Arthur and the Lost Kingdoms

by Alistair Moffat

  Traditions that carry the crust of old wives’ tales around them are rarely worth more than passing interrogation. Black cats crossing our path as a good portent appeals only to the irrational in us all, but traditions which are held in common, which are repeated with some precision, which carry the weight of years upon them – these are worth parsing for historical meaning.

  In the Scottish Borders each summer sees several unique festivals. Associated with the towns of Selkirk, Hawick, Langholm and Lauder there occur what are known as the Common Ridings. Although surrounded by fun and endless opportunities for socializing, the core of these festivals is profoundly historic. For at least half a millennium and probably much longer the young men of the towns have ridden out in midsummer to check the boundaries of the common land. It is the origin of the phrase ‘beating the bounds’. Particular trees were often used as triangulation points between other natural features such as streams and hilltops and to mark them out from others the riders beat the bark with swords and sticks so that they would recognize the same tree next summer. And as a matter of further incidental etymological interest the procession of riders is led by two Burgh Law men, or the Burley Men, who were no doubt often heavy-set individuals.

  The Hawick Common Riding is one of the oldest and I often went to cheer on the riders with my mother. She was a native of Hawick or a ‘Teri’ as they nickname themselves. A strange word, it comes from a motto anciently associated with the Common Riding. On the plinth of a statue of a Hawick horseman, the complete phrase is inscribed: ‘Teribus Ye Teriodin’. No one was ever able to tell me what it means. But when I realized how important the Welsh language underlay was to the history of the Borders, the meaning came easily. It is a Welsh phrase, Tir y Bas y Tir y Odin, not much changed by centuries of use. It means ‘The Land of Death, the Land of Odin’. What that has to do with the Common Riding will be explained later, but the significance for me was pivotal. How had a Welsh phrase, not understood, become the unquestioned emblem of a place I thought I knew well?

  Land, and its boundaries, is in essence what this story is about. As much as what the clerks of Kelso Abbey’s scriptorium wrote down about the ground they found themselves in possession of, what people remember now in these traditions is important. And it was important 800 years ago. Here is an example of what I mean.

  In 1202 King William the Lion of Scotland was asked by Pope Celestinus III to arbitrate in a long-standing dispute between the monasteries of Melrose and Kelso over boundaries.⁵ This had arisen as a result of the transfer of the abbey from Selkirk to Kelso in 1128. Seventy years later it still rumbled on. King William’s reaction was to delegate.

  I brought together the ancient and honest men of the countryside into my presence and then I put the enquiry into their hands.

  At length they came to my court at Selkirk … I am bound legally to the evidence of the honest and ancient men of the countryside. I wish the monks of Kelso to give up for ever to the monks of Melrose two bovates of land, two acres and pasture for 400 sheep which the monks of Kelso used to hold. On that day discussion of the matter ended.

  This dispute had ground on for seventy years because there was a great deal of very valuable land at stake, in today’s reckoning perhaps two million pounds. And the striking thing is that William the Lion immediately fell back on tradition, on what ordinary people who lived in that place could remember. Something modern historians are loath to do. Indeed I doubt if a modern court of law would accept a tradition as absolutely determinant in a dispute of this scale, particularly if one side was able to produce a piece of paper to back its claims. I fear we dismiss tradition too readily in piecing together pictures of the past. I would be inclined to set greater store by the honest and ancient men of the countryside over against Thomas Dempster and his literary fancies any day. This is a point worth bearing in mind as my narrative progresses.

  But first, one more piece of the unmade jigsaw which lay around the edges of my research into the history of Kelso. As I became more and more aware of how deeply the Welsh language underpinned my work, I came across a piece of great British history: The Age of Arthur by John Morris.⁶ A history of Britain from 350 to 650, it felt like a huge summary of a life’s work; the sweep of the thing is majestic and the depth of learning is humbling. And yet it contains a remarkable error of geography. Not only does Morris believe profoundly in a historical Arthur, he also attributes to him a long period of British supremacy over the Angles and Saxons in the sixth century. Having successfully resisted the Germanic invaders, Morris believed that a strong British state and army existed over a wide swathe of the south Midlands including Dunstable and Northampton and stretching westwards to north of Gloucester. It had a king, wrote Morris, called Catrawt and it was known as Calchvyndd.

