In 1996, protruding from a rabbit scrape, field walkers found a fascinating object in Springwood Estate. A copper alloy terret, a piece of horse harness which may date from as late as the fifth century. Its condition implies that it wore through and was discarded. It is a tantalizing glimpse of cavalry activity at Roxburgh and as a piece of high-quality horse gear, its discovery confirms the wealth of the area.
Archaeologists also found traces of what may be a Roman fort near the remains of old Springwood House and a series of small square enclosures which look like dwellings. They are arranged in two lines and they border a stretch of hitherto uncharted Roman road which leads arrow-straight to the riverbank opposite the east gate of Roxburgh Castle. There must have been a bridge – otherwise the road had no purpose whatever. Working backwards, there are also clear signs of a Roman road, punctuated by signal beacon points, travelling along the south bank of the Tweed as far east as the village of Cornhill in present-day England. And on the north side of the Teviot there is another road picking up the line of the one that stops at the riverbank and then goes west along the south bank of the Tweed, joining Dere Street near the village of Maxton. Third- and fourth-century coins have been found at Maxton and on the south side of the Teviot near Springwood.
In fact Roman copper coins of the third and fourth centuries have been found in other places in the Borders: at Borthwickbrae, Lauder, Peebles, Newstead, Dryburgh, Lilliesleaf and Tweedmouth, all on or near the Roman road system through the area. This currency circulated in Scotland after 212.
If this is what can be uncovered by knowledgeable and careful local people from an area not central, but adjacent to the main site, what lies under the feet of the grazing sheep and cows at Roxburgh?
More important, these extraordinary finds place Paternus Pesrut and his cavalry at Marchidun, at the Cavalry Fort at the end of the fourth century. The northern genealogies recite that Paternus’s father was a man with the famous Roman name of Tacitus, and then tell that he had a son called Aeternus. Who, in turn, fathered a man who took a famous P-Celtic name. He was Cunedda, the great leader who led his cavalry to rescue Wales. I believe he led them out of the gates of Marchidun down what became the Via Regis for the wool trade into the Eden valley and Carlisle, and then south.
There is no doubt that the Gododdin knew this place. They gave its neighbour across the Tweed to the east a name that has come down to us. Calchvyndd, or the chalk cliff, used to be clearly visible from Marchidun as Arthur’s warriors looked out over their grazing horses.
After his triumphant final expedition from Roxburgh to win the crushing victory at Badon in 499/500 Arthur had one more battle to fight. Here is the entry from the Easter Tables, giving the correct date: ‘517 The Battle of Camlann, in which Arthur and Medraut fell: and there was plague in Britain and Ireland.’
Medraut became the Mordred of legend, Arthur’s bastard son by his sister Morgan, and tradition holds that they were enemies at Camlann, what Tennyson called ‘the last dim, weird battle of the West’. I believe that Arthur led the Gosgordd out of Marchidun down the Via Regis into the Eden valley just as Cunedda had done before him. And near Arthuret where the slaughter drove Merlin into the Wood of Celidon, he found Mordred’s army. Camlann means ‘crooked glen’ in P-Celtic and the Roman name for Castlesteads on Hadrian’s Wall was Camboglanna, which means exactly the same.¹⁶⁶ Like Arthuret in 573 this was a battle between rival factions of the Men of the North, and in it Arthur was mortally wounded. The romances of Geoffrey of Monmouth and Malory tell that the dying man was brought back to Avalon, the Isle of Apples, where his wounds were bound up, and where he died. And then Excalibur was hurled into a pool to be caught by a hand and arm clothed in white samite.
Now there is a documented place at Marchidun, on the haughland, near the Junction Pool where Tweed and Teviot join, a place the Celts believed sacred, which was called Orchairt. The place where apples grew on a fertile peninsula that fails to be an island by 200 yards of geology.
Perhaps not. But the burden of the story is clear. Arthur led the cavalry of the Men of the North, the only native British kingdoms capable of concerted resistance to the three enemies of Britannia. In a brilliant campaign centred on the Scottish Border country, he rode out from his horse fort to defeat them all, to allow the nations of Britain to form, and to sow the seeds of glory.
