* * *
The island of Iona is perhaps the most famous diseart and sources talk of a community which did much together under the guidance of their abbots but whose members lived alone in cells built of stone and turf. The word monk, from the Greek monos meaning ‘single’, originally described a solitary person.
One of the most remote diseartan is on the island of Canna. Sgor nam Ban-Naomhan, ‘the Skerry of the Holy Women’, was home to a convent of nuns, probably founded in the seventh century. Their diseart is cut off from the main island by a steep escarpment and was only easily accessible by sea and then only in fine weather.
Behind a drystone walled enclosure was a group of small buildings, almost certainly monastic cells. Some huddled against the enclosure wall seeking shelter from the Atlantic winds. Others, perhaps eight in all, were arranged around a well-house and a building where saddle querns (for grinding corn) have been found. These holy women must have suffered in the hard and unrelenting winters, the wind-driven rain finding its way into their bare cells, and they were genuine ascetics anxious to know their God through extraordinary privation. It is not clear how they survived or for how long or where the corn for their querns came from. Perhaps they depended on the kindness of the islanders or Canna or on an aristocratic patron or on the gifts of visitors.
The Sgor nam Ban-Naomha never lost its atmosphere of sanctity. Pilgrims seeking cures were brought into the ruins of the ancient enclosure as late as the nineteenth century. Companions laid the sick and the crippled on stone beds known as leaba crabhach, ‘sacred couches’. It was an enduring belief which brought the pilgrims down the dangerously steep path through the scree. The prayers and exemplary lives of generations of the holy women had drawn God nearer to the drystone walls of the Sgor and imbued its very ground with a powerful sanctity. By simply being there, in contact with its stones and soil, the pilgrims could summon the help of the Almighty to ease or even cure the suffering of the infirm. More than that, the soil itself in such a place was thought to have the power to cleanse bodies of earthly sins. In the Middle Ages many wealthy noblemen gave generous gifts to Scottish abbeys and churches in exchange for the right to be buried inside the precincts and often as close to the high altar as possible.
In their remote and rainswept diseartan the early monks and nuns of the north of Britain brought a different Christianity into being. It stood in high contrast with the ministries of the bishops and priest of the cities and towns of the south who engaged with the world and all its sins and temptations. But it would be misleading to think of two versions of Christianity moving in different doctrinal directions. Their approaches to God and their sense of a Christian life were very different but not their fundamental beliefs.
* * *
St Gildas
The author of On the Ruin of Britain has a more rounded historical personality than virtually any other figure of the fifth and sixth centuries. Ordained in the church, he composed a monastic rule and was also the subject of an early biography. ‘The Life of Gildas’ was written in the ninth century by a monk based in Brittany at a place called Rhuys. It tells of Gildas’ birth in Alt Clut, Dumbarton Rock on the Clyde, the kingdom which later became Strathclyde. He was sent to the monastery of Llan Illtud Fawr in Wales and later to Ireland. After his studies were complete, Gildas came back to Strathclyde and the Old North where he preached and converted pagans. Towards the end of his life, he came to Brittany and settled on the island of Rhuys where he lived as a hermit. Later he founded the monastery which eventually produced his biography. Gildas’ story shows a Celtic west where there was routine movement over considerable distances and, with the exception of his short stay in Ireland, movement between communities speaking dialects of Old Welsh. Breton was probably introduced into the north-western corner of France by migration from Cornwall after the Saxon invasions.
* * *
Much of Gildas’ holy rage arose from what he saw as a badly managed contest between Christian British kings and pagan Saxon invaders. If only the native dynasties would cease their squabbling and sinfulness, then the hosts of the Lord could unite and drive the heathens into the sea. The early gains made by the Saxons in the east appear to have been consolidated and a truce was holding at the time Gildas wrote. He spoke of ‘our present security’ but nowhere does he explain how the peace was won. The sole clue is a reference to a final battle:
After this, sometimes our countrymen, sometimes the enemy, won the field . . . until the year of the siege of Badon Hill, when took place the last almost, though not the least slaughter of our cruel foes, which was (I am sure) forty four years and one month after the landing of the Saxons, and also the time of my own nativity.
Scholarship conventionally dates the composition of On the Ruin of Britain to the 540s and sets the year of Gildas’ birth as 516 – the year, therefore, of the siege of Badon Hill. Who fought this action, gained this mighty victory which stemmed the westward rush of the Saxon tide and created ‘our present security’? As usual Gildas does not say but Nennius’ History of the Britons offers an explanation, details of a victorious campaign and the name of perhaps the most famous warrior in British history:
Then it was, that the magnanimous Arthur, with all the kings and military forces of Britain, fought against the Saxons. And though there were many more noble than himself, yet he was twelve times chosen their commander, and was as often conqueror. The first battle in which he was engaged, was at the mouth of the River Gleni, the second, third, fourth and fifth, were on another river, by the Britons called Duglas, in the region of Linnuis. The sixth on the River Bassas. The seventh in the Wood of Celidon, which the Britons call Cat Coit Celidon. The eighth was near Guinnion Castle, where Arthur bore the image of the Holy Virgin, the mother of God, upon his shield, and through the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the Holy Mary, put the Saxons to flight, and pursued them the whole day with great slaughter. The ninth was at the City of the Legion, which is called Cair Lion. The tenth was on the banks of the River Tribruit. The eleventh was on the mountain Bregion, which we call Cat Bregion. The twelfth was a most severe contest, when Arthur penetrated to the Hill of Badon. In this engagement, nine hundred and forty fell by his hand alone, no one but the Lord affording him assistance. In all these engagements the Britons were successful. For no strength can avail against the will of the Almighty.
