Read Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations Online
Authors: Norman Davies
Tags: #History, #Nonfiction, #Europe, #Royalty, #Politics & Government
Ni forthïnt ueiri molüt nïuet,
ractria riallü trin orthoret,
tebïhïc tan teryd druï cïnneüet.
Dïu Maurth guisgassant eü cein dühet
Diu Merchyr bü guero eü cïtunet…
The chief men maintained the praise of rightful privilege
like a bright fire that has been well kindled.
On Tuesday they put on their dark covering.
On Wednesday their common purpose was bitter.
On Thursday envoys were pledged.
On Friday corpses were counted.
On Saturday their joint action was swift.
On Sunday, their red blades were redistributed.
On Monday, a stream of blood as high as the thigh was seen.
A Gododdin man tells that when they came back
before Madawg’s tent after the exhaustion of battle
but one in a hundred would return.
41
As many observers have noted, the warrior ethos, the poetic hyperbole and the tangible cult of death and slaughter has a timeless quality. These are Celts fighting Angles, but without too much variation they could well be the host of Agamemnon at Troy. The Lord of ‘The Rock’ was in the van:
Moch arereith ï – immetin
pan – crïssiassan cïntäränn i-mbodin…
He rose early in the morning
When centurions hasten in the mustering of the army,
Moving from one advanced position to another.
At the front of a hundred men he was the first to kill.
As great was his craving for corpses
As for drinking mead or wine.
It was with utter hatred
That the Lord of Dumbarton, the laughing warrior,
Would kill the enemy.
42
Yet this time the laughing was cut short. The advance guard of the Anglian host had pulled back, and drawn their adversaries into the line of march of a second Anglian force moving up from Deira. They collided at Catraeth (the modern Catterick). The slaughter was shocking even for a society that lived from warfare, and the North British army was annihilated: only one of the three hundred chiefs returned. Yrfai and Cynon and most of their companions were slain:
E tri bet yg Kewin Kelvi…
The three graves on the ridge of Celvi,
Inspiration has declared them to me:
[They are] the grave of Cynon of the rugged brows,
The grave of Cynfael and the grave of Cynfeli.
43
The road was open for the Angles to resume their inexorable progress.
The political consequences of Catraeth were worked out in the following decades. The Angles of Bernicia streamed north and overran Gododdin, so that by 631 Dun Eidyn had become Edinburgh (
burgh
meaning ‘fort’ was simply a calque of the Celtic
dun
). They also returned to the onslaught on Rheged which had been halted by Urien. In an earlier confrontation, the men of Deira had inflicted a Catraeth-like defeat on the Luguvalians at Aderydd (now Arthuret near Longtown in Cumbria), and had reputedly forced the bard of the city, Myrddin (Merlin), to seek refuge in the ‘Forest of Cellydon’ (which sounds awfully like Caledonia). Now the redoubled strength of the Angles could move into Rheged with destructive vengeance, bringing with them permanent colonists. Urien’s line disappears from the record. The last king of Rheged, the exiled Llywarch Hen, is received into the Welsh court of Powys, and Rheged itself fades away. In short, the presence of the Angles in the north is fixed from coast to coast; Bernicia’s expansion is revitalized; and the British people of ‘The Rock’ are further isolated from their countrymen.
The religious conflict came to a head in the 660s. The issues were often those of rite or theology, like the calculation of Easter, but at their heart was a raw struggle for power. The north had been evangelized by Celtic missionaries; by St Ninian, by St Columba, by Rhun, son of Urien and bishop of Luguvalium, who claimed to have baptized Edwin of Northumbria, and by the Irishman St Aidan, who established the See of Lindisfarne
c.
635. Yet the Roman mission, firmly allied to the expansion of Anglo-Saxon power, was unyielding. In 664 Oswy of Northumbria, far stronger than his predecessors, convened the Synod of Whitby. Despite his personal links to Celtic Christianity he ruled in favour of the Roman party, and appointed St Wilfrid as bishop of Northumbria. Henceforth, Anglian government marched hand in hand with the Roman faith. Within five years, Wilfrid was claiming to be ‘bishop of Pictland’. ‘It turned out that, in addition to Latin, God spoke English, not Gaelic.’
44
It also turned out that Wilfrid had been overly optimistic. Nechtansmere, the Anglian name for a location that the Britons variously called
Llyn Garan
, the ‘Heron’s Pool’, or
Dunnicken
, the ‘Fort of Nechtan’, lies well to the north of the Firth of Forth, near Forfar in modern Angus. Bede mentions it in connection with the onset of Northumbria’s decline, for it was at Nechtansmere that at around three o’clock on the Saturday afternoon of 20 May 685, the army of Ecgfrith, son of Oswy, king of Northumbria, was routed by the combined forces of Pictland and ‘The Rock’ under a warrior with the magnificent name of Bridei map Bili. Ecgfrith and his entire royal bodyguard were cut down. ‘Rashly leading his army to ravage the province of the Picts,’ wrote Bede, ‘and much against the advice of the Blessed Cuthbert, [Ecgfrith] was drawn into the straits of inaccessible mountains, and slain with the greatest part of his forces.’
45
The Angles were never seen in those parts again.
46
Unusually for the ‘Dark Ages’, Bridei’s victory left a lasting artistic monument in the so-called Aberlemno Stone. It stands in the kirkyard only six miles from the battle site, and carries the only clear battle narrative to be seen on any of the Pictish symbol-stones:
[The narrative] reads like a comic strip in a newspaper, with four scenes arranged in sequence from top to bottom. In the first, a mounted figure who may represent Bridei chases another mounted warrior. In his haste to escape the latter has thrown away his shield and sword. This man may be Ecgfrith… turning and fleeing at the moment when he realised that an ambush had been sprung. What identifies the escaping warrior as a Northumbrian is his helmet. During excavations at the Coppergate in York a very similar design, rounded with a long nose-guard was discovered.