  That set me thinking hard. Morris’s footnotes and appendices are exhaustive and it was easy to see how he had got the location of Calchvyndd 300 miles wrong. Later Welsh poets and transcribers had appropriated the stories of ‘The Gododdin’ and applied them to the south-west, merging them with stories told in Welsh about Wales.

  As I read more of the history of the Dark Ages, I could see that much of it had become even more skewed compass-fashion than John Morris’s work. The Welsh-speaking peoples of southern Scotland had been almost completely forgotten, their history even removed and stuck on to that of other places. However, like many Scotsmen, I preferred to nurse this thought as a grievance rather than treat it as a spur to action.

  Three months after the party for the publication of my history of Kelso and our family dinner, my dad died suddenly of a heart attack. I remember it was a foul February night when the young doctor phoned me. There were snow showers at first and then a blizzard blowing down on the north wind as I drove carefully south to be with my mother. There was a lot of late snow that winter and preferring to drive in the light I went to Kelso most Sunday mornings. I recall one journey in particular, like an experience sealed within itself. I travelled slowly down the Leader valley into the Tweed basin and the heart of the Borders. A yellow slanting winter sun threw the shapes of the snow-covered ground into detailed relief. It was as though the landscape had been wrapped in clinging white tissue. I drove past the great prehistoric fort of Eildon Hill North. I could see the defensive ditches clearly circling the round summit, enclosing scores of ancient hut platforms. These were things I had never really looked at before, even though I had passed the hill a thousand times. I stopped the car at the turn-off down to Old Melrose and scrambled up the railway embankment on the opposite side of the road. At the foot of Eildon Hill North lay the Roman fort and town of Trimontium (there are three Eildon Hills) and although not one stone has been left standing upon another, I could clearly see the line of one of the walls in the snow-covered fields near the village of Newstead.

  Even though nearly two millennia had passed since Agricola’s legions had dug in at Trimontium there had to be a way to tell the story of what happened in the Borders before the Romans arrived, after they left and before the arrival of more outsiders with David I’s French monks in 1113. We seemed to depend absolutely on other people to write our history for us. And more, there had to be a way of righting the imbalance in Dark Ages historiography, correcting the bias to the south.

  Standing in the snow in the Borders in the February of 1987, it occurred to me that I should stop complaining and start working.

  3

  THE NAMES OF MEMORY

  Let me begin with the Old Peoples. I do not know what else to call the communities who lived in the Borders before the Romans came. Until Pliny the Elder and Tacitus gave them names, locations, and some character, the Old Peoples left only shadowy marks on the landscape: great earthworks on the hilltops, burial sites, flint tools, cultivation terraces. And although the pains taken by archaeologists tell much that is useful about what they ate, how they sheltered themselves and where they built their huts, they tell us nothing of what they thought, how they felt, what they feared and what langu
age they spoke. Because the Old Peoples left no written record they seemed to me to be dumb, grey figures in a distant landscape. I had read every history book I could find, gone to the National Library in Edinburgh to look at articles in periodicals even more detailed and learned. But still I could get no sense of who these people were.

  At least that is how things seemed to me at first. But after a time I realized that I had been looking in the wrong place. What remains of the story of the Old Peoples is not to be found on the shelves of the National Library of Scotland. It lies all around us. If I wanted to hear the echo of how they spoke, some words of their language, then I realized that I should listen to the landscape. Names. Names of places, of natural features and most importantly the names of rivers. The Old Peoples gave the landscape names and many of them have survived. And since names are words, we can hear them talk by listening to the landscape.

  Now, this will take a lot of explaining and a good deal of what I have found is highly conjectural. Names for peoples and places can be conferred in the most unlikely and confusing fashion. Here is a modern example of how this historical approach can go badly wrong.

