Vanished Kingdoms

by Norman Davies

  For much of this time, the territorial extent of the realms of ‘The Rock’ can only be conjectured. Following the fall of Rheged and Gododdin, the kingdom’s neighbours did not change. To the west and north-west, most of the isles and promontories were controlled by the Dalriadan Scots. The extraordinary Senchus or ‘Register’ of Dalriada – a sort of primitive Domesday Book – shows that Kintyre was one of its most important regions.52 It also implies that the tribute-collectors of ‘The Rock’ would not have ventured further afield than Bute and Arran. The main concern would have been to safeguard the seaways of the Firth. To the north, the Clach nam Breatan or ‘British Stone’, which can still be seen in Glen Falloch above the head of Loch Lomond, marked the traditional dividing line with the Picts. Beyond lay the fertile valley of Strathearn and the Pictish province of Fortriu. To the east and the south, the lands of ‘The Rock’ adjoined Northumbrian territory. They occupied the tributary valleys and surrounding ridges of the Clyde Basin, but not much more. One major border post would probably have been in the vicinity of modern Kelvinhead, another in the vicinity of modern Beattock. Internal communications were compact, whether by river or by sea. There was land for arable farming and livestock, and forest. The ring of upland hills facilitated a sheltered climate and sound defence lines.

  Yet the kingdom’s overall resources fell behind those of neighbouring states. Northumbria was at least twice as large. The merger of the Picts and the Scots was to produce another large entity. As time passed, ‘The Rock’ found it ever harder to compete. All the indications are that Dalriada possessed significant naval capacity.53 One may infer that the lords of ‘The Rock’ would have sought to make similar provisions, but were unable to do so.

  At the time of Nechtansmere, Pictland had still been pagan, and the map of Christianity in the north did not settle quickly. For a time, the Northumbrian Angles competed with the Dalriadan Scots to convert the Picts. The halting of their own territorial expansion did not stop their religious ambitions. The first two incumbents of a Northumbrian bishopric at Whithorn were Penthelm, ‘Leader of the Picts’, and Pentwine, ‘Friend of the Picts’. Whithorn was not adjacent to Pictland, but some sort of Christian mission accompanied the bishopric. In that same era, Nechtan, king of the Picts (r. 706–24) expelled the Ionan monks and appealed to Bede’s boss, the abbot of Jarrow, for advice on how to establish a church on the Roman model. In later times, he would be credited with the wholesale conversion of Pictland. In reality, he was probably just standardizing the Roman rite. His successor, Oengus I (r. 729–61), went a step further by importing the relics of St Andrew from Byzantium and building a shrine for them on the furthermost eastern shore. The people of ‘The Rock’, holding to the tradition of St Mungo, would not have been directly affected.

  The year 731 marks the date of the most unambiguous of all references to the ‘Kingdom of the Rock’. In his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Bede, who died only four years later, mentions the Firth of Clyde ‘ubi est civitas Brettonum munitissima usque hodie quae vocatur Alcluith’, ‘where there is a city of the Britons highly fortified to the present day and called Alcluith’. Elsewhere he names ‘urbem Alcluith, quod lingua eorum significavit Petram Cluit; est enim iuxta fluvium nominis illius’, ‘the city of Alcluith, which in their language means Rock of the Clyde, because it lies next to the river of that name’. He also notes that the western end of the Antonine Wall is found nearby. Bede lived at Jarrow, less than 200 miles distant. The fact that he says Alcluith is fortified ‘up to the present time’ is ample proof that the Rock was inhabited and actively defended.54

  Twenty years later, another short but categoric reference appears in the Welsh Brut y Tywysogion, the ‘Chronicle of the Princes’:

  DCCL. Deg mlyned a deugeint a seith cant oed oet Crist pan vu y vróydyr róg y Brytanyeit ar Picteit yg góeith Maesydaóc, ac lladaód y Brytanyeit Talargan brenhin y Picteit. Ac yna y bu uaró Teódór map Beli.