47
The second scene shows Ecgfrith, or a mounted Northumbrian figure, wearing the same sort of helmet, attacking a group of Pictish infantrymen. The sculptor clearly understood military tactics because he was careful to arrange the men into the proper battle formation of three ranks. At the front stands a warrior with a sword and a round, curved shield with prominent boss. When the opposing cavalry charged he had to withstand the shock of impact. To support him another man stands immediately behind holding a long spear which projected well beyond the front rank. To the rear of the two warriors engaging the enemy, a third spearman stood in reserve. Along an extended battle line, an array of bristling spear points was designed to deter a charge, forcing cavalry horses to shy or to reel away. In a third scene, carved at the foot of the stone, the Bridei and Ecgfrith figures face each other on horseback. Ecgfrith appears to be on the point of throwing his spear while Bridei readies himself to parry it. And in a final act, tucked into the bottom right-hand corner, Ecgfrith lies dead on the battlefield. A raven, a carrion-feeder symbolizing defeat, pecks at his neck.
The Aberlemno Stone is a Pictish national manifesto. Carved a century after the great victory, its message was both simple and powerful: Pictland is different. And in 685 that ‘singular identity had been preserved by force of arms’.
48
There is no reason to query the continuity of the monarchy of ‘The Rock’ throughout the seventh century, but all its king-names are dubious, and several overlaps can be observed with the rulers of Pictland. Rhydderch Hael does not appear to have had sons. The succession passed to Nwython (Neithon, Nechtan), who is conceivably the same person as Nechtan, king of Pictish Fortriu (d.
c
. 621), after whom Nechtansmere could have been named. Nwython was father to Beli (or Bili I) and grandfather both to Ywain (Owen, Owain) and to Brude (Bridei). Owen of ‘The Rock’ was the victor of the Battle of Strathcarron in 642, when the king of Dalriada was killed, while his brother or half-brother, Bridei map Bili, who ruled in Fortriu, was the victor of Nechtansmere.
49
References to another run of dubious names crop up from time to time in the Annals of Ulster, showing that in their rivalry with Dalriada, the monarchs of ‘The Rock’ did not hesitate to take the fight across the sea to Ireland.
The consequences of Nechtansmere were never reversed. The battle had come at the end of a phase when fortunes on the Anglian-Pictish frontier had swung back and forth and the intervening territory had changed hands several times. But after Nechtansmere, both the Picts and the Britons of ‘The Rock’ stood their ground. The Angles put down roots to the south of the Firth of Forth, and did not venture beyond their stronghold at Stirling. They colonized Galloway and the former
Aeron
(Ayrshire) in the south-west, but they did not move on the Clyde. Within their area of settlement, they introduced their particular brand of Old English that, mixed with local idioms, led to the emergence of a language called ‘Lallans’ or Lowland Scots.
50
Henceforth, to the north and west of the Angles, the Gaelic Scots, the Picts and the Britons were drawn into a new, three-sided ethnic contest. Reduced to its simplest, the contest saw the Scots gaining the upper hand over the Picts, before the Picto-Scots overwhelmed the Britons. This was to take perhaps 250 years.
The eighth century and the first part of the ninth are the darkest of all. The historical record of the long decades between Nechtansmere and the irruption of the Vikings is threadbare. Despite occasional shafts of light, no continuous narrative can be constructed. As the Northumbrian Angles dug in to the south of them, and the warring Scots and Picts gradually fused together to the north, the Britons on the Clyde turned in on themselves. There are no famous monarchs; no resounding battles; no memory-cementing poems, no extant chronicles. The sources offer no clues on the subject of naval power. No expeditions by sea are recorded. No information is forthcoming on the size of armed patrols that may or may not have been maintained on the Firth of Clyde to monitor shipping and to protect the kingdom’s tax-gatherers. Nothing has survived except occasional remarks among descriptions of the doings of others. Of the various peoples involved in the creation of Scotland, ‘it is the Britons about whom least is known, and about whom least has been written’.
51
For much of this time, the territorial extent of the realms of ‘The Rock’ can only be conjectured. Following the fall of Rheged and Gododdin, the kingdom’s neighbours did not change. To the west and north-west, most of the isles and promontories were controlled by the Dalriadan Scots. The extraordinary
Senchus
or ‘Register’ of Dalriada – a sort of primitive Domesday Book – shows that Kintyre was one of its most important regions.
52
It also implies that the tribute-collectors of ‘The Rock’ would not have ventured further afield than Bute and Arran. The main concern would have been to safeguard the seaways of the Firth. To the north, the
Clach nam Breatan
or ‘British Stone’, which can still be seen in Glen Falloch above the head of Loch Lomond, marked the traditional dividing line with the Picts. Beyond lay the fertile valley of Strathearn and the Pictish province of Fortriu. To the east and the south, the lands of ‘The Rock’ adjoined Northumbrian territory. They occupied the tributary valleys and surrounding ridges of the Clyde Basin, but not much more. One major border post would probably have been in the vicinity of modern Kelvinhead, another in the vicinity of modern Beattock. Internal communications were compact, whether by river or by sea. There was land for arable farming and livestock, and forest. The ring of upland hills facilitated a sheltered climate and sound defence lines.
Yet the kingdom’s overall resources fell behind those of neighbouring states. Northumbria was at least twice as large. The merger of the Picts and the Scots was to produce another large entity. As time passed, ‘The Rock’ found it ever harder to compete. All the indications are that Dalriada possessed significant naval capacity.
53
One may infer that the lords of ‘The Rock’ would have sought to make similar provisions, but were unable to do so.