Arthur and the Lost Kingdoms

by Alistair Moffat

  wild pig wild cat fox from his lair

  unless it had wings it would never get clear.

  Silverweed grows wild now in hedge roots and on roadsides but both Celts and Romans ate it in quantity. Its roots, dried and roasted, are said to be nutty and taste like parsnips. Its usefulness is remembered in its Gaelic name, an seachdamh aran or ‘the seventh bread’, and the great collector of traditional poetry and music, Alexander Carmichael, wrote down a very old verse in praise of the silverweed.

  Honey under ground,

  Silverweed of spring

  Honey and condiment

  Whisked whey of summer.

  Honey and fruitage

  Carrot of autumn.

  Honey and crunching

  Nuts of winter

  The Scots language occasionally remembered the effects of Celtic herbal medicine very obviously. Water pepper is called lus an fhogair in Gaelic, which means literally ‘the plant which expels’, and it was commonly used as a purgative. In Scots it is known still as hot arsmart.

  More romantic is the tradition that love-making under the rowan tree was likely to bring pregnancy for a virgin and give her a male child into the bargain. Since the Scots climate did not often allow couples to venture out of doors to find a discreetly placed rowan, housebuilders brought the wood inside. The old name for the crossbeam in a chimney breast is the ‘rantree’ and it allowed tradition to be served in fireside comfort.⁶⁹

  The Glamoury lasted a long time. In his Tour of Scotland, made in 1772, Thomas Pennant saw Highland midwives take a green stick from an ash tree and hold it over a fire so that the sap oozed into a cup, which they then gave to the newborn baby as its first drink of life. This is a lineal descendant of the Glamoury. The Celts believed that the ash was a powerful and protective tree; they used its branches for divination and its straight limbs for spear shafts. The Norsemen held that the ash was their World Tree, called Yggdrasil. In its top canopy, far from the sight of men was Asgard, the house of Valhalla. Around its trunk was Midgard, the world we see now, and below the soil among its roots was Niflhel or the World of the Dead. And below that was ‘Hel’ or the underworld.

  The collector Alexander Carmichael published the Carmina Gadelica beginning in the early part of this century. It contains much that is beautiful and even more that is practical. There is a lyrical poem of great simplicity which also acts as a guide to where different tree species grow.

  Choose the willow of the streams,

  Choose the hazel of the rocks,

  Choose the alder of the marshes,

  Choose the birch of the waterfalls.

  Choose the ash of the shade,

  Choose the yew of resilience,

  Choose the elm of the brae,

  Choose the oak of the sun.⁷⁰

  As the Industrial Revolution emptied the landscape and people forgot their knowledge of the plants and animals around them, a country to town trade developed. Since organized cultivation began, surplus had always been exchanged or sold on market days, but what began to happen in the nineteenth century with the rapid growth of cities was different. Country knowledge, country skills and products, even country people came from another world, a place visited by city people but no longer understood by them. That is a gulf that has widened ever since, and its beginnings were noted by a nineteenth-century historian whose description of a wood fair already carries the seeds of division.

  The shortwood in the glens is worked into various useful articles, and disposed of in the low country. In the month of August there is a timber market held in Aberdeen for several days, which is of ancient origin, and to which the Highlanders bring ladders, harrows, tubs, pails, and many other articles; those who have nothing else, bring rods of hazel and other young wood, with sackfuls of aitnach or juniper and other mountain berries.

  Where Celtic medicine, tree and plant lore, and a general affinity for the land survived, a sense of that ancient way of life also continued. Occasionally it was reported to the sophisticates of the city and the righteous of the Kirk as quaint at best, and outright pagan at worst. But for us these random glimpses offer an insight into life in Dark Ages Scotland.

  It is known that Druids had supervised the ritual sacrifice of bulls both in pursuit of divination and also for votive purposes, sometimes on behalf of an important person, a king or a leader of some sort. There is no doubt that sacrifices of bulls conducted in exactly the same manner and for the same purposes were happening in the Highlands of Scotland as late as the 1670s, and possibly beyond.

