Happy St Oswald's Day

-
St Oswald's Flag Who? You might well ask. Oswald was king of Northumbria during the early 7th century. He was king when the Northumbrians defeated the Britons at the Battle of Heavenfield in 635. This comprehensive victory over the pagan Britons resulted in the reunification of Northumbria and led to an the era of greatness for the kingdom. By 638, Oswald was secure at home and looking towards expansion. Bede suggests that the king was recognised as Bretwalda or overlord of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.

Obviously, power breeds jealousy and King Penda of Mercia gathered a large force of Mercians and Welsh to bring an end to Oswald's reign. The armies clashed in 642 at Maserfield (now Oswestry or Oswald's Tree) in Shropshire and Oswald was killed on the 5th of August.

Oswald was hacked to pieces by the victors. The story goes that his body was taken from the battle field on a gold cloth which became soaked with the king's blood - so giving rise the flag that you should see at the top of this post. It is believed to be the oldest flag in the UK and forms the basis of Northumberland's county flag. Personally, I prefer the original.

Anyway, I'm Northumbrian and Oswald, along with St Cuthbert, is an important part of the area's history so may I suggest a pint of your favourite Mordue or Wylam ale and a pie.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I moved over to Linux (part 2)

-
It's nearly the end of April and I've been working from home for over a month, using the laptop running Ubuntu Studio as my daily driver. So what have I been using it for and how has it performed? I've thrown quite a lot of random stuff at the thing over that last 4 months and particularly the last 4 weeks of home working. I've been editing videos for the wife with a few different packages (I think I've settled on Kdenlive for now), trying my hand at music scoring using MuseScore , a lot of work in Google Chrome: email, GDocs, etc. I've been on Slack a lot, and Zoom (as, it seems, has most of the population). I've been developing in various systems and languages: C++ in Visual Studio Code , PHP in Atom and VS Code, Arduino stuff in Arduino IDE, some C# in MonoDevelop , some Kotlin in AndroidStudio . Given the small screen, I've mainly been sitting on the sofa with the laptop plugged into the telly and using Bluetooth mouse and keyboard for remo...
Read more

Giant Carbon Footprint

-
By all measures, this year has not been a good one for me and the environment. No, I'm not referring to my purchase of a 4x4, but the amount of time I've spent in aircraft. It all started with a flight back from County Clare, Ireland following a fantastic few days away for New Year. Next was Paris at the end of March. Two days later I was off to the States with work for just over a week, including several internal flight and almost 1000 miles in cars. Two days after getting back from the US I was off to Barcelona for 3 days, again with work, followed by a well earned travel breather, where any potential DVT could ease off a bit! September saw me in South Africa for a holiday and then less than 2 weeks later I was off to Korea for a conference. So having done the maths, this is what the figures look like: 29 flights taken during 2007 covering a total of 8 countries, 19 airports and (if we include car journeys) 9 US states. A total of just over 43000 miles in the air. That's ...
Read more

Commonwealth Games

-
I read this article by Michael Johnson the other day: his thoughts on the Commonwealth Games that have just finished in Melbourne. MJ could only talk of substandard competitors and the requirement of if you're going to prove you're the best, you have to compete against the best. It's a pretty poor attitude: best or nothing. No mention of people turning up and giving their all. Those people who don't get the millions in sponsorship required to be full-time, professional sportsmen or women, but rather have to train after work or at weekends. Real dedication in my eyes. There's no mention of sportsmanship or the joy of taking part or of pulling on the colours of your country. So what if someone was a second off world-best pace? They trained to the best of their abilities, turned up in Melbourne and said "hey I'm here and this is what I can do." Good on them I say and long may the Commonweath Games continue. No, the Commonwealth Games are not the World Ch...
Read more