13
THE LANDS OF AIR AND DARKNESS
In compiling this narrative I excluded any argument that relied heavily on tradition or on a folk memory not given substance in another way, in a place-name for example. To finish, however, I want to deal with matters unprovable, and with intuition, with coincidence, with rootless tradition and with extended conjecture. Often it is something on the edge of reasoned argument that sparks a connection, or that encourages a second and harder look at a text or a map. Having shone as bright a light as I could bring on the lost kingdoms of southern Scotland, and on Roxburgh, their lost city, I want now to look at the hinterland, the places behind such facts as are assembled, and make a brief journey into the lands of air and darkness.
But first an aphorism to set this on a sound footing; something, in fact, from the sober world of behavioural science, where everything begins from first principles, everything observed and noted, and no conclusion drawn without every sensible test of logic fully applied.
The story concerns the African weaver bird. Behavioural scientists captured a number of these birds in the wild. They were noted for their construction of elaborately woven nests suspended from a branch like a woollen sock. The scientists kept the birds in capitivity and as successive generations were born, they did not introduce any nesting materials into their cages, providing instead a foam rubber saucer for them to brood on. Then they took the great-great-grandchildren of the original wild weaver birds and put them into different cages with nest-building material strewn on the floor. When the mating period began, the birds took the straw, twigs and moss and built perfect sock-shaped nests.
It was a remarkable thing. No one had taught them to do this, they had no parents to observe, they had never even seen a weaver bird nest. DNA memory at work. The brain of an adult weaver bird is no bigger than my thumbnail. What memories lie in our huge brains? What is certain is that we remember more than the weaver bird, even if we do not realize it or simply mistrust what folk memory prompts in us.
I use that plain but striking story to underscore one claim I cannot back with any sort of detailed evidence, toponymic or otherwise. In the Scottish Border country we have a long history of understanding horses. Like all other agricultural areas it is only two generations since horses powered machinery, pulled carts or carried men as they worked the land. Scotland was quiet and green then, before the roar of the internal combustion was heard everywhere.
But in the Borders there is something unique, something significant for this story. Every summer each small town holds a festival; most are called Common Ridings. Four towns can trace them back 500 years. They all involve the same principle: a group of mounted townspeople ride out to patrol the common land, the territory that they hold in common. Even when that no longer exists, as in most burghs, the tradition of the rideout still holds. In all the ceremonies a young man is elected to carry the town flag and to be in some ways the symbol of its independence, and at several points he leads a great tearing charge of all his mounted followers, generally where the ground is good.
Nowhere else in Britain do the Cives, the Citizens, the Cymry still do this. I believe that the mounted Common Ridings of the Scottish Borders are the folk memory of Arthur’s cavalry, the Gosgordd.
How you interpret that is largely a matter of taste but one curious survival offers a scrap of documentary reassurance. In the town of Hawick, home of one of the oldest Common Ridings, there is a statue at one end of the High Street of a mounted survivor from the skirmish of Hornshole after the Battle of Flodden in 1513. Carved on the plinth is the town motto: Teribus Ye Teriodin. Although natives of Hawick
are called Teris, no one knows what it means. In fact it is a P-Celtic phrase, more correctly rendered Tyr y Bas y Tyr y Odin. Literally it means ‘Land of Death and the Land of Odin’, and I believe it is an ancient connection with the legends of the Ride of the Dead, sometimes known in a variant as the Wild Hunt. Odin led the Ride of the Dead, collecting souls as they rode through the night sky. Perhaps something that originated with the high flight of wild geese, the Gabriel Hounds, who scream their calls as they stream across the sky at twilight. In later versions, Arthur replaced Odin as their leader.
The Wild Hunt is sometimes called Odin’s Host and it is said that he rode to find the souls of men slain in battle or sometimes he led the spectral huntsmen as they careered through forest glades on headless horses chasing a ghostly hart.
On a statue dedicated to the sons of Hawick who fought at Hornshole and also fell at Flodden, a memory of the Ride of the Dead is a remarkable thing to see. A small droplet from the deep well of folk memory. And, more, a motto in P-Celtic a millennium and a half after it was the common tongue of the countryside, after Arthur rode to victory at Glein, Bremenium, Caledon and Badon.