  The outraged elders of the presbytery of Applecross reported in 1658 that ‘abominable and heathenish practices’ were going on in the area. Men from Achnashellach had gathered at what sounds like an ancient holy place, the site of ruined buildings and a hollowed-out stone where ‘they tryd the entreing of thair head’. They brought a bull with them, tethered it and then killed it in sacrifice. They walked sunwise around the site and attempted divination and prophecy by the hollowed-out stone.

  Twenty years later, in 1678, the Dingwall presbytery noted another bull sacrifice, this time on the island Eilean Ma Ruibhe in Loch Maree. To this old and holy place Hector Mackenzie brought his two sons and a grandson and on the site of an ancient temple they sacrificed a bull to ‘the god Mourie’. They killed the animal ‘in one heathenish manner … for the sake of his wife Cirstane’s health’.

  The old tradition died very hard and these reported incidents would have been only a part of what still went on in secret and remote locations.

  Some communities had more confidence and did not trouble to keep their old ways out of the sight of the Kirk. At the old Celtic festival of Samhuinn, on the west side of the island of Lewis people gathered at the church of St Mulvay. Then one of the men took a jug of ale and waded through the breakers into the Atlantic where he stopped, and with the crowd on the beach, he chanted verses now lost to us which were intended to invoke the sea-god Seonaidh. Then he poured the ale into the sea to encourage the god to wash ashore a good harvest of seaweed so that the fields would be well fertilized. After he had regained the beach, the crowd returned to the church, put out the altar candle and began a night of singing, dancing and drinking. The Kirk eventually suppressed this festival but even after the ritual was stopped the crowd still gathered on the beach to chant and invoke the sea-god Briannuil, asking him to blow a north wind so that the seaweed was washed ashore. So complete is the triumph of Presbyterianism that Gaelic dictionaries now list Briannuil as a synonym for Satan.⁷¹

  Some Druidic traditions escaped censure because they were either innocuous or misunderstood, or both. On the Black Isle near the village of Munlochy is what is now called the Clootie Well. Instead of the more common Celtic habit of throwing objects of value into water in return for the granting of a wish, the Clootie accepts just that: cloots or rags are tied to the bushes either side of the well. And local residents have observed groups of young girls drinking the water and then tying their knickers on the bushes.

  This habit has spread throughout the western world. At air bases in Britain the wives of pilots flying missions to Iraq during the Gulf War tied rags on the wire-netting fences around the perimeter, and the country and western standard ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon round the Old Oak Tree’ combines at least two Druidic traditions.

  This may seem a long way from the Men of the Great Wood, the Gododdin, and certainly the survival and understanding of these ancient memories tells us little of their politics and their military history. But it does help an understanding of how they thought about the world, what they believed and what, in that revealing phrase, was second nature to them.

  10

  THE GENERALS

  Whatever his rank it is clear from historical sources that Arthur was no king. None of the genealogies of British or P-Celtic kingdoms lists him as an ancestor who ruled before the Anglo-Saxon or Q-Celtic takeover. In no contemporary or near-contemporary account is there mention of a King Arthur. Instead he is called dux be
llorum or the ‘leader of battles’, a title more reminiscent of Roman military terminology than anything royal or hereditary. Elsewhere he is styled ‘Artorius miles’ or ‘Arthur the soldier’. It was Geoffrey of Monmouth who anointed him king in 1135, a title that none of his contemporaries would have attached to him. Because Arthur was a professional soldier, a man who was appointed to lead a cavalry army on behalf of a coalition of kings; in modern parlance he was a general. Others had done a similar job before Arthur and to understand his role fully it is necessary to brush in some of the background.

  Britannia was valuable. The imperial authorities exerted themselves greatly to protect the province throughout its occupation, particularly from incursion from the north. Emperors led legionary armies against the tribes of Caledonia and later spent much effort in dealing with seaborne attacks from the east. Septimus Severus died at York and a century later in 306 Constantine II was proclaimed emperor in the legionary fortress. More troops were stationed in Britannia than in any other province, even though its sea defences were more secure than the long land frontier on the Rhine–Danube line. That meant in turn that many imperial usurpers chose to raise rebellion in Britannia, backed by its wealth and remote enough from Rome to allow time to build a power base.

