Arthur and the Lost Kingdoms

by Alistair Moffat

  In the eighth century Oengus, son of Fergus, became one of the most powerful Pictish kings in history. He defeated the Scots of Dalriada and threatened Strathclyde to the south. Once again the Damnonians defeated their enemies and in 750 Oengus was killed and the Picts retreated.

  Time and again Strathclyde won in crucial battles. Almost 900 years of power and then cultural occupation beyond that is a history without parallel in the British Isles. And yet the achievement of the Strathclyde Britons has been almost forgotten. Few remember that they named the Clyde or that Glasgow is their P-Celtic name of ‘Green Hollow’.

  The end came in 889. For more than a century the western seaboard of all Europe had been terrorized by the Vikings. They killed, stole and destroyed first and then in classic pattern began to settle. Kingdoms were made in the Orkneys, Manx and Dublin. They sailed up the Solway Firth into the heart of Rheged and saw the Clochmabenstane on the flat land near Gretna. The Vikings remembered it and began to talk of the ‘Sul vath fjord’ or the ‘Fiord of the Pillar Ford’ or the Solway Firth. Its northern shore with its sea lochs and natural harbours was a place they often raided and then settled. While the Vikings took western Rheged and swallowed Northumbria, the Damnonians held the Clyde and were not defeated.

  But in 870 a fateful alliance was created. Olaf, overlord of the Irish and Scottish Vikings, joined his considerable forces with those of Ivar, who had defeated the Angles of Northumbria and East Anglia.

  Perhaps as a precaution the Strathclyde kings had moved their centre from the green and indefensible hollow of Glasgow down the Clyde to the ancient fortress of Alcluid or the Rock of Dumbarton. Best seen from the opposite, western shore of the Firth of Clyde, it is a dominating place, a near-vertical rock climbing sheer out of the water on one side and offering a cliff-face to the landward. Alcluid was one of the most powerful fortresses in Britain.

  When Ivar and Olaf sailed their huge fleet of 200 longships up the Clyde estuary, they knew that the Damnonians had defied attacks for 900 years but they were determined to take the rock. After a four-month siege – something unprecedented in Dark Ages warfare – Alcluid fell and with it the ancient kingdom of Strathclyde.

  Viking occupation was short-lived and after 889 the Scots began to exert overlordship on the Clyde. The integrity of the old kingdom remained, those who worked the land still spoke P-Celtic and still worshipped Christ in the same way, but the Q-Celtic kings of Alba began to confer Strathclyde’s kingship on their eldest sons. Rather in the way that the heir to the throne is nowadays made Prince of Wales, the Scots kings kept the title for their sons or important clients and also retained the old territory of the Damnonii for their sustenance as great noblemen. This arrangement lasted well into the early medieval period when King Owain of Strathclyde was killed fighting alongside Malcolm II MacMalcolm at the Battle of Carham. After that it fell out of use, although its remnant of northern Cumbria was held into the twelfth century by the heir to the Scottish throne. Before he became king in 1128 David I, founder of Kelso Abbey, was Prince of Cumbria.

  After the mortal blow of the fall of Alcluid in 870, the kingship of Strathclyde lingered on in the shape of Eochaid son of Rhun. He was expelled in 889 and for the following year there is an entry in the Welsh Chronicle of the Princes which says: ‘The men of Strathclyde, those that refused to unite with the English, had to depart from their country, and to go to Gwynedd.’

  Leaving aside the confusion over the word ‘English’ (the Vikings had conquered Northumbria by 890) and remembering how little precision the Celtic languages of Britain showed when referring to Anglo-Saxons, this passage is unequivocal. It attaches events and dates to a clear migration from P-Celtic Scotland to Wales. There can be no doubt that the Damnonians took their stories south across the Irish Sea with them. They spoke a cousin language and tales of the glory of Strathclyde, the Gododdin and Manau and their defeat of the English, their resistance and their tenacity, slipped easily into the mainstream of orally transmitted songs, poems and stories. At the time of Rhodri Mawr when Wales was resurgent, there can have been no harm in recounting the tales of the victories of our cousins. They were almost our victories. They were our victories! We can defeat the English! The fact that the Scots greet an Irish or Welsh sporting victory over the English at anything as second only to a Scottish one should not be wondered at. And nor is the appropriation of Arthur. In 890 the men of Strathclyde sailed away with the memory of him from the Clyde and brought him to north Wales, where the ‘Men of the North’ became over time the ‘Men of North Wales’.

