’ve picked seemed like a good colour to me: rich, distinctive, and colour-fast.

With regard to the rest of the banner: we know seventh-century Britain was not lacking in gold, or garnets, or small pieces of ivory to represent tusks, and amethysts weren’t unknown. The most fanciful addition might be the emeralds—but I like them and as there’s no evidence that it was impossible for emeralds to be there, why not? Besides, if you want to quarrel I’ll just pretend they’re green garnets. (If there are red garnets in Early Medieval Britain it seems ridiculous to argue there couldn’t also be green ones. And I for one couldn’t tell the difference between an emerald and a green garnet if the person carrying it was thundering towards me in front of an army.)

Oswald

Creating Oswald’s totem was in some respects less challenging. For example, Bede says that after Oswald’s death, “to furnish a lasting memorial of the royal saint, they hung the king’s banner of purple and gold over his tomb.”⁴ Gold seems unambiguous. And purple I’d already decided.⁵ So that was the colours sorted. If we were talking of a later era, the banner might have been simple stripes, like the 8-stripe alternating purple and gold flag adopted by the first Earl of Northumberland, a complicated version of which is today the official flag of the county. But I was already committed to Anglisc animal totems. And of course there’s a clue in Oswald’s name: Os– meaning god and -wald ruler. Ruler of gods. And the ruler of the gods was Woden. Woden is cognate with Odin. And Odin had two ravens.⁶ (Later German legends of Oswald turn the saint and his talking raven into a comedy duo.) Given that Oswald was so prominently Christian, I’m not sure how much he would have emphasised his heathen-flavoured raven association—Bede certainly says nothing (except in connection with Paulinus’s preaching when Edwin was king). On the other hand, recent finds at Bamburgh Castle, Oswald’s stronghold of Bebbanburg, include a piece of jewellery that is interpreted as a raven:

So in the end for me it was an easy choice: his banner and totem would be a raven and his colours purple and gold.

But what would the raven have looked like? Fortunately I’d already done some thinking about ravens. Given its similarity to a variety of 6th-century Merovingian and 6th- and 7th-century Anglisc finds, I suspect the Bamburgh raven was designed to be worn as a pin, oriented upright—and probably in pairs, which makes me think more of women’s clothing than men’s. But there’s one big difference between this raven and the other brooches—the legs and feet. The other brooch pairs have tiny sketches of feet, not these great complicated things that are sort of hard to tell where they begin and end. Also, those brooches do’t exactly shriek martial intent.

Then I remembered a Viking coin from York:

So I started playing, and made a simple version, bearing n the mind the need for it to be stencilled on shields:

And, well, it was okay—and had the advantage of not really having legs to deal with—but just a bit too Norse. So I played around with the Bamburgh-based image and wasn’t satisfied. It kept becoming oddly deconstructed—a Picasso-esque, bones-on-the-outside representation—which was appropriately eerie and unsettling but still not quite the thing.

There was another problem. Although Oswald was Anglisc, he had lived the majority of his life in exile, steeped in the Irish culture of Dál Riada. So what what did an Irish raven look like? The Morrigan of myth was said to be a shape-shifter, sometimes becoming a raven, but I couldn’t find any visual representations. So I pondered the Celtic Iron Age fascination with spirals in combination alongside the Anglisc raven and came up with this:

I liked this one quite a lot. It made me think of some of the iconography on Pictish symbol stones, it was full of spirals, and this vision of the inner, vulture-like carrion bird under the surface reminded me of the Bamburgh raven. Also, I could tell where the legs were. (Seriously, when dealing with birds the legs can get really irritating.)

I couldn’t decide which raven stencil I liked best, so I tried both with shields of different colour combinations:

Shields are objects designed to be hacked to pieces. Actual gold is out of the question—except perhaps for ceremonial regalia. I think the same is true of purple; it’s just too expensive. There again, given the necessarily temporary nature of shield decoration the expensive, permanent colour could be swapped for cheaper, more fleeting pigments extracted from a mix of woad and madder, or bilberry, or whatever worked. For the great, rippling banner of the overking, though, I imagine a startlingly effective field of actual purple purpura⁵ embroidered in gold thread.

Of course, given Oswald’s piety, his banner would probably have a cross, too. Or maybe he had several banners. We’ll never know. I just have the best time trying to imagine…

¹ This quote, as usual (but not always, so please check specific blog posts) is from my old and battered copy of Leo Sherley-Price’s translation of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gens Anglorum (HE), revised by R.E. Latham (Penguin, 1968).

² The hexcode is #680f3f, RGB 104 15 63. In other words, mostly red as you can see.

³ Wikipedia has a useful article on Tyrian Purple. And an excellent resource is Carole Biggam’s paper, Knowledge of whelk dyes and pigments in Anglo-Saxon England. (Biggam C.P., 2006. Anglo-Saxon England 3523-55.)

⁴ Bede, HE, III.11

⁵ Except, well, look at the Latin: ut regia viri sancti persona memoriam haberet aeternam, vexillum eius super tumbam auro et purpura conpositum adposuerunt. And then remember that purpura doesn’t just mean the colour purple. From Biggam (you really should go read it): “Latin purpura has been discussed by Dodwell. He noted that it was said to have a gleaming quality, that it was silk, although it could not be confused with other silks, it was thick, and it was of more than one colour. It was regarded as being both dis­tinctive and expensive. Dodwell concluded that purpura must indicate a shot­ silk taffeta since this identification satisfies all the above requirements. This textile is made of silk, but with the warp threads in one colour, and the weft threads in another, which, combined with the glossy quality of silk, causes the light to emphasize one colour, while leaving the other as a background colour in the folds and creases. If the textile is moved relative to the light source, as happens, for example, when a person wears a garment made from it, the light catches first one colour and then the other, creating an almost kaleidoscopic effect of colours and gleams of light. The most important aspect of purpura for this paper is that it could be of any colour.” Bu there comes a point where too many variables just aren’t useful. So I decided: this was just good old purple.

⁶ Michelle Zeigler explains further in her excellent Hefenfelth blog