Battle of Winveda

At present, it is not established reliably what name the Vinved River now bears. Among the proposed versions, the most trustworthy are the two that connect this river with the Kok-Bek (flowing through a place called Fields of Penda in West Yorkshire , on the eastern outskirts of modern Leeds ) or Vent (a tributary of the Yorkshire River Don ). These two versions are most consistent with the description of the circumstances of the battle given by the chroniclers ^{[1] [2]} .

In 642, the king of Mercia Penda killed the king of Northumbria Oswald at the battle of Matherfeld . Oswald, the unifier of Bernice and Deira , was subsequently canonized; his severed and embalmed head is kept in Durham Cathedral . Penda, who had previously defeated the Battle of Hatfield with his Gwyneddic ally Cadwallon up Cadwan, and attracted the Welsh Lords to his side, became the main threat to the Christian kingdoms of England.

Having defeated the son of Oswald Oswiu under Sterling , Penda began to ruin Bernice, so that the besieged Oswiu was forced to offer him a large ransom so that he would end the war and return to Mercia. The trouble, the Honorable and Galfrid of Monmouth, report that Penda refused the proposed ransom, which forced Osviu to accept the battle with superior enemy forces ^{[3] [4]} . At the same time, History of the Britons reports that Penda took the ransom and distributed it among her Brit allies; this version is questioned ^[5] , but it can explain why the decisive battle took place not under Sterling, but under Winved: this would mean that Oswiu caught up with the outgoing army of Penda and hit the enemy in the rear.

The army of Penda included detachments of 30 Welsh tans, as well as the troops of Gwynedd (under the command of King Cadavail ) and East Anglia (under the command of King Ethelher ) and King Deira Ethelwald , another son of the murdered Oswald. On the side of Oswiu there were much smaller forces.

Misfortune, the Venerable says that before the battle, Oswiu appealed to the Lord, promising, in case of victory, to give his daughter as a nun and donate twelve land plots for the construction of monasteries ^[3] . On November 15, 655, Osviu unexpectedly attacked the army of Penda near the Vinved River. The army of Bernicia, which was significantly inferior in size to the army of Mercia, compensated for this by the surprise of the attack and the skillful use of the terrain, pressing the Penda soldiers on the march to the river. In addition, the troops of Cadavail, who later received the shameful stigma of a coward, and ельthelwald, who stood apart from the battle in anticipation of his outcome, did not take part in the battle. The Mercians were defeated, Penda and almost all of his allies, including Ethelher and most of the tans, were killed. Many of the Penda warriors who tried to escape from the battlefield drowned in a river that swelled after the recent heavy rains ^[3] . Henry Huntingdon , while retelling the Venerable Misfortune, emphasizes the supreme justice of the fact that Penda died a violent death - just as he often took the lives of others ^[6] .

After the death of Penda Northumbria, whose influence among the Anglo-Saxon kings has shaken in recent years in parallel with the rise of Mercia, has regained its leading role. Oswiu united under its authority both its parts - Bernizia and Deira. Mercia, on the contrary, was divided: its northern part was joined by Oswiu to its possessions, and the son of Penda Peda reigned in the southern.

Unlike the pagan father, Peda was baptized by this moment and after he ascended the throne, he also baptized Mercia. Thus, the last bastion of Anglo-Saxon paganism fell on the path of the spread of Christianity in England. Given the full support provided by the king of Northumbria to the church after the victory at Vinveda (he really allocated the promised allotments to monasteries and tonsured the one-year-old daughter Elfleda as a nun - she later became abbess of the monastery in Whitby, and after her death was canonized ^[7] ), this spread was quick and unobstructed.

• Breeze, Andrew (2004), “The Battle of the Uinued and the River Went, Yorkshire,” Northern History 41 (2): 377–383