  However, the reputation of one of the Men of the North stayed where it began. St Kentigern was the apostle of Strathclyde and his name is a P-Celtic one, similar to Vortigern although a different sort of man altogether. It is a title from Ceann Tighearna or ‘Chief Leader’ or perhaps ‘High Priest’, or perhaps Ceann Tighe for ‘Head of the Family’. He is also known as Mungo, a Q-Celtic familiar meaning ‘Dear Friend’, which survives in modern Scotland as a Christian name.

  His church has also survived as Glasgow Cathedral, albeit in medieval form and his remains are said to be buried beneath. But it is a fanciful story that ties Kentigern as close to the city as any piece of substantiated history. At the court of King Riderch there was scandal. The queen was having an affair with a young nobleman and the king was anxious to expose the truth of it. He gave his wife a valuable ring which she in turn had given to her lover. The king noticed it on the lover’s hand, removed it when he was sleeping, pitched it into the River Clyde where it was swallowed by a salmon. Riderch then challenged his wife to produce it. The distressed woman sought help from Kentigern who dispatched one of his monks to the river to start fishing. Miraculously, the monk caught the very salmon that had swallowed the queen’s ring, thus saving the queen’s reputation.

  Nonsense, of course, but the kind of nonsense that is remembered. And which passes into heraldry. Glasgow still sports a salmon and a ring on its coat of arms.

  While the origins of that tale are obscure, Kentigern’s are less so. He was from Gododdin and his mother was described as a princess named Teneu who lived at Traprain Law, the centre of the northern Gododdin before the court moved to Edinburgh. Kentigern was educated by St Serf who was a very early British saint based at Culross on the southern shore of Fife near Dunfermline. Serf’s cult was best known in Manau and it shows Christianity and its spread as a P-Celtic matter in southern Scotland.

  After he joined the court of Riderch Hael in Glasgow, Kentigern is said to have travelled to north Wales to the place visited by Dewi Sant after he had left Whithorn. There are other stories about Kentigern which can serve to fill out a picture of him but for the sake of clarity and the direction of this narrative only one more tale needs to be told. It is a labyrinthine connection but worth making for all that. Even allowing for the licence of poets and the elasticity of date, it seems very likely that the saint Kentigern knew a pagan bard called Myrddin, the man known to the world as Merlin.

  8

  PART SEEN, PART IMAGINED

  There is an ancient streak of wildness in us all, a part of us that remains irrational, needs to remember instinct, reject reason, ignore consequence. Because what we believe, however illogical, shapes what we have done, history is surely part seen and part imagined. In order to understand the acts of ancient men and women, particularly in a pre-literate age, it is necessary to find some sense of their emotional lives, to understand how romance, love and magic worked on their minds.

  Here I want to turn to a figure whose role as counsellor, teacher and magician seemed at first to exist only in the fables concocted by Geoffrey of Monmouth and his medieval imitators. Compared with Arthur, Merlin appeared an infinitely more mythic figure. And yet there is far more direct documentary evidence for his existence in the Dark Ages than for Arthur. There are three main sources of reliable information which can be pleached together to bear some weight.

  Firstly, most of what is known about the career of St Kentiger
n comes from a biography compiled by a Cumbrian monk called Jocelyn in the thirteenth century.⁵⁵ He understood P-Celtic and relates well a sense of the kingdoms of Strathclyde, Gododdin and Rheged. He uses material from the ninth century which has the ring of common sense to frame a coherent narrative of events that took place in the sixth century. Kentigern was active in Strathclyde between about 570 and his death in 612. The fact that he established a church as far south as Hoddam, near Ecclefechan in Dumfriesshire, has allowed historians to plot the expansion of the kingdom of his patron Riderch of the Clyde. In a passage of routine hagiographic propaganda, Jocelyn relates the story of a meeting, in a wood, between St Kentigern and a naked, hairy madman. Called Lailoken, he told the saint that he had been driven wild by the slaughter of a bloody battle fought nearby between the Liddel Water and a place known as Carwannok. After the battle Lailoken had fled into the forest. Later he reappeared to attend one of Kentigern’s masses, possibly at Hoddam, where he interrupted by shouting out wild prophecies. And then, as the wild man senses the approach of his own death, he asks that Kentigern accept him into the Church.

