A little-known saint from the Dark Ages: the tale of Bishop Birinus and Dorchester-on-Thames

by Matthew Harffy

When I first read that Dorchester had been an important town in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex I had thought that it referred to the town that is in the modern-day county of Dorset. After all, Dorset is part of the West Country and would have been part of Alfred the Great’s Wessex. However, the research I was doing was about the seventh century, long before Alfred’s time and centuries before Wessex had become the pre-eminent power in Britain. It turned out that the Dorchester I had read about was not in Dorset, but in modern-day Oxfordshire and just thirteen miles southeast of Oxford. The Dorchester in question is Dorchester on Thames (or Dorchester-on-Thames).

It is a sleepy village now, picturesque and quintessentially English, with its timber-framed Tudor houses and the medieval abbey that dominates the settlement. It nestles in a bend of the River Thame just before it joins the Thames (or Isis, to use the alternative name for the river upstream of Dorchester), as it flows towards London and eventually the Thames Estuary and the North Sea. The modern name of the River Thames has often been thought to be derived from its two main tributaries, The Thame and The Isis. However, the ancient name of the river was Tamesis, which it seems was erroneously assumed to be made up of Thame and Isis in the middle ages.

Dorchester on Thames is picturesque and very English

The village of Dorchester is quaint and quiet and clearly well-to-do, but is hardly what one would consider a place of power. So what makes Dorchester on Thames so important in seventh century history?

The answer, as is so often the case with early medieval history, is linked to the rise of Christianity. In the early seventh century most of the tribes of northern Europeans who had settled in Britain, who we now call by the generic name of Anglo-Saxons were pagans. Incidentally, it was the Angles who gave England its name: Angleland. These Germanic tribes worshipped the gods that we all know as the pantheon made famous by the Vikings. The all-father Woden, Thunor, Tiw and Frige were the Anglo-Saxon equivalents of Odin, Thor, Tyr and Freya. But of course, Christianity is an evangelising faith, and from the north and west of Britain in the form of Irish missionaries, the word of the gospel was being brought to the pagans. And from the south of Britain, by way of the continent, came Christian missionaries sent by a series of popes from Rome.

These men of faith and learning must have been brave indeed to travel to unknown lands, having to learn the language and the culture of the warlike people and attempt to convert them to what they saw as the one true faith. These must have been formidable men, with passion and zeal and the patience to convince the Anglo-Saxons to convert. In most cases they did this through targeting the kings and the royal families. It seems that when a king decided to become a Christian, so did all his people. This certainly makes proselytising more efficient than if you had to convince every individual, but it still must have taken a great amount of courage and perseverance to get the warlike kings to turn away from the gods they had worshipped for generations and to whom they were said to be direct descendants!

Saint Birinus

One such European missionary was Birinus, now known as Saint Birinus. Before doing my research I had never heard of Birinus and I imagine that many of you reading this blog post will never have heard of him either. Not a great deal is known about him, save that he came from France at the order of Pope Honorius and set about converting the West Saxons. He landed on British shores at Southampton (Hamwic) where he founded the church of St Mary’s. Birinus had been made a bishop in Genoa and was obviously a man of great persuasion for, in 635, he had convinced Cynegils, King of the West Saxons, to allow him to preach the word of God to his people. Cynegils was in the process of negotiating an alliance with King Oswald of Northumbria. He hoped for Oswald’s aid against the rising star of the Anglo-Saxon warlords, Penda of Mercia. But the Christian Oswald baulked at joining forces with the pagan Cynegils and so it was that Cynegils was eventually baptised as a Christian by Bishop Birinus. Oswald became his godfather and also married Cynegils’ daughter. And the King of Wessex gave Dorchester on Thames to Bishop Birinus as his episcopal see.

For the next few years Birinus founded churches throughout the lands of the West Saxons before dying in 640. Shortly after his death, the bishop’s see shifted to Winchester, but it was Dorchester on Thames where the Christianisation of the West Saxons truly began.

Dorchester on Thames Abbey

There’s not a lot to remind us of the time when Dorchester on Thames was the centre of the episcopal see of Bishop Birinus. Nowadays, the village with a population of less than 1000 people, has a couple of pubs, the 12th century Abbey and also a Roman Catholic Church, a small convenience store, some allotments, and a primary school.

