Aelfred's Britain

by Adams, Max;

  Early Scottish history is a flimsy bridge constructed between the two banks of a river: projecting tentatively forward from the Roman period (rebellious, half-seen tribes partially subdued by Roman generals but ultimately left to their own devices and never a full part of the Imperial project) and back from the medieval (steeped in nationalist myth and cultural smoked glass). Studies of Scottish history were, for a long time, diverted from the sorts of questions being asked of contemporary kingdoms further south and west by both a lack of secular sources and the apparent enigma of the Picts, evident from the distinct and opaque symbolism of their stone sculpture and odd references apparently implying that they were an archaic race, unrelated to the so-called Celts.

  Scholarship has moved on. The Pictish kingdoms are now recognized as having belonged culturally and linguistically to the greater indigenous group to which the Irish and Welsh belong. Their language was a form of ‘Q’ Celtic, with similarities to Irish, Manx and Scots Gaelic. The ideology of their social and political élites is harder to reconstruct, except insofar as they shared affinities with other Christian tribal states. But the wonderfully carved symbols of their self-conscious psyches—bulls, fabulous marine monsters, hunting parties, hounds, mirrors, birds of prey—pictured with or without crosses, saints and apostles, shows their élite to have enjoyed a rich cultural hinterland somewhat obsessed with expressions of rank, with animist totems, warfare, noble pursuits and religious symbolism. Portmahomack, as nowhere else, shows the Picts to have been proficient farmers, engineers and craftspeople.

  By the end of the seventh century much of what is now Scotland south of the Forth–Clyde isthmus lay under Northumbrian influence. Argyll and the southern Hebrides were the Gaelic-speaking lands of Dál Riata, with strong historic ties to Ulster. Looming over the River Clyde, Dumbarton Rock, more properly Alclud, was the fortress capital of Strathclyde: British in language and culture, periodically powerful and, in later centuries, resurgent, able to rule over south-west Scotland and Cumbria.

  The distribution of so-called Pictish art, of early churches, of fortresses, suggests that two kingdoms dominated the east of what would become Scotland: Atholl, centred on Strathearn and the watershed of the River Tay, with a capital at Forteviot and a sacral ‘hill of destiny’ at Scone; and Fortriu, centred on the equally fertile lands around the Moray Firth and north Aberdeenshire.Ω North of the Great Glen there seems to have been a separate entity called Cait, which became Caithness, and it is possible that Fib, or Fife, retained a status as an independent kingdom; but these are murky waters.

  The political geography of these kingdoms can be mapped in terms of what are known as cultural core lands, after the phrase proposed by the eminent historical geographer Brian Roberts.4 In the Early Medieval period fertile lowland plains, the drainage basins of navigable rivers, offered both rich lands for exploitation and coherent territorial units, often ruled over by chieftains whose descendants became their kings. The land of the Hwicce around the Severn and Warwickshire Avon was one; the Bernicia of the River Tyne another, each one offering a range of riverine, arable, pastoral and other natural resources, the river its unifying thread. The name Strathclyde, meaning the broad valley of the River Clyde, neatly encapsulates the type.

  Significant features of such core lands include royal palaces: Craig Phadraig, perhaps, near Inverness, and Forteviot in Strathearn; inauguration sites like Scone; fringe zones of less favourable land where grants of estates were made to establish ‘royal’ minsters. These latter are usually identified by the frequent occurrence of sophisticated, decorative sculpture, such as one finds at Meigle in Strathmore and on the Tarbat peninsula, displays of élite patronage of important cult sites. Secular settlements characterized by specialized production and large-scale consumption, which ought to go with such core lands, have not yet been found in eastern Scotland: do they lie in wait, or were these lands simply not sufficiently productive or developed for them to exist? Archaeology will eventually have its say; and the smart money says they will be found.