  Seven hundred and fifty was the year of Christ when the battle between the Britons and the Picts took place, [that is,] the action of Maesydog, and the Britons killed Talargan, King of the Picts. And then Tewdwr, son of Beli, died.55

  The cryptic information is important because it tallies with other snippets of both Welsh and Irish provenance. Teudebur map Beli, son of Beli II of ‘The Rock’, figures in the Harleian Genealogies as a contemporary of Oengus macFerguson of Pictland, whose brother Talorgen was killed at Maesydaóc/Mygedawc – a location identified with the modern Mugdock halfway between Dumbarton and Stirling. The Irish Annals of Tigernach put the death of ‘Taudar mac Bili, ri Alo Cluaide’ at 752.56

  The death of King Teudebur/Taudar initiated a period of dynastic strife in which headlines of ‘Catastrophe on the Rock’ could have appeared at several points. The contested throne was secured by the late king’s son, Dynfwal map Teudebur, but almost immediately his kingdom was invaded by a joint army of Picts and Angles, who turned up like vultures at the feast. On 1 August 756 King Dynfwal surrendered ‘The Rock’ jointly to Onuist, king of the Picts, and Eadberht, king of Northumbria; the terms of submission are not known. But ten days later, as Eadberht marched home, he and his army were suddenly wiped out ‘between Ouania and Niwanbrig’. The only possible perpetrator was Onuist, whom one of Bede’s continuators, without charging him with the crime directly, characterizes as ‘a tyrannical butcher’. The Ouania or River Avon, a Welsh name, would have been the one in West Lothian, and Niwanbrig or ‘Newbridge’, which is an Anglian name, would have been somewhere beyond the Northumbrian border. The Picto-Northumbrian alliance had collapsed, and the ‘Kingdom of the Rock’ gained a respite.

  A more persistent threat, however, came from the continuing fusion of the Picts and the Gaelic Scots in a process undoubtedly helped by the final stage of Pictland’s Christianization. Three parallel operations were in play. In the cultural sphere, the Gaelic-speaking Scots, long since converted to Christianity, provided the literate clergy who drove the conversion forward. They would have had little difficulty in persuading their Pictish converts to adopt their language as well as their religious beliefs. (Their success may be compared to that of the Anglo-Saxon clergy, who in a somewhat later period simultaneously converted and Anglicized the pagan Danes of the Danelaw.) At the same time, in the geographical sphere, the Gaels were migrating eastwards, physically mingling with the Picts and forming a solid belt of Scottish settlement from Argyll to Fife. By the time that the first known list of Pictland’s provinces was drawn up, two of them had Gaelic names. Atholl, which means ‘New Ireland’, lies to the east of the mountainous watershed; Gobharaidh or ‘Gowrie’ lies north of the Tay round modern Perth. In the political sphere, ever closer relations were established between the Dalriadan and Pictish ruling houses, until the distinction between them grew blurred. Since Edinburgh would long remain in Northumbrian hands, the capital of the emerging kingdom was to be located at Dunkeld. The sacred coronation stone would be housed at the nearby abbey of Scone.57 From the standpoint of the North Britons, a new and more dangerous rival was emerging from the combination of two old enemies.

  The manoeuvrings whereby Gaelic dynasts from Dalriada merged with their counterparts in Pictland cannot be reconstructed with precision. One Pictish king, Oengus I macFerguson, is known to have originated in Argyll. Another, Oengus II (r. 820–34), briefly created a joint kingdom from sea to sea a hundred years later. But a disputed succession then spawned civil war; and a decade passed before the Gaelic contender, Cinaed mac Alpin, better known as Kenneth macAlpin (810–58), secured the throne as ‘king of the Picts’. In later times, macAlpin was to be widely credited with creating the first united ‘Kingdom of Scotland’, yet the attribution may be premature. Under his son, Constantine I (r. 863–77, the founder of Dunkeld), Argyll and Pictland were still being governed as separate entities, and it could be that the union was only completed permanently by Constantine II (r. 900–943). The kingdom’s Gaelic name of ‘Alba’ was not recorded in macAlpin’s
time; the name of ‘Scotland’ was not used except by outsiders.

  At some point during the Picto-Gaelic fusion, St Andrew was adopted as patron of the Alban kingdom. According to legend, the relics of the saint were donated to a King Oengus; the monastery of Cennrigmonoid (the core of the modern St Andrews), which became the focus of the saint’s cult, dates from the mid-eighth century. The Alban flag was designed from the blue and white saltire of St Andrew.

  The union was cemented above all by the Viking invasions. Sea-raiders from Scandinavia roared onto the scene at the end of the eighth century. Pouring down the coasts, they destroyed Lindisfarne in 793 and Iona in 795, then conquered the Isle of Man and settled in Ireland, Sutherland, Orkney and Shetland. That first attack on Lindisfarne caused repercussions similar to those which followed the arrival of Ida the Flamebearer 250 years earlier. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle trembled:

  AD 793. This year came dreadful forewarnings over the land of the Northumbrians, terrifying the people most woefully: these were great sheets of light rushing through the air, and whirlwinds, and fiery dragons flying across the firmament. These tremendous tokens were followed soon after by famine, and on the sixth day before the Ides of January… by the harrowing inroads of heathen men, who made lamentable havoc in the Church of God on Holy Island, by rapine and slaughter.