  Why do the Mexicans call the Americans Gringos? It is a strange term with an even stranger origin. When Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie and the other heroes of Texas’s war against Mexico were besieged in the Alamo, they had a small force of about eighty Scots mercenaries with them. The Scots’ marching song was the folk-tune ‘Green Grow the Rashes O’ and that is why Santa Ana’s army and finally the whole of Mexico called the Americans Gringos.

  Historians with an interest in etymology might believe that a recital of a nation’s nicknames, or terms of abuse even, would provide a useful gloss to a study of that nation. However the Alamo story illustrates what a risky set of assumptions rumble around inside that way of thinking. The Mexicans believed that they were describing Americans when they were actually describing a band of Scotsmen, and they used an accidental term which says nothing much about any of the groups involved, except perhaps that early nineteenth-century Mexican soldiers had a poor grasp of English and knew nothing at all about traditional Scottish folk-songs.

  So history from names is a risky business. Be that as it may, I am forced by the lack of anything else to go on to embark on this course. However, I hope that the process will not seem too laboured and the results not too scanty.

  The oldest names in the landscape are river names. The rivers Thames, Tees, Tyne, Tweed and Tay have been so called for millennia. All begin with ‘T’ and all lie on the eastern coast of the country. That is because they were named by people who walked across the North Sea to Britain. The last Ice Age cleared the Tweed valley by about 7000 BC but it still left Britain connected to the continental land mass by low-lying, swampy plains which are now the North Sea. Archaeology on the banks of the ‘T’ rivers shows that those migrating were fisher people who used figure-of-eight flint and chart sinker-stones for their nets. They came to Britain in small, unrelated bands but they shared a language. They sought out navigable rivers and in boats they travelled up them into the interior of the densely forested unpopulated countryside. Archaeological finds of pottery and their places of burial trace the progress of the Old Peoples upriver and up-country. Densest along the banks of major rivers and particularly at the confluence of large tributaries, the finds gradually thin out inland and finally disappear at the foot of the watershed hills. Each time a band of these people came to a large river they called it the same thing: tavas is a Sanskrit root which means ‘to surge’. All the names of the ‘T’ rivers come from the same word. In AD 80 the Roman historian Tacitus calls the Tay ‘Tanaus’ or ‘Taus’, a much clearer echo of the Sanskrit.

  That means that after the last Ice Age Britain was first populated by a people who spoke an Indo-European language but were not yet Celts. The persistence of the names might be explained by the fact that the Celtic-language-speaking peoples who followed them understood what tavas meant, they understood the Old Peoples who pointed at the Tyne or the Thames and said what it was: the surger or surging river. A verb that became a name.

  The Celts had another reason not to change the names of the rivers they found. They did not dare to. In Celtic story-telling rivers are magical phenomena possessed of cataclysmic power and often contain supernatural creatures easily given to anger and evil-doing. Gaelic legends still remember the Kelpies, water horses who drag the unwary to the depths. St Columba was the first to report the Loch Ness monster, while in Breadalbane there was, according to legend, an Uruisk tribe, half human, who haunted streams and waited at fords for careless travellers. So strong was this tradition that the Celts gave the chief of this tribe a name, Peallaidh, which they then preserved in Obar Pheallaidh, or Aberfeldy as it is now rendered down into English.

  Rivers were thought to be sentient in those days long ago but even now, in what we are pleased to think of as more rational times, they still retain a power that can reach down the centuries and chill our bones. Here is an old Border rhyme which imagines the Tweed’s tributary, the River Till, talking.

  Till said to Tweed

  Though ye rin wi’ speed

  And I rin slaw

  For ae man ye kill

  I kill twa.

