Arthur and the Lost Kingdoms

by Alistair Moffat

  The story of York is extraordinary and shows the tenacity of these ancient tree names. It is first recorded in 150 as Eborakon and then Eboracum which came from the P-Celtic personal name Eburos which in turn came from the word iubhar (best preserved in Scots Gaelic) which means ‘yew tree’. The Angles who fought at Catterick against the Gododdin had already taken the city, but they did not understand its Latinized name. They twisted it into Eofor Wic Ceaster: ‘A Wild Boar Homestead at the former Roman Army Camp’. Approximately. Then they boiled it down to Eoforwic which the Danish Vikings modified to Jorvik which appeared as York in the thirteenth century. The persistence of iubhar in the first part of the name is remarkable and it shows that the Glamoury has long fingers, reaching all the way to Manhattan Island.

  The Celtic languages carry much in the way of attitude inside them. All languages do that, but without the labour of learning them it is difficult to understand how those attitudes work on the world that words describe. Although the P- and Q-Celts were not literate people, in the sense of writing down their languages, they did become influenced by the determined and consistent literacy of the Romans, whose Latin inscriptions, carved on stone, were placed where all could see them: on public buildings, on wayside tombs and on the insignia of the legions.

  By the fourth century the Q-Celts began to develop an alphabet somewhat influenced by Latin, but emphatically Celtic in its application. Taking its name from the Irish God Ogma, the Ogham script is not an abstract like the Latin alphabet which children still learn today, where symbols representing sounds are followed in a sequence of twenty-six. The Q-Celts based Ogham script on trees.⁶⁵ Taking a long vertical line to represent the trunk, each letter or twig (the Irish word fleasc has both meanings) stands for each of the eighteen letters of the Gaelic alphabet, depending on its position and orientation. Some letters are straight lines or twigs at right angles, others are diagonal, and still more penetrate through the trunk to show both sides. And even more concretely each letter is represented by a different tree in the forest. Rather in the way that children recite A for Apple, B for Ball and C for Cat, the Q-Celts remembered their Ogham by the initial letters of the trees they saw around them. Their alphabet looked like this:

  This, for consistency, is an old Scottish Gaelic version of the Ogham and it is almost identical with the Irish Gaelic list. The yew and the birch appear twice to cope with minor differences and the appearance of the vine as a tree or shrub is interesting since it seems to support the notion that the weather was warmer 1,500 years ago when the Ogham came into use.

  The script only appears now on stones for the mundane reason that they have survived. It is almost certain that the most common vehicles for Ogham were either sticks, wooden stakes in the ground or living trees. All that has been coherently translated from the stones are a series of names and their locations suggest strongly that they were used as boundary markers.

  There are 332 Ogham stones in Ireland, 40 in Wales, 8 in England, 2 in southern Scotland and 27 in the north of Scotland. This last group are inscribed with a Pictish version of the alphabet which has proved impossible to decode.

  Ogham script

  Even though there are no surviving Ogham stones in P-Celtic, there are remnants of an adaptation of the script in what Welsh scholars call Coel bren. It means, somewhat tautologically, ‘wood sticks’. And the names of trees in P-Celtic largely bear the same initial letters as their counterparts in Q-Celtic: derwen is for oak, bedw for birch, collen for hazel and so on. I think it likely that Ogham was carved on trees in the Great Wood in southern Scotland even though nothing has survived. If stones denoting boundaries were placed in the clearings, the riversides and the hilltops, those who invaded or took control of the land would have removed them as a trace of former ownership. Where Oghams do survive, in Ireland, Wales and northern Scotland, no new people gained power for centuries and land remained in the hands of people who understood the stones.

  The significance of this alphabet is to show clearly one of the ways in which Celts began to develop the idea that nature could have relative value and be considered in a hierarchy. More particularly, the uses of trees described in this letter-system allow a window into everyday life. Here are some examples of tree knowledge that follow the Ogham order.