  Pictish settlements have still not been excavated in sufficient numbers to construct a robust economic and social narrative for them. The classic type-site of the so-called Pictish longhouse, a timber and turf dwelling whose walls have distinctively rounded corners, is Pitcarmick in north-east Perthshire; another small complex has recently been excavated in Glenshee in the same county. Frustratingly, the latter has produced Pitcarmick-type structures that, perversely, did not contain hearths; and without a hearth, what is a dwelling? The longhouses at Lairn in Glenshee sit in a landscape of roundhouses which are often assumed, on thin grounds, to be ‘prehistoric’ in date. Archaeologists continue to scratch their heads. Other Pictish sites are associated with souterrains, the enigmatic underground structures also found in Ireland, which look as though they were food storage complexes (not the dwellings of hobbit-like Picts, as popular fancy would have it).

  On many Scottish lochs, crannogs (pile-built circular dwellings lying just offshore, reached by wooden causeways) seem to have belonged to transhumant≈ élites, perhaps the summer residences of chiefs and petty kings. It remains to be seen if the bulk of the northern post-Roman peoples lived in as yet unidentified settlements not visible to archaeology (perhaps lying beneath contemporary farms and villages); or if they were still living at sites traditionally identified with the late Iron Age; hillforts and brochs, for example. A comprehensive programme of Early Medieval field archaeology, especially excavation, is required in mainland Scotland. Portmahomack proves that the evidence is there, even if acidic upland soils have often degraded it severely.∂

  Alex Woolf, author of the most authoritative recent history of Scotland in this period,5 in unpicking the complexities of its early dynasties, proposes that in the early ninth century the northern kingdoms were dominated by King Constantín, son of Wrguist, ruling Fortriu and Atholl together for thirty years and probably, by the end of his life in 820, overlord of all the lands north of the Forth; then by his brother Onuist, who succeeded him for fourteen years until 834; and by Constantín’s son Domnall, who ruled Dál Riata in the west for twenty-four years until 835. The deaths of two powerful kings in such a short space of time unsurprisingly left the northern kingdoms vulnerable. Scandinavian entrepreneurs had keen eyes and ears, their sensitivity to the weakness of their potential prey as acute as stalking tigers. Four years later a Norse invasion triggered the series of events that would lead to the emergence of a kingdom of Alba.

  Under the year 839 (the year in which King Ecgberht of Wessex died) the Annals of Ulster record that ‘the heathens won a battle against the men of Fortriu, and Eóganán son of Aengus, Bran son of Óengus, Aed son of Boanta, and others almost innumerable fell there’. These were the short-lived successors to the dynast Constantín. Historians used to make much of an entry, in the Irish Annals of the Four Masters under the year 835 (but corrected to 839, the same year as the devastating raid on Fortriu), in which an Irish chief went to Dál Riata with a war band in support of one Cináed, son of Ailpín. From such trivial entries are national myths born. Kenneth McAlpin, Cináed mac Ailpín, has become Scotland’s Ælfred, its royal dynastic founder and unifier. He sits at the head of a genealogy preserved in a work known as the Chronicle of the Kings of Alba (CKA) whose credibility for this period is seriously in doubt and whose complexity makes it very difficult to interpret with confidence.6 In the Chronicle, essentially an expanded king list, Cináed is credited with conquering and then absorbing Pictavia from a base in his Dál Riatan homeland; with founding Alba as a single entity, just as Ælfred is frequently credited with seeing off the Vikings single-handed and creating a kingdom called England.

  The chronicler of the CKA would have us believe that Cináed ruled Dál Riata and Pictavia for the next sixteen years before dying at a date calculated as 858; that he attacked Dunbar and the monastery of Melrose in north Northumbria and transferred the relics of Colm Cille from Ionaπ to a new church (assumed to be Dunkeld in Strathtay: D�
�n Chaillean, the Fort of the Caledonii). During his reign, the chronicler records, Danari (a generic for Norse) wasted Pictavia as far east as Clunie and Dunkeld.

  Cináed, then, was later remembered to have ruled over both Picts and Dál Riatan Scots. He was not the first; and we cannot even be sure of his geographical origins, so from those points of view his career is noteworthy rather than spectacular. From his reign, it is true, Pictavia and Dál Riata lost their individual identities so far as the chroniclers were concerned; they are simply not mentioned again after the middle of the ninth century. But as a founding dynast Cináed must be demoted; only in the reign of his grandson, Constantín mac Áeda, can we confidently begin to describe the emergence of a coherent kingdom of all Scotland outside Strathclyde and the Scandinavian settlements: of a state called Alba.