  Jocelyn’s purpose in relating all this is transparent. In the sixth century all the P-Celtic kingdoms had converted but it is wrong to imagine that this happened comprehensively or quickly. While Ninian, Columba, Kentigern and others adopted a strategy of targeting the royal family and the top slices of society for conversion, it is likely that Celtic beliefs lingered for a long time among ordinary people and in remote places. Lailoken sounds like a Druid who lived a hermitic existence ‘in the woods’. There are other versions of this story but its essence is clear, as is its relationship to an entirely other group of sources.

  But before looking through the window into the sixth century which these offer, it is necessary to draw out a historical blind. Ever anxious to Latinize P-Celtic names, Geoffrey of Monmouth stumbled on a problem with Myrddin. If he had simply hardened the ‘dd’ to ‘d’ and added the suffix ‘us’ to give us Merdinus, his readers would have laughed at him. Merdinus means ‘Shitty One’. And so Merlin was born, out of necessity rather than literary taste.

  The sources that Geoffrey drew on were known collectively as the Prophecies of Myrddin and when he reworked them into his Vita Merlini in 1135, he added so much new and fanciful material that the legend of the Great Enchanter quickly overlaid his historical Celtic origins.⁵⁶ When the later accretions are scraped away and the work of Myrddin reduced as close to its sixth-century original as it is possible to get, the picture becomes much clearer, even though the primary sources are poetic rather than a set of prose reports.

  There are five poems in all: ‘Appletrees’, ‘Greetings’, ‘The Dialogue of Myrddin and Taliesin’, ‘A Fugitive Poem of Myrddin in his Grave’ and ‘A Dialogue Between Myrddin and his Sister Gwenddydd’. Mostly they contain prophecies, either general, cryptic, or specific. But studded through each of them are fragments of a real narrative with named people, places and incidents which can be found well established elsewhere in other sources.

  Broadly the story of Myrddin runs like this. In 573 a bloody battle was fought at a place called Arthuret, between Longtown and Carlisle. Two sub-kings of Rheged opposed each other: the Christian King of York, Peredur, and the pagan King of Carlisle, Gwenddollau. From the king lists of the Old North, Gwenddollau ap Ceido appears to have had a considerable pedigree which places him sixth in descent from Old King Cole. And his memory is preserved in the name of the village of Corwhinley near Longtown. It is from Caer Wenddolau or ‘Gwenddollau’s Fort’. More pungent tradition places this king squarely in the old religion. Bards sing of princes travelling far to attend the ‘balefire of Gwenddollau’ or his cremation at Arthuret and he is also named as one of the pagan ‘Bull Protectors of Britain’.

  Peredur was also a P-Celt and an heir of Coel Hen, and internecine fights like this cannot have been uncommon as the old British kingdoms fragmented. Gwenddollau was defeated and killed in what sounds like a particularly savage encounter. His bard, Myrddin, was driven insane by the great slaughter and he fled from the field into the Wood of Celidon whose fringes lay near at hand. He became a madman (‘mirth’ originally denoted ‘insane laughter’ and it seems to have some relation to the name Myrddin) and began a long exile in the wild wood living on fruit and the occasional gifts of visitors. He was at the mercy of the weather – ‘snow to my knees, ice in my beard’ – and prey to his own imaginings. One of his fears seems however to have been real enough.

  I slept alone in the Woods of Celyddon

  Shield on shoulder, sword on thigh⁵⁷

  Because Myrddin fears not Peredur of York but Riderch, King of Strathclyde who is ‘a lover of monks, a hater of bards’.

  There are many more references which pin these poems to the sixth century and the connecting figure of Riderch as well as the great similarity between the poems and the stories Jocelyn tells of Kentigern which mean that Lailoken and Myrddin are very likely identical.