  Birch – their leaves make a tea which relieves rheumatism and breaks down bladder stones. In Scotland it is still believed that bad luck follows the felling of birches.

  Rowan – everyday hand tools were made of this wood as were pegs to hold parts of implements together. The power of the tree to protect is the reason why it was found in farmyards and near houses, and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when country people crowded into tenements in cities, they red-leaded their doorsteps to represent the berries of the rowan.

  Alder – Gwawrddur was ‘an alder palisade’ for Taliesin because the P-Celts made their shields from this hard wood. Because it lasts a long time in water before rotting, aider was also used to make jetties and serve as piles for crannogs.

  Willow – willow withies are still used for basketwork and archaeologists can show that the Celts coppiced the trees to produce more wands.

  Ash – made spear shafts. In Merlin’s poem ‘Appletrees’ there is a line: ‘The Saesons will be slaughtered by our ashen spears’.

  Oak – ships were made of ‘hearts of oak’ and more than any tree they were venerated. Darroch became associated with strength and nobility. A modern Gaelic poet uses the hierarchy of animals to describe it: ‘salmon of trees, eagle of trees’. Druids were called ‘oak-knowers’ and groves of the trees were sacred. It hosted the mistletoe which Druids believed was an aid to fertility; we still kiss under it at Christmas. In Scotland people swore ‘by oak and ash and thorn’ and women hugged oak trees hoping for easier labour pains.

  Tree lore is almost lost to us now but there is in the Ogham a genuine memory of what the Great Wood meant to the P- and Q- Celts and a fleeting sense of how they thought about it.

  In 1823 William Cobbett went on his rural rides in Surrey and Sussex where he heard an entertaining echo of that past. He met an old man who claimed that when hazelnuts, beechnuts and others were plentiful it had an effect on young people. ‘A great nut year was a great bastard year,’ he told Cobbett and furthermore he could support his view by looking at parish records. He was only repeating tree lore, as was the old saying: ‘When elder leaves are as big as a mouse’s ear, women are in season.’ Doubtful nowadays.

  A good deal more likely is the survival of a very old wood-burning poem which had its origins in Devon and has now been pleasingly rewritten in English.

  Oak logs will warm you well,

  That are old and dry;

  Logs of pine will sweetly smell

  But the sparks will fly

  Birch logs will burn too fast,

  Chestnut scarce at all;

  Hawthorn logs are good to last –

  Cut them in the fall.

  Holly logs will burn like wax,

  You may burn them green;

  Elm logs like to smouldering flax,

  No flame to be seen.

  Beech logs for winter time,

  Yew logs as well;

  Green elder logs it is a crime

  For any man to sell:

  Pear logs and apple logs,

  They will scent your room,

  Cherry logs across the dogs

  Smell like flower of broom.

  Ash logs smooth and grey,

  Burn them green or old,

  Buy up all that come your way

  Worth their weight in gold.

  Since we no longer depend on the natural world to warm us, these characteristics are forgotten.

  To most of us now, as urban dwellers, the seasons mean little more than the length of the days and the outside temperature. Shelter is all around us and warmth is rarely something we have to work to create. The Glamoury is nothing more now than a collection of explanations of phrases and words, if that
. But the plants, animals and seasons of Britain were forces of great power felt by the Celtic peoples of Britain in a way that has almost but not quite outrun living memory. An old Catholic priest from South Uist told me once that he bitterly regretted that children no longer went barefoot. From the feast of St Bride (Imbolc) on 1 February he wore no shoes and he said he could feel the ground come alive through the soles of his feet. And at Hallowe’en he could feel that the earth was ready to die. He spoke to me in Gaelic, because he believed that English had not the means of carrying these ideas. They just sounded daft, he said, looking away out of his kitchen window.

  South Uist may be an unlikely place to look for Arthur but I am certain that in the chapel house on the machair I heard some sense of how his people thought about the world.