One of the pubs of Dorchester on Thames - The Fleur de Lys

I was pleased to see when I visited the village recently that the name of St Birinus is yet remembered in the name of the Roman Catholic Church and the primary school.

I wonder how many of the local inhabitants know who he was or why he is important, but I am sure the man who travelled from France to preach to the barbaric West Saxons would be pleased to know that his name was yet linked to both the church and the teaching of children in the village where he resided nearly 1,400 years ago.

A reminder of the past. An old milestone in Dorchester on Thames

It is interesting to note that the name of Cynegils, the king who gifted the village to Birinus, has not lived on in the same way, and I saw no mention of him in the village. Perhaps this is a reminder of how ephemeral earthly power is. Or perhaps it is more a testament to the fact that written records were kept by the church for many centuries before secular administrations caught up.


All photos copyright Matthew Harffy.

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Matthew Harffy is the author of the Bernicia Chronicles, a series of novels set in seventh century Britain. The first of the series, The Serpent Sword, was published by Aria/Head of Zeus on 1st June 2016, followed by the sequel, The Cross and The Curse in August and book three, Blood and Blade, in December. The fourth book in the series, Killer of Kings, was released on 1st June 2017.

The Serpent Sword, The Cross and the Curse, Blood and Blade and Killer of Kings and Kin of Cain are available on Amazon, Kobo, Google Play, and all good bookstores.

Website: www.matthewharffy.com

Twitter: @MatthewHarffy

Facebook: MatthewHarffyAuthor

The Bloody Assizes: Justice and Cruelty in 1685

by Tim Vicary

The first person brought before the court was a woman. She was seventy years old, partially deaf, and possibly senile. The charge was high treason, for which the penalty was death. Her name was Alice Lyle.

The judge was the Lord Chief Justice of England, the newly ennobled George, First Baron Jeffreys of Wem. In 1685 Jeffreys was 40 years old and had been England’s top judge for 2 years. He was a highly intelligent, ambitious man, renowned for his energy, hatred of criminals, and ferocious skill in cross-examination. He was also a sick man, suffering from a kidney stone. He frequently sipped what was thought to be brandy during trials, leading to accusations that he was drunk. This may have been true, but if so the brandy was probably medicinal, to dull the extreme pain he was suffering. And like most people in chronic pain, he was often in a filthy temper, searching for a scapegoat to vent his fury on.

If that was so, he had been given the perfect opportunity.  Earlier that year, James II succeeded to the throne, and his nephew James Scott, duke of Monmouth, rose in rebellion against him. Monmouth landed at Lyme Regis, in Dorset, and gathered an army of Protestant rebels to depose King James, his Catholic uncle. But the rebels were defeated at Sedgemoor (the last battle on English soil) Monmouth was captured and beheaded, and King James sent Judge Jeffreys to the West Country to teach the rebels a lesson they would never forget.

The charge against Alice Lyle was that she had hidden a rebel fugitive named Hicks in a priest’s hole at her home.  Her defence (she was a wealthy widow, able to hire a lawyer) rested on two points:

a)      Hicks hadn’t even been tried yet, let alone convicted, so there was no proof that he actually was a rebel;

b)      She was too old and doddery to know anything about Monmouth’s rebellion; she thought he was a priest

Jeffreys was having none of it. Point a) – which would certainly have stopped the trial in its tracks today – he brushed aside as irrelevant; of course Hicks was a rebel, everyone knew he had been with Monmouth’s army, he said. For point b) the prosecution produced two witnesses, a man called Barter and a man called Dunne. Barter said he’d seen Dame Alice with Dunne about ‘the business’ by which he meant the rebellion. When Dunne refused to confirm this Jeffreys launched into a terrifying cross-examination.  Part of it went like this:

Jeffreys:  Come now and tell us, what business was that?

Dunne:  (After a long silence) Does your lordship ask what that business was?

Jeffreys: Yes. It is a plain question. What was the business that the lady asked thee, whether the other men knew?

Another long silence.

