My dad knew the land around Kelso intimately and we talked a great deal about change, how it could obliterate history and how often the names of their places were all that remained of peoples who had long vanished into the darkness of the past. As he grew older and frail, I realized that much of his sort of understanding of the Borders would be obliterated too. Therefore I made extensive tape recordings with my dad and in rereading the typescript of this book I can hear the echo of his insistent voice clearly. No one else can, only me.
One more word before I set out my narrative. Much to the distaste, no doubt, of proper historians this piece of work is occasionally conveyed in the first person, not objective but nominative. In fact it is precisely names that make it so. I am a Moffat, first from western Berwickshire, earlier from Dumfriesshire. My mother’s people are Irvines, Murrays and Renwicks from Hawick and the hill country to the west. All ancient Border families, people who stayed where they found themselves and found where they stayed to be beautiful. We have been here for millennia but, apart from playing rugby for Scotland, none of my family has gained great wealth, fame or notoriety. We have acquired few airs or graces. There is no need. We are all Borderers, and that is more than enough.
And that is precisely my claim. The landscape of the Scottish Border country is part of me, I know it in my soul. The red earth of Berwickshire is grained in my hands, the rain-fed fields of the Tweed valley nourished me and the hills and forests of Selkirk fill my eye. I know this place.
2
AN ACCIDENTAL HISTORY
Since this book began its life as a series of accidental discoveries, I should begin by describing the sequence of events that forced me to draw such an unlooked-for conclusion.
Despite my frequent puzzlements and pauses I completed my history of Kelso in 1985. I remember an excellent party, some daft speeches and a hilarious dinner with my mum and dad pleased as punch that I had dedicated the book to them. Because it was the name used by ordinary people I called it Kelsae and then below it for those who wanted a Sunday name: A History of Kelso from the Earliest Times. Except it wasn’t. The earliest it got was 1113 when the future King David I of Scotland planted a settlement of austere French monks from Tiron first at Selkirk and then, moving them downriver in 1128, at Kelso. Being literate and careful men, they set down all the gifts given by David in a long foundation charter.³ While the document is rich in detail, overflows with place-names, descriptions of natural features and much monkish precision, it was none the less frustrating to have to begin the history of such an ancient place as late as 1113. Particularly since the quarry I mined for material contained nuggets of information (much of which I failed completely to understand at first) about the lost centuries before the monks of Tiron came to the Borders and wrote down what they found.
My quarry was a collection of 562 documents or charters bound together in what is known as the Kelso Liber. Published by a nineteenth-century gentlemen’s antiquarian association, the Bannatyne Club, the Liber is a singular thing. As a printing job it is remarkable as it sets out precisely the homespun, everyday Latin turned out by the monks of Kelso Abbey’s scriptorium. They wrote on precious vellum and parchment and to save space they developed an inconsistent shorthand which, maddeningly, the printers and proofreaders had reproduced in all its inconsistency. However, once I had cracked its codes I found behind the idiosyncratic Latin a terse and sometimes elegant style and, with documents dating from 1113 to 1567, a surprising continuity of expression.
The twelfth-century documents of the Kelso Liber describe important places, a busy economy, and great wealth gifted to the Church. King David I moved the Tironensian monks from his Forest of Selkirk to Kelso so that he could concentrate economic, military, administrative and spiritual power in one place. He already held a massive royal castle across the Tweed from Kelso at Roxburgh, while beside it was his royal burgh of the same name. Established as an international centre for the trade in raw wool, Roxburgh was booming in the early twelfth century. It contained four churches, a grammar school, five mintmasters and by 1150 a new town forced the expansion of the town walls to incorporate it. David I needed literate men to help him administer his kingdom; he was very often at Roxburgh and so he moved his new abbey to Kelso for convenience and strength. And for a spiritual focus to confer prestige and dignity on all around it.