  The tiny speech community of Scottish Gaels has also preserved something else which will colour a picture of all Celtic Britain and supply an elusive insight into the lives of those who are always ignored by early history: ordinary people.

  A body of ancient medical practice has survived in Gaelic in the Highlands which is now sadly unique, but which once healed and helped sick people all over Britain and western Europe.⁶⁶ Described no longer as the Glamoury but demeaned by the name folk medicine, it was all but eradicated by the witch-hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The appalling punishments meted out by the Church to women who were guilty of nothing more than a knowledge of ancient herbal recipes for the relief of pain drove this body of lore first underground and then to extinction. Although the witch-hunters brought their terror very near to the edge of the Gaidhealtachd – in 1590 Agnes Sampson from the town of Keith was burned at the stake for alleviating labour pains for one of her pregnant neighbours – they never penetrated the glens and sea lochs to any great degree. Remoteness saved the Gaelic medical tradition and so did the obvious fact that it was not carried on in English. While women, and some men, were horribly tortured and burned by the agents of both Catholic and Protestant Churches all over western Europe, the Gaelic healers of the Highlands of Scotland quietly continued to use medicines they found growing around them to cure and console the sick and the old.

  By its nature Celtic medicine was a tradition; a combination of long experience and observation with a necessary faith nourished by need and the example of others. Because a natural or herbal cure had a history of working, patients were more disposed to believe in its efficacy, to want it to ease pain or correct malfunction. Which in turn went a long way to ensure that it did.

  Credibility was further buttressed by formality. Far from being a mere collection of remedies arrived at by centuries of trial and error, Celtic medicine was seen as the conventional wisdom. In other words the people of the Scottish Gaidhealtachd did not see it as ‘folk medicine’ or ‘alternative medicine’ or something inferior to what was practised in the Lowlands, it was simply medicine and all that there was.

  Central to the survival of Celtic medicine is a remarkable family. Far-famed throughout the Highlands and down the centuries since Somerled, the Lord of the Isles, was what became known as the Beaton family. Before the sixteenth century they called themselves the MacBeths. But in either guise it is clear that, as the focus of Celtic healing, their genealogy goes back further than conventional history can trace it.

  The Beatons and other medical families became professional doctors with a close connection to the clans and particular clan chiefs. So important was their role that even when the Scottish kings suppressed the Lordship of the Isles, the patronage of the Beatons and others continued.

  But it was royal patronage in medieval Scotland which established the family as pre-eminent. In the early fourteenth century Robert I Bruce was the patient of Patrick MacBeth, undoubtedly a renowned doctor but probably unable to do more than ease the discomfort of the old king’s leprosy. David II employed Gilbert, Patrick’s son and while the king was held hostage in England between 1346 and 1357, there is evidence that his doctor was allowed to travel between Scotland and England. Probably he returned to see home and family but perhaps he also needed to replenish his store of natural remedies. At all events it is clear that the Scottish kings from Robert I down to Charles I employed members of the Beaton family to minister to them. Such was the prestige of Celtic medicine that even a renaissance monarch like Charles I, painted by Van Dyke and sculpted by Bernini, turned to the ancient traditions of the Glamoury for help when he was sick.

  In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, before the witch hunters chased the old traditions into the hills, manuscripts began to appear which codified good practice and sometimes showed how wide was the net of Gaelic learning, with translations of European and classical texts often included.⁶⁷ These were sometimes used as manuals and marginal jottings are common. They show doctors as purveyors of common sense, of good hygiene and also men who listened to their patients in a proper attempt at diagnosis. Washing, cleanliness in cooking and food handling are all coupled with more arcane medical advice, as well as sound social counselling. In one manuscript a doctor writes that it is better to cook peas or beans with a pinch of cumin since that prevents farting.