  In the fourth century the continental empire was under constant pressure from barbarian attacks and the instability this caused led to much faction fighting between imperial candidates. And the focus of Roman power was shifting slowly but inexorably to the east and the new capital at Constantinople.

  While there was general decline and fragmentation in the west, the process was slower and less dramatic in Britannia. Communications remained good while the extensive network of paved roads was maintained. It was much much easier to travel from, say, London to Edinburgh in 400 than it was in 1600. In the countryside, villas survived and thrived. Archaeologists digging at Hucclecote in Gloucestershire and Great Casterton in Rutland have found new mosaic floors laid at the end of the fourth century. While it grew increasingly difficult to retain slaves and other bonded agricultural workers, the fertile flatlands of Britannia continued to support organized villa-farms well beyond 400.

  At Wroxeter, near Shrewsbury, the great basilica fell into disuse around 350 but archaeologists have found evidence of a remarkable new structure which was built over the levelled rubble of the hall. A new municipal centre, rather like a modern shopping mall, was constructed in a classical mode, except that it was not built out of stone but of timber.

  During the first half of the fourth century the province enjoyed some relief from the raids of the Picts and the Saxons and political peace also seems to have reigned. Britannia basked in unprecedented prosperity. But its ripeness inevitably attracted unwanted attention. In 342 there was trouble, so severe that the Emperor Constans arrived the following January or February. Although details are scant, it seems that the Picts had mounted a heavy raid down through the old territory of the Selgovae and had burned the outpost forts north of Hadrian’s Wall at High Rochester, Bewcastle and Risingham. The patrol groups known as the Areani were involved in some unspecified action or other but the only concrete decision made by Constans was one of policy. The substantial fort at High Rochester or Bremenium, which lay on Dere Street in the territory of the Gododdin, was abandoned. Since frontier security was of paramount importance to the emperor, this must have involved a judgement about the military capabilities of the Gododdin. He and his advisors took the view that it was better to leave defence in the hands of warriors who knew the Picts, who had been their eastern neighbours for at least a century, whose lives and land lay beside their line of advance, and whose intelligence about the movement of these hill tribes must have been second to none. Constans’ judgement is important for this narrative. The Picts had been the curse of Britannia for generations; imperial forces had struggled to contain them. In 343 the Gododdin were entrusted with the task of subduing the Picts.

  At first they failed, spectacularly. In 350 the usurper Magnentius, a Spaniard who had risen through the ranks of the Roman army, removed troops from Britannia to support his imperial ambitions on the continent. After his death in 353, a sinister official named Paul arrived in Britannia to organize reprisals against the usurper’s supporters. Nicknamed ‘Catena’ or ‘the Chain’, he further depleted the military and civil infrastructure in his purges.

  After 360, raids from the north became more frequent. The Gododdin seem to have been powerless to prevent the Picts from descending on Britannia intent on destruction and plunder. Once over the Wall there seems to have been little to prevent their bloody sprees.

  And then in 367 a remarkable event took place. In what the Romans called the Barbarian Conspiracy, the tribes of the north, the Scots in the west and the Franks and Saxons in Europe attacked the provinces of Britannia and Gaul simultaneously. Coordinated in some unknown fashion, these raids were the most devastating yet to be visited on the south.

  It seems that the Roman frontier patrols, the Areani, had been bribed by the Pictish chieftains both to supply intelligence and to fail to report the massing of the northern host in the Selgovan hills. The Gododdin may have taken the prudent course and done nothing.