  In the Border country, to draw a tighter focus, there is a network of names for various sorts of rivers which supply more words and more information. Tweed and Teviot are ‘T’ rivers, the arterial waterways of the area. They surge, are big rivers, navigable in small boats for much of their length. Then there is a second group of names: the Jed Water, the Kale Water, the Ettrick and the Gala Water. Just as modern English imposes a secondary classification of ‘water’ as opposed to river, so the Old Peoples gave them a lesser name. They are the babbling, talking rivers, large enough to be noisy but not navigable. Kale and Gala come from a similar Indo- European root, kel, meaning ‘to shout’ or ‘to cry’, while Jed and Ettrick are from iekti or jekti for ‘to talk’ or ‘to babble’. Two of these ancient names have been joined to much younger words to form the town names of Jedburgh and Galashiels.

  Then there is another lesser group of streams which have held on to Sanskrit names. There are two Allan Waters and two Ale Waters in Roxburghshire and Berwickshire. Their duplication in such a small area is interesting but the derivation is harder because it is hidden inside another name. On the Ale Water is the village of Ancrum. In early monastic documents it is written in the more pulled-out version of Alnecrumba, or Alncromb or Alnecrum or Allyncrom. These show the old name of the Ale Water, which comes from the Sanskrit root alauna which means ‘to flow’ or ‘to stream’. The clearest memory of this name appears outside the Borders in Roman military maps of the north of Britain. Three places bear the name Alauna and two of them lie on rivers where the modern name shows traces of the name given by the Old Peoples. The first and best known Alauna is Alnwick in Northumberland: the old town stands on the River Aln and although it has attached an Old Norse suffix, the example is there. Less clear is the Alauna in Cumbria. The unconnected name Maryport stands on a coastal site but the derivation falls into place with another river name, this time the Ellen which washes into the Irish Sea just below the town. The final example is near Ardoch in Perthshire but the reason that prompted the Roman reconnaissance units to name the place Alauna has been lost, probably covered over by later Gaelic place names.

  In Berwickshire and north Northumberland there are more water-names such as the Blackadder and Whiteadder rivers that also come from Sanskrit roots.

  All this shows that the Old Peoples spoke an Indo-European language like Sanskrit, which is close to the sort of Hindi now understood by ordinary people in India, and that they travelled and lived by water which they named with some sophistication. Although it is difficult to judge how numerous they were, they were certainly not anonymous. Five thousand years after they fought the currents up the Tweed, we in the Borders unconsciously use their words every day.

  Also unconsciously, and particularly around K
elso, we complete in our everyday speech an extraordinary historical circle with the Old Peoples. Bina Moffat, my grandmother, used to buy kitchen utensils, and have knives sharpened by ‘Muggers’. This is not as dangerous a practice as it might appear. By Muggers she meant Gypsies, and they often drove their carts into Kelso to offer their wares and services. Muggers is a corruption of Magyars or Hungarians and it is a more sophisticated linguistic description than Gypsies. For they had little to do with Egypt or, come to that, with Bohemia. Their language does not fit neatly into the Indo-European group. Like Hungarian, Finnish, Basque, or Estonian, Romany is in its essence much less like the Mediterranean romance languages or the northern European Germanic. In fact it is a greatly corrupted dialect of Hindi with an eccentric admixture of words from several European languages. At some unrecorded time someone had understood this linguistic particularity and that is why my grandmother called the Gypsies ‘Muggers’, not because she believed they might steal her purse. That later American gloss no doubt derives in part from attitudes to these nomadic groups but in the 1950s in Scotland a Mugger was more likely to sharpen your knife than threaten you with one.

  The reasons why Gypsies were not foreign to me as a child were part historical, part linguistic. Since the late Middle Ages certain tribes had from the king a grant of rights to overwinter at the village of Yetholm which stands eight miles from Kelso in the foothills of the Cheviots. They spoke Romany and referred to themselves as the ‘Roma’ or, if it was one person, a ‘Rom’. Although they used it as a secret language or a cover tongue the Roma had become so familiar to generations of Kelso people that many of their words leaked into local dialect: basic terms such as gadji for man, manishi for woman, pani for water and jougal for dog. Two words that have transmitted themselves into modern drug culture via the film Trainspotting come from Romany: bari means good and raj means crazy. But perhaps the most telling piece of vocabulary for this story is a Romany word for river. They call it tavvy.