  No more detailed history of this key period in northern history is ever likely to be drawn. But if we cannot identify the reign of Cináed as the founding event of Alba, we can at least say that the intervention of Norsemen, and their future domination of the western part of Scotland, had forced a decisive shift in the orientation of Scottish politics towards the east.

  The kingdoms of Early Medieval Scotland had been Christian, at least nominally, since the seventh century. In common with other early kingdoms their economies were coinless (coins were circulated as bullion, but not minted north of York) and based on food and service renders; their social structures hierarchical, with slaves at the base and kings at the top. Warrior élites were supported by groupings of households whose economic geographies cannot have looked much different from the shires of Northumbria or the small territorial kingdoms and cantrefi∆ of Ireland and Wales: miniature cultural core lands, if you like. The sophistication of the monastic settlement at Portmahomack and the overwhelming evidence of surviving Pictish art reveal a highly politicized, self-conscious culture, actively connected to its neighbours by linguistic, historical and intellectual ties. Had the works of its scholars and genealogists survived, as they did in Northumbria, we would be able to paint every bit as rich a picture of Pictavia and the other Scottish kingdoms.

  In the lands north of the Forth and Clyde the impact of Viking raids and settlement was felt earlier and more profoundly than in the kingdoms of the Anglo-Saxons and Welsh. Rival dynasties took advantage of the instability caused by this new, third-party intruder, to make war on their neighbours and ancient rivals, to annex, render tribute, even conquer. If Cináed is to fit credibly into Scottish history, it is as one of many opportunists of the Viking Age, one whose dynastic legacy assured him a permanent place in history as a nation’s progenitor.

  While history and archaeology let us down in the Early Medieval North, at least the latter has been much more productive in the island communities of Shetland, Orkney and the Western Isles. This is itself a matter of historical and geographical chance. Many coastal island sites, buried by windblown sand over the millennia, have been revealed by the same sorts of storms that buried them; in sand their structural integrity and material culture—drystone walling, domestic utensils, hearths, bed-settings, decorative items and containers—have been preserved. They are treasure chests.

  In the isles, the distinctive forms of so-called Pictish wheelhouse and Norse longhouse, with their dramatic and tightly-managed internal layouts, beautifully constructed walls and wide distribution, have allowed archaeologists to map the settlement of Scandinavian communities from the late eighth and ninth centuries onwards, far into the medieval period when the Lords of the Isles were overtly Norse in culture, language and affiliation; to map, also, the crucial period when native populations co-existed with or were driven out, enslaved or oppressed by the incomers.

  Attention was first drawn to the possibility of such cultural conflict by the romantic re-emergence of the Shetland site that became known as Jarlshof (christened by Walter Scott on a visit there in 1814). Excavated between the 1930s and the 1950s, it revealed a sequence of occupation that stretched as far back as the Neolithic (roughly 4000 BCE to 2000 BCE ) and was represented in all subsequent periods. Its Norse longhouses, the first to be excavated in Britain, were found to have been continuously occupied until the fourteenth century.

  In Orkney substantial excavation campaigns have allowed archaeologists to reconstruct highly detailed sequences of settlements at Brough of Birsay on the west coast of Mainland, and elsewhere. Burials of Scandinavian appearance, including boat burials, now have distribution maps all their own, and a number of settlements of the Norse period are currently under excavation in the Western Isles. The material clues to a century and more of human contact, tension and survival, of clashes of religion, belief and language, are slowly being teased from the sands of the Atlantic shores.

  Like Western Scotland, Wales shared affinities and vulnerabilities with the coastal communities of Ireland; its land borders were zones of periodic tension and conflict with ambitious Anglo-Saxon neighbours; its mountainous heart gave Welsh political geography a regional, north–south axis. But its history and archaeology in the early part of the Viking Age is frustratingly obscure.

