Oswald of Northumbria – an Anglo-Saxon saint-king of the north for our time

In Hamlet a gravedigger asks the riddle: ‘What is he that builds stronger than either the mason, the shipwright, or the carpenter?’ Answer: ‘A grave-maker: the houses that he makes last till doomsday.’And yet they do not; this character has disturbed the bones of Yorick. ‘Doomsday’ is, of course, the archaic word for ‘judgment day’ and Hamlet is soon asking questions of the dead jester’s skull.

So it is in modern times with those odd folk, archaeologists — always scrabbling around in the dirt, asking questions of the dead with their grubby fingers. Medievalists are lucky that they do, because without their digging and scraping we would have to rely on a finite number of heavily thumbed sources. Archaeology is a great disruptive force, dredging up enigmata, quashing theories, creating fresh uncertainties.

Paul Gething, the co-author of a new book on the Anglo-Saxon north in the early 7th century, is a highly accomplished practitioner of this imaginative science. A former DJ and nightclub doorman who got hooked on archaeology after a chance site tour, he is now the co-director and co-founder of the Bamburgh Research Project in Northumberland.

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Bamburgh Castle neighbours Lindisfarne, and in the 6th and 7th centuries was the royal centre of the kingdom of Bernicia, which lay north of the Tyne. Its sister kingdom of Deira lay to the south and, in this period, the two would unite into the realm of Northumbria.

Bamburgh was thus centre stage at one of the great transformative periods in English history, when the petty kingdoms of the post-Roman epoch amalgamated into larger units (Wessex, Mercia, East Anglia), the regional legacies of which live with us still. These were the years in which the Anglo-Saxons converted to Christianity, taking inspiration from both the Irish monks of the west and the Italian missionaries of the deep south.