  The Vikings, like the Scots and Angles before them, intended to stay.

  The north-west of Britain was especially vulnerable. By the 830s Viking intruders were making Dalriadan Argyll unsafe for habitation, devastating coastal settlements and raiding deep into the interior. In 839 a Viking host marched into the Pictish heartland of Fortriu, and killed the two sons of Oengus II. They did not settle, but they created the vital opening for Kenneth macAlpin, then ruler of Argyll, to launch his bid for the throne.

  Vikings were to cause even worse havoc in the neighbouring ‘Kingdom of the Rock’. Commentators write that ‘The Rock’ in that era ‘seems to have remained subject to foreign control’, or ‘the kingdom seems to have been eclipsed’.58 But the circumstances are nowhere clarified. The ‘controllers’ could have been Vikings or Picts, or ‘Scots’ from Dalriada, or possibly a combination of various outsiders. One solitary happening is attributed to c. 849: ‘The Britons burned Dunblane.’ Dunblane lay in Pictland, near Stirling. One possibility among several suggests that the Britons of ‘The Rock’ were already chafing against the growing power of a Picto-Gaelic union that would only grow stronger in the following decades.

  By the late 860s the Vikings were threatening to overwhelm the whole of the Isles. They had created a major base in Dublin whence they were swarming all over Ireland and the western coasts of Britain. They held London, East Anglia and Humberside in what became the Danelaw. Wessex alone among the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms was mounting effective resistance. King Alfred of Wessex (r. 871–99) was lucky to escape their clutches. Further north, by moving up the Mersey, the Solway and the Humber, the Scandinavian raiders had created a Norse community in the Lake District of the former Rheged and a Viking Kingdom of York. They had completely absorbed the far north of Britain, which they called their ‘Southland’ (Sutherland). The earlier balance of power was in ruins, and the future lay open to bidders. If the Vikings prevailed, Britain would be turned in its entirety into another Norse realm like Denmark or Norway. If Wessex in the south or Alba in the north could rally, some new modus vivendi might be found.

  All surviving contemporary sources agree that ‘The Rock’ was destroyed by Vikings in 870 or 871. The exact date can vary by a year or two, due to the hazards of retrospective year-counting. But chroniclers in Ulster, in St Davids and in three versions of the Welsh Annals all use the same name for the target, Alt Clud (the British form); and they all use verbs that imply complete destruction:

  869. … the battle of Cryn Onen [Ash Hill] took place.

  870. Eight hundred and seventy was the year of Christ, and Caer Alclut was demolished by the Pagans.

  Deg mlyned athrugeint ac wythgant oed Krist, AC Y TORRET KAER ALCLUT Y GAN Y PAGANYEIT

  (St Carodog of Llancarvan, Brut y Tywysogion

  (Chronicle of the Princes))

  869 an Cat Brin Onnen

  870 an Arx Alt Clut a gentilibus fracta est

  871 an Guoccaun mersus est, rex Cereticiaun.

  (Nennius and the Welsh Annals)

  870 an Cat Brionnen annus. Cant Wrenonnen (Ashdown)

  871 an Arx Alclut a Gentilibus fracta est. Alclut fracta est

  872 an Guoccaun mersus est Gugan, rex Cereticiaun

  rex Ceredigean mersus est

  (Welsh Annals)

  Obsesio Ailech Cluathe a Nordmannis, i.e. Amlaiph et Imhar ii regis Nordmannorum obsederunt arcem illam et destruxerunt in fine 4 mensium arcem et predaverunt.

  The siege of Ailech Cluathe by the Northmen, that is by Olaf and Ivar, two kings of the Northmen besieged the citadel, and at the end of four months destroyed and plundered it.