  Perhaps they and the treacherous Areani were intimidated by the first appearance of a new people, the far northern allies of the Picts. Their savagery was appalling and St Jerome claims in a memoir to have seen them commit cannibalism in Gaul. They were the Atecotti. The name is P-Celtic and it means ‘the Old Peoples’.⁷² They came from Caithness and Sutherland and the Western Isles. St Columba’s biographer Adomnan remembers an incident in Skye when the saint met an old man who spoke a language that was neither P- or Q-Celtic, but must have come from the north. There are Ogham stones inscribed in a language where it is possible to make out personal names but the rest is utterly unintelligible to us. Perhaps the Atecotti were a remnant of the Old Peoples who, driven far to the north, make a brief and bloody appearance in history as the most savage and feared elements in the Barbarian Conspiracy.

  Having bypassed the Gododdin and the forces of Strathclyde, the Picts, Scots and Atecotti burst through Hadrian’s Wall and then, at some point, they destroyed what remained of the imperial field army. That victory allowed bands of warriors to roam at will in the province, burning, slaughtering and plundering as they made their bloody progress south. It must have been terrifying. Many soldiers in the provincial forces deserted, slaves took the cover of chaos as a chance to escape and join in the mayhem. The sole motivation of the northern tribes was plunder and destruction; they were raiders, not invaders.

  Nevertheless the incursion provoked an immediate imperial reaction. By the spring of 368, at the start of the campaigning season, a man known to history as Count Theodosius arrived in Britannia with four regiments to expel the barbarians, clean up the mess and take measures to discourage a recurrence.

  Theodosius acquired the seemingly anachronistic title of ‘Count’ because of a series of far-reaching changes made to military nomenclature in particular and to the Roman army in general. This process was begun in the early fourth century by the Emperor Diocletian who created the office of Dux, a Latin word which broadly means a mixture of ‘leader’ and ‘commander’. Benito Mussolini adopted it in his self-conferred title of Il Duce and the rulers of Venice for the quasi-royal Doge. To the Romans it bore a more specific meaning of ‘commander of frontier forces’.

  These new titles, their chains of command and the units under their control were listed in a fascinating document called the Notitia Dignitatum.⁷³ Covering both the eastern and western empires, the extant version dates from around 395 but includes a good deal of earlier information. The army in Britannia is described in three sections, each under the control of a different officer.

  First and most senior is the Dux Britanniarum, the Commander of the British. He had direct oversight of fourteen units, all but three of which were stationed to the east of the Pennines in Durham and Yorkshire. His headquarters was
the old Army Command North at York, where the Sixth Legion had been based for nearly 200 years. Three units were of a new type: cavalry regiments which operated independently of infantry. In a signal defeat near the city of Adrianople in what is now Bulgaria, the Emperor Valens had seen his infantry-based legions destroyed by the heavy cavalry of the Sarmation Alans. That had a profound effect on Roman strategy and led directly to the promotion of mounted units as a strike force in their own right.

  The second part of the forces under the command of the Dux was the entire garrison of Hadrian’s Wall. The Notitia Dignitatum of 395 lists each fort and its occupants in perfect sequence but, given the large withdrawals of troops in the late fourth century, this must be out of date and an aspiration rather than a fact.

  The regional forces, the comitatenses of Britain, were under the leadership of the Comes Litoris Saxonici, the Count of the Saxon Shore. Based in the south, his title was his job – to deal with the landings of raiders from across the North Sea and the English Channel. But it is clear that in 367 when the storm of the Barbarian Conspiracy burst on Britain, the count had no regional army at his disposal, only a scatter of frontier troops stationed in shore forts.

  The Comes Britanniarum was in charge of six cavalry units and three infantry regiments. This small force, about 6,000 men, was in essence Britannia’s field army, whose role was to deal with invasion or rebellion. Again, contemporary Roman historians make no mention of this army when the Picts, Scots and Atecotti raided the province in 367.

  In all, at its full complement, the Roman garrison of Britannia should have numbered around 25,000 men in the fourth century. It is highly unlikely that it ever reached that figure. In 402 the Roman general Stilicho the Vandal withdrew a large part of the garrison for the defence of Italy against Alaric and the Visigoths. In 407 Constantine III pulled out most of the skeleton forces that Stilicho had left.