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Was this a warning to enemies, a sacrifice to the heathen gods, a ritual humiliati o n, or an indication that death alone was not enough to satiate long-term rival Penda’s vengeful fury? Or perhaps this gruesome stage set was intended to signal the Mercian’s prowess in the theatre of wa r, in essence a form of macho showboating. Now, in a spectacular reversal of his fortune, his butchered remains were left out as carrion in act of degradation and savagery that would make a serial killer blanch.

With help from Aidan, an Irish missionary from the Columban monastery on Iona, he brought Christianity and new hope to vast swathes of the pagan north.

His reign herald ed the beginning of an unprecedented cultural renaissance that ultimately led to the production of masterpieces such as the Lindisfarne Gospels. H e had not only reunit ed his vast and war-ravaged kingdom but reinvent ed it as a theocracy aligned with Ireland and Scotland. Presented by Bede as Northumbria’s answer to Constantine the Great, his kingdom ( p robably headquartered in Bamburgh ) stretched from the banks of the Humber in the south right up into what is now southern Scotland, and from the North Sea coast possibly as far as the Irish Sea. Oswald famously raised a cross on the eve of his victory at Heavenfield near Hexham in in 633 or 634 – a triumph that saw him b ec o me the most powerful man in Britain, an overlord known in the late ninth-century Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as a “ Bretwalda ” (possibly ‘broad-ruler’ or ‘Britain-ruler’). St Oswald stained glass at Heavenfield, Acomb (John Connell)