  In earlier periods kings of Powys and Gwynedd dominated the north and the border zone with Mercia. At the beginning of the ninth century a new dynasty, perhaps originating in the Isle of Man and apparently seeking new horizons under pressure from Scandinavian piracy and settlement, came to control the ancient kingdom of Gwynedd from its heartland in Anglesey, or Môn. In 825, that tumultuous year recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Annals of Ulster, Merfyn Frych acquired the crown of Gwynedd from the supposed last king of the line of Cunedda, Hywel ap Rhodri Molwynog. His son Rhodri Mawr (the ‘Great’) annexed Powys sometime around 856 and the southern kingdom of Seisyllwg** in about 871. In 876 he was defeated in a battle on Môn by a Viking force; he died in 878, killed by a king of Mercia after having won mastery of most of modern Wales. His sons, like those of Cináed and of Æðelwulf of Wessex, were rulers of successful houses themselves; the dynasty would produce a celebrated overlord, law-maker and friend of the West Saxons, Hywel Dda, the ‘Good’.

  Just as Northumbria had its precious Cuthbert and Dál Riata its Colm Cille, so the Welsh church had as its cult hero St David, a tough, uncompromising sixth-century bishop and monastic entrepreneur whose relics were said to be held in the cathedral of the city that bears his name.7 The Annales Cambriae or Welsh Annals, preserved in the historical miscellany known as ‘Nennius’, seem to have been compiled here in the middle of the ninth century. Uniquely, David’s shrine was not despoiled by Viking pirates during the ninth or tenth centuries, despite several raids on the community; indeed Wales as a whole, Anglesey apart, seems to have been affected more by the tides of the Viking Age than by direct attack.††

  The geography of Wales, as its engineers know only too well, does not favour communications. Only the Rivers Dee, Severn, Wye and Cleddau offer substantial navigable waterways, mostly along its eastern borders (and each of them was penetrated by raids during the ninth century). The legacy of Roman roads is unimpressive: routes through the valleys have been hard won. Its great natural harbours are confined to the south-west, on Milford Haven, and the south coast and Severn estuary. The features that most hinder its economic development are precisely those that protected it from the worst attentions of the Vikings.

  *

  The first overwintering of a Scandinavian fleet, on Sheppey in 850, was followed by the arrival of an immense naval force at the mouth of the Thames in the spring or summer of 851. A fleet of 350 ships, if true, is a step-change in ambition: this was not raiding but state-sponsored invasion. The hæðnum herige or ‘heathen army’ attacked Canterbury, perhaps the closest thing to a town in any of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and vulnerable to marine assault by virtue of the River Stour. In the ninth century the river may have been navigable as far inland as the trading settlement at Fordwich, just 2 miles (3 km) from the Roman civitas‡‡ capital of the Cantiaci and from Christ Church. It is far from clear whether the Sca
ndinavian forces had a coherent plan or whether, on arriving in the Thames estuary in convoy, they split up to pursue their own predatory ambitions. Coin production in Canterbury and London seems to have been disrupted for some time afterwards and no Kentish charters survive from the years immediately after the great raid.

  Part of the fleet, at least, penetrated the Thames valley: King Beorhtwulf of Mercia was put to flight, his levies defeated, his fate unrecorded. The heathen army crossed the Thames into Surrey, where they faced stiffer resistance. Æðelwulf, king of Wessex, with the levies of his second son Æðelbald, met the invading force at an unidentified place called Acleah and ‘there made the greatest slaughter of a heathen host that we have heard tell of up to the present day, and there won the victory’.8 In spite of their very evident vulnerability to coastal attacks, the kings of the Anglo-Saxons, fighting on their own territory with experienced shire musters and a well-trained and armed warrior élite, were more than a match for a Viking force reliant on raiding for supplies and isolated from its ships. In 851 the economic and social machinery of the Anglo-Saxon states may have been bruised, but their existence was not yet threatened.

  Mercia’s new king, Burghred,§§ now sought to establish himself and revive the waning fortunes of a once-great kingdom. In 853 he won support from Æðelwulf in pressing historical claims against Powys, his western neighbour. He married Æðelwulf’s daughter Æðelswið in a ceremony at the royal West Saxon township of Chippenham (Cippanhamme: Cippa’s promontory’) in Wiltshire: a seal of both alliance and submission. By 857 he was able to issue a charter granting a house and commercial rights in Lundenwic to the bishop of Winchester.9