The foundation charters of Kelso Abbey list a long, immensely detailed and rich inventory of property, services and hard cash given by the king and by wealthy subjects anxious to impress him. Impossible to measure in today’s values, perhaps the fabulous new wealth of the monks is best expressed by a telling comparison. By the end of the sixteenth century most, but not all, of what remained of the abbey’s patrimony was appropriated by the Kers, a notorious Border clan based at a nearby stronghold, Cessford Castle. The Kers took a new title from the old castle and burgh, then became the Innes-Kers (Ker is pronounced ‘Car’) and are now the Dukes of Roxburghe (with an ‘e’), one of the wealthiest and most widely landed families in Britain.
Twenty miles downriver was another bustling town much written about in the Kelso Liber. The port of Berwick-upon-Tweed was the main exit point and trading post for the raw wool shipped out to the primitive cloth factories of Flanders and the Rhine estuary. Colonies of Flemings and Germans were settled in the town in the early twelfth century and once again generous portions of the customs revenue, valuable property in the town, salmon fisheries in the Tweed estuary and many other rights and services were gifted by the king. These properties, incidentally, only escaped the clutches of the acquisitive Kers by dint of Richard III incorporating Berwick as part of England in 1483.
Being the supply end of an embryonic textile industry in Europe, Roxburgh and Berwick formed together the beating economic heart of medieval Scotland. When they addressed charters to their Scottish, French, Flemish and English friends, David I and his successors reflected a busy, expanding cosmopolitan society. And so long as the English and the Scots remained friends, Roxburgh, Kelso and Berwick boomed. But with the accidental death of Alexander III in 1286 and the drying up of legitimate heirs to the Scottish throne, the expansionist Edward I of England turned his attention northwards, and then followed it with his armies when he did not get his way. Centuries of intermittent border warfare ensued. Trade declined, international contact virtually ceased, and over time the Borders became a place where people crossed a frontier on their way north to do business in Edinburgh, or south to London. Berwick was split from Roxburgh, and ultimately the latter diminished to extinction.
It is easy to forget the bustle of the market place, the buzz of language – English, Scots, Gaelic, Flemish, French and German were all spoken as deals were struck in the Market Place of Roxburgh. It is all gone now, without leaving any mark on the landscape. Only the sheep are still there, quietly grazing where once their fleeces brought promissory notes of exchange from Flemish merchants.
What became increasingly clear to me as I read the Kelso Liber, all of it, was how important this place was. By any modern measure Roxburgh/Kelso was the capital place of Scotland in the twelfth century. It generated immense wealth, it minted the coinage of the young kingdom and the king set his seal on many hundreds of documents in Roxburgh Castle.
However, an important question hovered over all this. Why is this large city not noted in any source before 1113? How can it be that such an important place makes such a dramatic, instant historical appearance, like a medieval Atlantis emerging from the mists of anonymity? The truth is that Roxburgh was not built the summer before the monks arrived and sharpened their quills to write about it. Clearly the town had been established for a very long time before that. But the fact is that there are no documentary facts. Nothing to refer to except common sense and a knowledge of the place and its name.
While the consistency of expression, of grammatical form and of vocabulary over the 562 charters written between 1113 and 1567 in the Kelso Liber is remarkable, there is a quiet, barely di
scernible undercurrent of change which flows through that record of 450 years of experience in one place. When the Tironensians arrived in the Borders from France, they would have understood little of what local people had to say to them. As members of the French-speaking ruling élite imported into Scotland by David I, that may not have mattered much. Except in one vital area: land. Most of the abbey’s new wealth was reckoned in acreage and in order to record their gifts clearly and safely, the clerks of the scriptorium needed to know two things: the name of the place they were to own and its precise boundaries. A difficult business and the monks no doubt lost a good deal in the translation. There are nearly 2,000 place-names scattered through the documents and, even allowing for radical spelling variants, 112 do not appear on any map or in the recollection of anyone who knows the ground around Kelso. It is true that not all of the 2,000 names are located near the abbey. The monks held land as distant as Northampton, but even so 112 disappearances is surprising. The lost names are often exotic: Karnegogyl, Pranwrsete or Traverflat; but I began to see that they all shared one obscure linguistic characteristic, something that turned out to be very important to this story. Buried in the Kelso Liber is an example that explains what happened.