Like all ceremony, the Common Ridings had a serious and even dangerous purpose behind them. Selkirk is the best example. Through a series of royal grants the common land around the town which belonged to all its citizens had become a large area of almost 22,000 acres. Not only could the townspeople graze and water their cows, sheep and horses on it, from the more upland parts they had the right to cut peats for winter fuel. Peat Law to the north-west remembers this practice. However the people of Selkirk and their burgesses had to fight hard to retain the common, which was pressed on all sides by greedy aristocrats who believed that bits of it belonged to them, and also that ordinary people had no real right to the ownership of land. John Muthag, a provost of Selkirk, was killed when he tried to gain legal backing to evict encroaching aristocrats in 1541, and in 1668 the townspeople rioted when the Riddels of Haining tried to appropriate parts of the Southern Common. This was class warfare, sharply fought.¹⁶⁷ The lairds were wealthy and powerful, their ancestors inserted into positions of ownership by Anglian and Norman incomers. The townspeople were ordinary people whose strength lay in unity and persistence. Among them the traditions of the P-Celts survived, because they were all they had. The Lord of Whipmen cuts the Beltane sod because his ancestors did the same thing in the same place more than a millennium before. When the Teris line the streets of Hawick to cheer on the riders and their Cornet, they did so in the past to encourage them to fight for their rights. ‘Aye in common’ they shout. And they mean it.
Folk memory is very strong in the Borders; each year on the second Friday after the first Monday in June, Selkirk sings the same songs, at the same time, in the same place and weeps the same tears for all that experience in one place. Five hundred years the records reach back but for much longer before that ordinary people remembered where they came from and recited their traditions without any need to write them down. I once tried to buy a tape of the Selkirk Common Riding songs. ‘What do you need a tape for?’ said the shop assistant, shaking her head. ‘We all know them.’
Among the Q-Celts of modern Scotland, this sort of folk memory has a name. They call it the beul-aithris which literally means ‘mouth-history’ and has come to be a synonym for tradition. But originally it signified all that passed from one mouth into another: stories, songs, poems, place names and proverbs. The beul-aithris for the Gaels, and similar mechanisms for P-Celts, represented a huge store of inherited information which they needed for practical as well as cultural reasons. Consequently it was very accurate with none of the overtones of invention now carried by the phrase ‘oral tradition’. Given what we now understand about the written word and its unreliability and partiality – no one would be comfortable with the Sun newspaper as a record of British political history since 1970 – the transmission of information through the beuli-aithris, even across millennia, should worry no one. Even when these become intertwined as in Geoffrey of Monmouth or in Thomas Dempster’s astonishing assertion that British kings in southern Scotland ‘had worn the purple’, it is often better to listen for the voices of ordinary people who have long vanished into the darkness of the past, rather than set store by a fact simply because someone decided to write it down.
There is a tradition in Selkirk that offers a conclusion. At the end of the Common Riding morning, the flags are paraded and then flourished in a ritualistic style on a dais so that everyone can see. Watching the standard-bearer cast his flag in the Market Square and then listening to the pride and dignity in ‘The Liltin’, a lament for the dead at Flodden played in absolute silence, a local man turned to me with tears in his eyes. ‘Aye,’ he said, ‘we come from nothing small.’ And he was right. For this is not a history brittle with relics, it is about people and a pulse of memory that beats unbroken down a hundred generations.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
This is not intended as an exhaustive bibliography but rather as a guide for those who might want to read further. It would have been near-impossible to list everything I had read in pursuit of Arthur, so what follows is not arranged into primary and secondary sources but in what seemed to me to be a sensible order of importance and value. The first section lists works which I referred to repeatedly and the second includes material which was very helpful. For the sake of simplicity and ease of access, I have for the most part excluded reference to periodicals and books no longer in print and included the most recent work on this historical period where possible. This is a bibliography for browsers in bookshops and borrowers from the public libraries.
