Page:St. Oswald and the Church of Worcester.djvu/45

 the mountains; but never shalt thou sit in the apostolic seat.' Ælfsin dismissed the messenger with contempt; but soon afterwards that misfortune befell him which the Spirit had foretold.

This ends the first section of the biography of Oswald. When the writer passes to his proper subject, he refers to Oda again as superintending Oswald's education, supplying him with the means to purchase for himself a monastery at Winchester, and afterwards sending him with rich gifts to Fleury, where he was to enter on the monastic life. At this point we have the only sentence in which Oda is brought into any connexion with monasticism. Fleury, says our author, was the house from which Oda himself received the monastic habit ('ex quo idem pontifex suscepit monasticae religionis habitum').

It is plain that the writer had but scant knowledge of the history of Oda's times. The only king whom he mentions by name is Edwy, and his account of him differs from all others: he has nothing to say of the scandal of his coronation day, when Oda sent Dunstan and Kynsige to bring back the young king to the banquet of the nobles; nor of Oda's divorcing Ælfgifu, the king's wife, on the ground of a too close relationship. Although the author afterwards makes use of the earliest Life of St Dunstan, he has not employed it as a guide in this opening section.

As to dates and localities he gives us little help. He does not say where Oda was born, or where the good knight Æthelhelm lived. He had heard a report that Oda's father was one of the Danes who came over with Ingwar and Ubba. It is a tempting suggestion that Oda was the Danish boy whom Asser saw in a monk's habit in Alfred's new monastery at Athelney. But Asser wrote in 893, and if Oda died at seventy—a supposition which would make him a bishop at thirty-eight and archbishop at fifty-three—he must have been born in 888. We might indeed date him a little earlier; in any case the suggestion is not easily reconcilable with what we have been told of his education under Æthelhelm's roof, and with the express statement that he received his habit from Fleury. Moreover, there is no evidence, apart from his tenure of the Wilts bishopric, to connect him specially with Wessex.