The Scottish Borders
To the south-east of Edinburgh, on the other side of Arthur’s Seat from Holyrood Palace, is the well-set suburb of Duddingston. The monks of Kelso owned part of the medieval village which they spelled as ‘Dodyngston’ in a charter which notes that it belonged to a man with an English-sounding name, Dodin. As place-names go, a simple enough derivation. But then the clerk added, for clarity, that Dodyngston used to be known as Trauerlen. This turned out to be a Welsh name which breaks into three elements: tref is a settlement or a stead, yr means ‘of’, Llin is a lake. The settlement by the lake, a place good for skating in winter. (One of Sir Henry Raeburn’s most famous portraits is of the Reverend Robert Walker skating on Duddingston Loch.) The first elements in the three examples of extinct toponymic exotica quoted above are also Welsh: Caer for fort, Pran for tree, and again Tref for settlement.
It became clear to me that the 112 lost names did not all disappear. Many of them were discarded as new people arrived in Scotland anxious to stamp their identities on those properties. The Old Welsh names were swept aside as English speakers made these places their own. Nowhere was that more true than in Calchvyndd which the monks quickly boiled down to Kelso.
But what this process of renaming also told me was that the Old Welsh language culture was near the surface. Trauerlen was rejected by Dodin and the clerks of the abbey scriptorium but I am certain that it stayed for generations in the mouths of the ordinary people who formed the cultural bedrock of southern Scotland. People who understood Welsh names and, as I will show, who may have even retained remnants of the old language far into the medieval period.
There are some fossil remains of Welsh names that can easily be seen nowadays. The new people, like Dodin, took the best land but up-country in the more remote areas away from the population centres the old names persisted. Another tref makes the point. A sharp-eyed traveller on the A68 going south might notice a road sign near Lauder pointing to a by-road to Trabrown. In the collection of documents for Dryburgh Abbey⁴ it has the give-away spelling of Treuerbrun or Tref yr bryn, or ‘the settlement on the hill’ or, since it is now a farm place, better as ‘hillstead’. The name survived because the land was less sought after and the people in whose mouths Trabrown felt more comfortable retained the power to call it what they had always called it. These stubborn men and women form the basis of this story and the place-names they left to us will continually light our way through the voids of Dark Ages Scotland.
At the points in our history where documentary evidence is almost totally lacking, historians have for the most pan regarded toponymy – the study of the place-names of a country or district – as a footnote rather than a guide. They have mistrusted the land as a text in itself and ignored our eternal, primal connection with the ground we live on. We are bound to leave our mark in more ways than an archaeologist can dig out and the names of our places beat out the rhythm of history more steadily and honestly than a stray text from a propagandist monk anxious to apply his partial slant to a piece of history somebody else told him. Too much importance has been attached to documentary history, too little to what the landscape can tell us.
Here is a good example of how dry etymology can lead to daft conclusions even in a case where some play is allowed to toponymy. Melrose has been a holy place for at least a millennium and a half. Saints Cuthbert and Aidan and possibly Ninian had strong connections, as did the mother house at Lindisfarne. The original Celtic monastery lay in a loop of the River Tweed two miles to the east of the later Cistercian abbey so beloved of Sir Walter Scott. The name Melrose is everywhere written up as a reflection of the topography. From Gaelic the second element is ros for ‘a promontory’ – the loop of the Tweed – while the first is maol which means ‘bare’. So Melrose is Mailros or, it is widely repeated, ‘bare promontory’. That is a derivation produced by someone who has never visited the site and has missed an obvious connection with the known history of the place. Certainly Old Melrose lies on sufficient of an inland promontory to allow the second element, but ‘bare’? The fields at Old Melrose, watered by the nourishing currents of the Tweed, are lush with corn each summer and in fallow years the farmer cuts some of the best hay in the Borders. It may be a promontory but it is not bare. What ‘maol’ actually refers to is the men who lived at Old Melrose. In both Gaelic and Welsh it means not only ‘bare’ but also ‘bald’. Celtic monks had a severe tonsure cut from ear to ear right over the crown of their heads. Melrose got its name because local people called it ‘the promontory of the monks’.