Jeffreys: He is studying and musing how he shall prevaricate ... But thou hadst better tell the truth, friend ... Now I would know what that business was.

Dunne: I cannot mind it, my lord.

Jeffreys: Oh, how hard the truth is, to come out of a lying Presbyterian rogue!

Dunne: I cannot give you an account of it, my lord.

Jeffreys: Oh blessed God! Was there ever such a villain upon the face of the Earth?

And so on, over half an hour. Very effective cross-examination, you might think, from a prosecution barrister.  But Jeffreys wasn’t the prosecution, he was the judge, whom we think of today as impartial. But that wasn’t how Judge Jeffreys saw his role, not at all. He was there to get convictions, as quickly and efficiently as possible, and that was what he did.

Alice Lyle was convicted and sentenced to be burnt alive. There was no appeal on legal grounds, as there would be today. The only appeal was to the King, for mercy. And King James was merciful, sort of.  Alice wasn’t burnt alive; she was beheaded.

Hers was just the first case in the Bloody Assizes; Jeffreys had well over a thousand more to deal with.  In Dorchester he found 300 prisoners crammed into a small jail, mostly men charged with fighting in Monmouth’s army. Clearly it would take months to try them all individually, but Jeffreys had a better idea. Dispensing with a Grand Jury, he sent his clerk into the jail to offer them mercy if they would confess (and inform on their friends) He repeated this in court:

‘If you will plead guilty, the King, who is almost all mercy, will be as ready to forgive you as you were to rebel against him, yea as ready to pardon you as you are to ask it of him.’

Does that sound familiar? It should: it is the basis of the ‘plea bargain’ which is, unfortunately, practised daily by district attorneys across the United States, and, slightly more discreetly, by the Crown Prosecution Service in England. In 1685 the main differences were:

a) it was the judge who was making a direct offer to the accused, rather than a deal being struck between prosecution and defence lawyers (but then few, if any, of the rebels had defence lawyers) and

b) the punishments the rebels were facing were much more extreme.

The choice was between being transported as indentured slaves to the West Indies, or being hanged.   A cruel punishment indeed, but Jeffreys was able to joke about it.  When Christopher Battiscombe was convicted, his mistress bravely pleaded with the judge to hand over his body, unmutilated, for her to bury after death. ‘Certainly, madam,’ Jeffreys laughed. ‘You shall have part of the body. I know what part you love best and will direct the Sherriff accordingly.’

In fact, of course, the men were not just hanged, but drawn and quartered too.  They were half hanged, then cut down and disembowelled while still alive, and chopped into four pieces. Captain John Kidd was the last of twelve men to be executed like this on the beach at Lyme Regis; he suffered the unimaginable horror of watching this happen to eleven of his friends before him. The courage of such men, many of whom met their deaths while singing a psalm, is as humbling as the cruelty of the executioners is appalling.
Jeffreys ordered all this, but he was not the only monster of cruelty around. At least he acted within the law. James Kirke, the colonel of ‘Kirke’s Lambs’ a royal regiment who wore white coats, was said to have hanged over a hundred rebels without any trial at all. When a pretty young woman begged him in floods of tears to save her father’s life, Kirke agreed on one condition: that she would spent the night in his bed, which she did. When she got up next morning and walked to the window, she saw her father, hanging from the signpost outside the inn.

Such stories, and the fact that the rebels’ arms, legs and heads of rebels were boiled, tarred, and publically displayed in towns and villages all around the West Country, had a terrifying effect. Judge Jeffreys’ Bloody Assizes didn’t make anyone love the King, but they surely made people fear him.

For the next three years, at least.  

Then, in 1688, King William of Orange sailed to England with a much larger army, and chased King James away. James fled abroad, but Jeffreys – now Lord Chancellor - was captured, thrown into prison, and died of kidney disease in the Tower of London.  In the West Country, his death was greeted with understandable delight.

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Tim Vicary’s novel about 1685, The Monmouth Summer, which touches only briefly on the cruelties described here, was listed as one of the 10 top history books of 2012 by Samantha J. Morris ‘Lady Hertford’ in her blog ‘Loyaltybindsme’. It is available on Amazon UK and Amazon US.