  For the times these narratives represent an unusually rich store of historical material and they make Merlin’s actual existence more acceptable than almost every other figure of the period. And more, they confirm him as one of the Gwyr Y Gogledd (the Men of the North). Seeking refuge in the Wood of Caledon, hiding from Christian kings, in the centre of the old territory of the Selgovae, Merlin is also emphatically a pagan. Perhaps the last of the Druids, surviving in a remote refuge among the tribe that was almost certainly, according to archaeology, the last in southern Scotland to convert. There is even, on the Ordnance Survey, high up on Hart Fell in the middle of the Great Wood, from whose slopes spring the Clyde, the Tweed and the Annan, a place marked as Merlin’s Cave.⁵⁸ Perhaps it was there, in the whistling, snell winds of the seasons, that he searched the sky for portents: Merlin’s observatory.

  The historical Merlin lived sixty years after Arthur perished at the Battle of Camlann and there can have been no actual connection between them. But it is remarkable that these two men lived so close in place and time.

  There is another source to buttress these literary sources: tradition and toponymy. Between Hart Fell and the town of Peebles lies the hamlet of Stobo. Its church is one of the oldest in Scotland; part of its fabric is Norman but the dedication is much older. Outshot from the body of the modern kirk is the North Aisle Chapel which was reconstructed in 1928 out of the ruins of a fifteenth-century mortuary chantry which in turn was built on the foundations of a seventh-century cell dedicated to the cult of St Kentigern. It is one of a clutch of dedications to the saint in the Selgovan hills.

  Layers of tradition are sandwiched at Stobo between layers of archaeology. The name Stobo is derived from an Anglian word for ‘a holy place’, which means that the tradition of Kentigern was still alive when the Germanic invaders penetrated the upper Tweed, probably in the eighth century. That memory endured through the Middle Ages, the Reformation and right up to 1928 when the restorers inserted a stained-glass window into the wall of the North Aisle Chapel. There are two figures in it: a tonsured man wearing the brown habit of the Franciscans stands with his hand raised in benediction over a kneeling man who is long-haired, half-naked and wearing an animal skin. Under the monk is written the name Kentigern, and under the wild man Myrddin. More confirmation, albeit in a tradition, that Lailoken and Merlin were the same man.

  However the location of this church and its modern window are what is important to the next part of this puzzle. Across the road from Stobo Kirk is a farm called Easter Dawyck, another straight-forward Anglian or Old English place name meaning ‘Crow Farm’. There are other English names in the area, but as the road bridges the young Tweed at a farm known as Altarstone, it is as though an invisible toponymic frontier has been crossed. English names cease and the landscape is named in P-Celtic. A group of ghost names that remember Merlin.

  At their centre lies Drumelzier. That is a Q-Celtic name directly concocted from the much earlier P-Celtic Dunmedler.⁵⁹ Allowing for a metathetical confu
sion of consonants (common enough in Celtic names), it means ‘The Dun of Myrddin’, or ‘Merlin’s Fort’. While the hamlet and its kirk lie on the banks of the river, 400 yards up a steep hill stands Tinnis Castle. This is from P-Celtic Dinas, which now means a ‘city’ in modern Welsh, but in those days it was for a focal stronghold. To the north, less than a mile away across the river valley, is Dreva Craig, another large fort notable for its chevaux-de-frise defences. Designed to frustrate both infantry and cavalry charges, large boulders have been rolled and set in front of the ditches at Dreva. The name is also P-Celtic from tref for ‘settlement’. Below the forts, on the flood plain of the Tweed, there is a standing stone and tucked under roadside trees just beyond the farm of the same name is the Altarstone. This is old, and if it is remembered nowadays as a place of sacrifice, then that tradition will have been even fresher in the sixth century.

  Guarding the south-west, on Rachan Hill is another fort, completing the circle of lookouts and defences around Dunmedler’s fertile flatlands where the Tweed is joined by its tributary the Biggar Water.

  As often, modern names remember ancient association: the largest house in Drumelzier is called Merlindale and it is reached by Merlindale Bridge. But there is an older tale which has been repeated for centuries about the little hamlet.

  When Tweed and Pausyl meet at Merlin’s grave