the first king credited with that no doubt largely honorary title.

An early Irish law tract on the law of bees, Bechbretha, says that damages caused by bee stings are the responsibility of the owner, a decision established after 'the crime of bees against Congal Cáech whom bees blinded; and he was king of Tara until it put him out of his sovereignty'. The Uí Néill who later dominate the honorary but prestigious 'high-kingship of Tara', seem otherwise to have effectively expunged the memory of anyone holding this position who was not of their family. It is another hint of the important position which Congal held in north-east Ireland, and of his political ambitions. And the reference to the incapacitating effect of blinding is not implausible. Irish kings inhabited a very different world from that of the Germanic kings further south. They were set apart from their subjects by ancient rituals, such as that of marriage with their kingdom, and by an elaborate web of taboos (gessa) and prerogatives (buada). Some of these ideas about kingship are paralleled very closely in the Sanskrit literature of ancient India, and go back to the prehistoric roots of European civilization. It is with the Irish that we can get closest to understanding the nature of pre-Roman European society.

At this time the kingdom of the East Angles was ruled by Rædwald. Rædwald was, at the start of his reign, under the overlordship of King Æthelberht of Kent, then the most powerful king in southern England; at this time, willingly or not, Rædwald accepted Christianity and was baptized in Kent. But the Northumbrian monk Bede says Rædwald 'was seduced by his wife and by certain evil teachers and perverted from the sincerity of his faith', and thereafter used to have a Christian altar and a pagan altar in the same building. This fine compromise may have made good political sense when people must have been bitterly divided by their religious opinions. Rædwald managed, even before Æthelberht's death in 616, to make his kingdom the dominant power in southern England. When he died, probably in the late 620s, his son Eorpwald was persuaded to convert to Christianity by Edwin of Northumbria. But he was killed and succeeded by a pagan, who reigned for three years. Then Eorpwald's brother Sigbert returned to

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