  The most substantial Gaelic medical manuscript was compiled by Angus Beaton of Skye in 1612. In a remarkable echo of the Glamoury, he writes his name on page 302 in a version of the Ogham alphabet. Using a pair of consonants to stand together for vowels, he mimics the strokes of the ancient script. This was a doodling attempt at a code which begs a larger question about the use and origin of Ogham. Was it something understood only by the Beatons’ Druidic ancestors? And was its use somehow sacred? All that can be said with any certainty is that both the Druids and the Beatons (and other families) were groups in Celtic society who carried valued traditions of great knowledge, who were revered and who occupied roles that placed them close to political power. Perhaps the use of Ogham is a slender thread that binds them together across millennia.

  Although the persecutions of the seventeenth century killed the old medicine in southern Scotland and severed a direct link with the P-Celts of the Great Wood, there are still some telling traces to be detected. The Romans brought medical knowledge which found its way into what survived in the Highlands, and these practices and ingredients can only have been absorbed in times of peace and settlement, which in turn must mean that they were exchanged with the P-Celts of southern Scotland after 80 and before the withdrawal of the legions two centuries later.

  Hygiene was the clearest connection, and unlike their southern cousins, Gaelic doctors absorbed the common sense of cleanliness and its direct connection to good health from the Romans. They also introduced more plants into the Celtic materia medica. Many of these were already native to southern Scotland but the Romans understood how to use them in compiling cures.⁶⁸ The juniper berry is a good example. Traditionally the Ettrick Forest, as late as the nineteenth century, abounded with juniper bushes which were picked at the onset of winter and the berries sold at market. The Romans knew that they had a purgative quality, very useful in treating stomach ailments and the convulsions they sometimes caused. Another example is male fern, an everyday name for a plant much used by Roman cavalrymen. The Gaelic name is marc raineach and as ‘horse fern’ it says more about its medical history. Horses are very prone to develop worms and there is strong evidence that the Romans introduced its use to the Gododdin in the second century AD. The roots were first powdered and then infused in the horses’ drinking water.

  The names of herbs also show how closely linked the medicine of the Highlands was with the P-Celtic south. Thyme is a common herb and the Gaels used it as a flavouring and also made a decoction of it for people who slept badly and suffered nightmares. It has an interesting name in Gaelic: leis mhic righ Bhreatainn or ‘the plant belonging to the King of the Britons’ son’.

  The origins of that are now lost but the link between medicine and diet was very close and looking through the herbals and lists of aphorisms and observations, it is possible to gathe
r a good sense of what the Celts of southern Scotland ate, and thereby an idea of the everyday texture of their lives.

  By and large they were vegetarians. They ate oatmeal porridge sometimes flavoured with seasonal berries: juniper, raspberries, wild strawberries, and sometimes they added hazelnuts and beechnuts. They made brose from barley and added pulses to it, usually peas or beans. Broth from kail and wild celery and vegetable stew were common dishes. Milk from cows, ewes and goats was a source of protein either drunk fresh or made into cheese or butter. Eggs from a variety of birds were eaten and fish netted or hooked from the lochs, rivers and seas. The P-Celts were loath to kill many domestic animals for meat and they depended on their skills as hunters to supply protein, particularly in wintertime. Here is a beautiful song from a mother to her child which was found bound into the A version of ‘The Gododdin’. It is a uniquely homely piece which gives a clear sense of family life among the P-Celts of southern Scotland in the seventh century.

  Dinogad’s speckled petticoat

  was made of skins of speckled stoat:

  whip whip whipalong

  eight times we’ll sing the song.

  When your father hunted the land

  spear on shoulder club in hand

  thus his speedy dogs he’d teach

  Giff Gaff catch her catch her fetch!

  In his coracle he’d slay

  fish as a lion does its prey.

  When your father went to the moor

  he’d bring back heads of stag, fawn, boar

  the speckled grouse’s head from the mountain

  fishes’ heads from the falls of Oak Fountain.

  Whatever your father struck with his spear