  (Annals of Ulster)59

  By piecing together these scattered bits of information, narratives of reasonable plausibility can be constructed:

  It was in the year 870 that the Norse king of Dublin, Olaf the White… decided on an expedition to plunder the kingdom of the Britons in Strathclyde. He set off with a large fleet from Dublin and, sailing up the Firth of Clyde, laid siege to Alclut. He was joined by another Viking ruler, Ivar Beinlaus (the ‘Cripple’ or ‘one-legged’), who came north from York, which he had seized in 867. The garrison of Alclut held out for four months. But at length it was compelled to surrender, as the well on the Rock had dried up… The citadel was destroyed and the kingdom of the Britons lay prostrate before the invaders, who remained in Strathclyde over the winter, [before] sailing back to Dublin with a fleet of two hundred ships laden with slaves and booty. The king of Strathclyde was killed shortly afterwards and the kingdom passed for a time under the control of neighbouring kings.60

  The Viking fleet sailed away with its loot, heading no doubt for the Dublin slave market, though the presence of Viking-style ‘hogsback’ tombstones in the nearby Govan district indicates that a body of Vikings could have stayed behind.61 But local survivors also remained; and the humbled monarchy of ‘The Rock’ was not eliminated. The exact fate of King Arthgal is hard to discover. One modern authority assumes that he was taken prisoner to Dublin.62 Most accept the chronicler’s statement that ‘Arthgal, king of the Britons, was slain in 872 by counsel of Constantine, son of Kenneth [macAlpin]’. It is certain that the British king’s son, Rhun map Arthgal, had married, or was about to marry, the sister of King Constantine I. The neatest solution, though it is uncertain, would show Constantine setting up Rhun during his father’s absence and then persuading or paying the Dublin Vikings to kill Arthgal and to prevent his return.63 One way or the other, it is clear that the Scots established their supremacy over the ‘Kingdom of the Rock’ in the early 870s, with Constantine I ruling as over-king and Rhun as sub-king.

  As the Welsh Brut y Tywysogion put it, ‘the men of Strathclyde who refused to unite with the English had to depart their country and go to Gwynedd’. It is likely that the Welsh chronicler was using ‘English’ as the English used the word ‘Welsh’ – to mean ‘foreigners’. Yet the episode shows what really went on in the ‘Dark Ages’ when one native society was overrun by another. Some of the defeated population were sold into slavery. Some, probably most, stayed on to work the land and in time to integrate with the victors. But the ruling elite had to be replaced. If they were lucky, they would be given the choice of submitting to the victor’s rule or of being expelled. If not, they would be killed. This explains how language and culture change in areas where the basic human gene pool remains the same. The example of post-Roman Britannia turning into Anglo-Saxon England is a prime case; the Britons of the north turning into Gaelic Strathclyders is another.

  The departing elders of ‘The Rock’, who had chosen to reunite with their British kith and kin rather than with the incoming Gaels, could only have r
eached distant Gwynedd by sea. Their ships would have sailed on the tide, leaving the Rock behind, gliding past Bute and Arran (which they would have called something else), edging round the coast of Aeron, and out past the ‘rip-tide’ of the Ituna. They would have carried their bards and their scribes, who were to pass on the knowledge of the Gwyr y Gogledd to their Welsh hosts. As they must have known, hundreds, indeed thousands of years of history were being cut adrift with them. One cannot say for certain when this journey took place, but by 890, the exiles had appeared in the Welsh Annals, and are reported helping the king of Gwynedd to repel the ‘Saxons’.64

  From 870/871, therefore, the remaining Britons of ‘The Rock’ were closely subject to the rising Kingdom of ‘Alba’. Formal feudal overlordship, which was slowly spreading round Europe at the time, was not yet introduced, but the shift in power was manifest. The monarchs of ‘The Rock’ henceforth acted in concert with their Alban superiors. The administrative centre was moved across the river from Alt Clud to Govan; and the name of Cumbria came increasingly into use for the sub-kingdom as a whole. Control over ‘The Rock’ and its tributary lands would have assisted sons and grandsons of Kenneth macAlpin to strengthen their inheritance.

  It was the Alban monarchs and their fellow Gaels who introduced the name of Strath Cluaith or ‘Strathclyde’, by which Alt Clud would be best known in later times. They had good reason to treat the people of ‘The Rock’ with some indulgence; from their point of view, the rulers of Strathclyde were but a junior branch of their own family through the maternal line. Eochaid map Rhun (fl. 878–9) even appears to have made a bid for the senior, Alban throne on the strength of being Kenneth macAlpin’s grandson. One source calls him ‘the first Briton to rule over Gael’. He was dispossessed by the shadowy Giric MacRath, or ‘Son of Fortune’, who held Britons, Norse and English in his house as slaves. Yet the rift between the senior and the junior branches of the ruling family did not lead to a lasting feud. In any case, the imminent and unforeseen collapse of Viking power beyond Hadrian’s Wall was to draw the Strathclyders and the Scots into yet another set of power struggles in which they would need to stand together.