The point of this example is a simple one. If scores of historians can fail to see the value of correct toponymy with a name and place as famous and important as Melrose, what else has been missed?
These are all questions that jumped out at me as I worked on my original book on Kelso. They told me that through the history of my native place another river ran and although I had little idea at the time where it would lead, it bothered me that so much that was obvious to me, a local amateur, was so ignored or, it seemed, wilfully misunderstood by the professionals.
Before I finished my history of Kelso, three more ill-fitting pieces of information disconcerted me enough to keep on interrogating the conventional wisdom.
In my researches I came across a spectacular liar. At first I thought I had made a sensational discovery. In the British Museum reading room catalogue I found an entry from a man who wrote under the name of Thomas Dempster. In 1627 he published a history of Scottish churchmen with the sonorous title of De Viris Illustribus Ecclesiae Scotticanie. The book records a dazzling succession of intellectual achievements and international contacts made by the abbots and priors of the monastery of Kelso. According to Dempster the twelfth-century Abbot Arnold wrote a treatise ‘On the Right Government of a Kingdom’. His successors produced volumes on the freedom of the Scottish Church, appeals to the court of Rome, and in the late fifteenth century the Prior Henry was described by Dempster as an intimate friend of the Italian poet Angelo Poliziano and the philosopher Marsilio Ficino, both of whom were part of the Medici court circle during the zenith of the Florentine Renaissance. Clearly Prior Henry was a man of some erudition since Dempster tells us that he translated the work of Palladius Rutulius into Scots verse and carried on a lengthy and learned correspondence with the smart set in Florence.
All this would have been remarkable, if any of it had been true. I spent fruitless days searching through library catalogues, bibliographies and incunabula for any corroborative reference to these works. Not only did I fail to find the learned works themselves, I came across no trace of them either, no mention of their existence by any other writer. The extraordinary thing is that Dempster invented it all. He was an undergraduate at the University of Padua which, having a long
tradition of foreign students, organized each group into different ‘nations’. As a member of the Scots nation Dempster may have harboured a sense of cultural inadequacy in the company of relative sophisticates from France, Germany and Italy. Compared with the glittering intellectual achievements of the Italian Renaissance, an upbringing in backward, backwoods Scotland must have seemed dreich and unimpressive, leaving Dempster as only a listener in company, with nothing to talk about, no status. So he invented it. By writing his De Viris Illustribus Ecclesiae Scotticanie he hoped to borrow sufficient spurious lustre to allow him to pose as a substantial man, to be a talker, an understander, a member of the European intellectual mainstream. Poor man, so ashamed of his origins, he was forced into fiction to cover them up.
Since he wrote so much about Kelso Abbey – it is in fact the focus of his book, and has a correct sequence of abbots and priors in his list of illustrious Scottish churchmen – I think it is likely that Thomas Dempster came from Kelso or from the Borders. That belief is bolstered by the early part of De Viris. No doubt in pursuit of more reflected glory, he makes an interesting claim. Some of southern Scotland’s earliest kings were descended from Romans who had ‘worn the purple’. He goes on to say that they were, of course, cultured men even though they spoke a British language and their Latin was poor.
Either this is a fleeting glimpse of some research by Dempster into the work of very early historians (unlikely given the fiction he went on to produce) or it is a repetition of local traditions which were still in currency in the 1620s but are lost to us now. Despite my angry disappointment at how much time I had wasted on the inventions of Thomas Dempster, his references to British kings in southern Scotland whose forebears had worn the purple stayed with me, and intrigued me. They had the ring of remembered truth about them.
Arthur and the Lost Kingdoms Page 2