Anderson, A.O., Early Sources of Scottish History (1990)
Anderson, A.O., Scottish Annals from English Chroniclers (1991)
Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Penguin, 1955)
Bede, The Life of Cuthbert (Penguin, 1965)
Berth, Mary, Healing Threads (1995)
Darwin, Tess, The Scots Herbal (1996)
Dixon, Karen, Roman Cavalry (1994)
Dryburgh Liber (Liber S. Marie de Dryburgh), The Bannatyne Club (1847)
Dwelly, Edward, The Illustrated Gaelic-English Dictionary (reprinted 1994)
Frere, Sheppard S., Britannia (1967)
Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain (Penguin, 1966)
Gildas, De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (Phillimore, 1978)
Guest, Lady Charlotte (ed.), The Mabinogion (1906)
Hale, Alan, The Border Country, A Walker’s Guide (1993)
Kelso Liber (Liber S. Marie de Calchou), The Bannatyne Club (1846)
Livingstone, Sheila, Scottish Festivals (1997)
Malory, Sir Thomas, Le Morte d’Arthur (Penguin, 1969)
Melrose Chronicle (trans. Joseph Stevenson) (1850)
Melrose Liber (Liber S. Marie de Melros), The Bannatyne Club (1837)
Moffat, Alistair, Kelsae (1985)
Morris, John, The Age of Arthur (1973)
Murray, J.A.H. (ed.), Thomas of Ercildoune (1875)
Nennius, Historia Brittonum in J. Morris, The Age of Arthur (1973)
Nicolaison, W.F.H., Scottish Place-Names (1976)
RCAHMS (Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland), Roxburghshire (1956)
RCAHMS (Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland), Selkirkshire (1957)
RCAHMS (Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland), Peebleshire (1967)
Scots Dialect Dictionary (Chambers 1911)
Skene, W.F., Four Ancient Books of Wales (1868)
Stephens, Thomas, The Literature of the Kymry (1849)
Stewart, R.J. and Matthews, John (eds.), Merlin Through the Ages (1995)
Vegetius, Epitoma Rei Militaris
Watson, W.J., The Celtic Placenames of Scotland (1926)
Williams, Gwyn A., Excalibur (1994)
Aburron, Yvonne, The Enchanted Forest (1993)
Alcock, L., Arthur’s Britain (1971)
Ambleton, R., The Outpost Forts of Hadrian’s Wall (1983)
Anderson, A.O. and M.O., Adomnan’s Life of St Columba (1961)
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (ed. and trans. Michael Swanton) (1996)
Armit, Ian, Celtic Scotland (1997)
Ashe, G. (ed.), The Quest for Arthur’s Britain (1971)
Augustine of Hippo, The Anti-Pelagian Treatises (ed. F.W. Bright) (1880)
Bain, J., Calendar of Border Papers (1894)
Bannerman, John, Studies in the History of Dalriada (1974)
Barrow, G.W.S., Robert the Bruce and the Community of the Realm of Scotland (1965)
Barrow, G.W.S., The Kingdom of the Scots (1973)
Barrow, G.W.S., Kingship and Unity Scotland 1000–1306 (1981)
Black, Ronnie, various articles in the West Highland Free Press (1997/8)
Blair, Peter Hunter, An Introduction to Anglo-Saxon England (1970)
Barber, Chris and Pylatt, David, Journey to Avalon (1997)
Burday, Gordon, Farmers, Temples and Tombs (1998)
Caesar, De Bella Gallico (ed. Locks) (1842)
Campbell, James (ed.), The Anglo-Saxons (1982)
Chadwick, N.K., The Celts (1970)
Chadwick, N.K., The British Heroic Age: The Welsh and the Men of the North (1976)
Coe, Jon B. and Young, Simon, The Celtic Sources for the Arthurian Legend (1995)
Coghlan, Ronan, The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Arthurian Legends (1991)
Craig Brown, T., History of Selkirkshire (1885)
Curie, A.O., The Treasure of Traprain (1923)
Currie, Andrew M., Dictionary of British Placenames (1994)
Darton, Mike, The Dictionary of Place-names in Scotland (1994)
Davies, Norman, Europe (1996)
Arthur and the Lost Kingdoms Page 25