Scholarly reaction to this text varies enormously. Some dismiss it as late, corrupt and ultimately fanciful, while others are more vehement, seeing it as the poisonous seeds of pointless myth-history. To this way of thinking, Arthur, king or otherwise, never existed outside the imaginations of a few Celtic clerics and chroniclers. There are other references. In the tenth century Annales Cambriae and the death songs known as The Gododdin, composed around 600, Arthur is mentioned but those who take these doubtful historical notices seriously are characterised as no-smoke-without-fire-mongers not rigorous scholars.
Others take a different view. The primary sources for the period between 400 and 600 are so sparse, even those transcribed much later, that all evidence should be treated with respect. One eminent scholar wrote of the period as ‘the lost centuries’ of British history. But, if Arthur is not remembered in any texts, he certainly has his memorial in the British landscape. Hundreds of place-names remember the great hero and, even though the mythology swirling around him can be wildly romantic, the core of the story has always seemed credible. A successful native general, the successor of the Vortigern, the Cunedda and Ambrosius Aurelianus halted the tide of Anglo-Saxon invasion sufficiently to allow Gildas in the 540s to enjoy his ‘present security’.
The Nennius text appears to be a version of an older praise poem, something composed by bards to honour the achievements of Arthur, the conqueror. Remnants of poetic conventions are detectable in the alliteration of Cat Coit Celidon, and a rhyme-scheme with Celidon, Guinnion, Bregion and Badon. All of which persuades the sceptical to redouble their doubts – the needs of poetry outweighing the dema
nds of historical accuracy! But why should poetry and accuracy be mutually exclusive? Poems are still composed with real events as their subject matter and they often derive added power for that reason. But then there is the inherent unreliability of oral traditions, history becoming distorted and embellished as it passed down in memory from one generation to another. But why should word of mouth be more untrustworthy than a written source? Who would rely on the British tabloid newspapers of the last thirty years as an honest record of anything? The bards of the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries are to be trusted no less – and no more – than the scribes of the same period.
The central difficulty with Nennius is one of comparison. In his great history, Bede generally excluded fanciful elements (if saintly miracles are taken at face value) and concentrated on what he believed to be true. No dragons flew and only a little lightning rent the air. But, in his apparently forensic rigour, Bede was an unusual chronicler. Most, like Nennius, included an undifferentiated jumble of material uncritically set down, sometimes in a very eccentric order. And that is the problem. Not far from the passage about Arthur is the tale of a boy (the young Ambrosius Aurelianus) brought into the presence of the Vortigern to be put to death in some sort of blood sacrifice. He avoided his fate by the unlikely means of pointing out that two dragons dwelt under the foundations of the Vortigern’s fortress. This sort of thing is seen as a fatal taint, invalidating everything around it. But, in fact, the tone of the Arthur text and other material is markedly different, almost certainly indicating a separate source.
The Nennius text is careful to point out that Arthur was no king but a man appointed by kings as a war leader like his predecessors. There is a sense of unity, of a common purpose and a common enemy, of native kings combining their forces, what Gildas despaired of them doing in the 540s, what he knew had been successful forty or fifty years before he was writing. Alliances of this sort were not uncommon and there would be two famous concerted native efforts against the enemy at the end of the sixth century in the north.
As well as politics, geography is important as Nennius lists twelve battles won under Arthur’s leadership, the last of them corroborated by Gildas, what the sources call the siege of Badon Hill. Four out of the twelve are identifiable, clearly real places where the armies of Celtic Britain tasted victory. And they can be found on maps of north Britain.
‘Gleni’ is the River Glen which flows east out of the Cheviot Hills in what is now north Northumberland. Arthur was likely a penteulu, the professional warrior at the head of a royal war band and a man who had attracted a powerful reputation. But why did he form his men up for battle on the banks of an obscure and windswept river in the wilds of north Northumberland? Because a royal enclosure stood by the Glen, perhaps even a complex of buildings which could be described as a palace. Yeavering was brilliantly excavated in the 1950s by Brian Hope Taylor and, amongst later material, the rare remains of a fifth- and sixth-century native presence were recorded. Kings lived by the little river.
Like the battle at the Glen, others take place at sites by rivers, almost certainly at fords. Tactically they were good places to lay an ambush, perhaps with cavalry charging a surprised straggle of infantry. ‘Bregion’ is attested as another name for Bremenium, the old Roman fort at High Rochester in Redesdale. It stands astride Dere Street, near the head of a valley reaching into the heart of the Cheviots, on what became the traditional invasion road for armies marching north. And it too lies near a ford over the River Rede and is only ten miles south of the Glen. The ‘Wood of Celidon’ later became Ettrick Forest, north of the Cheviots, and it appears in more than one early source in that guise.
Three battles within less than a day of each other – this concentration suggests the faded reports of an ancient campaign fought in the north by Arthur and his squadrons of Celtic cavalry. The siege of Badon Hill is believed by many to have taken place in the south-west, near Bath. But across the valley from High Rochester stands Padon Hill. Perhaps four battles were fought in the north. And, if they were, who opposed Arthur and his allied army? And when did they fight?
Archaeologists have discovered Germanic cemeteries in the north (and therefore evidence of settlement) dating from as early as the late fourth and fifth centuries. The massive forts of the Saxon Shore were built at the end of the third century and there exist several notices of German warriors in Britannia. With the end of the Roman province and the ebb and flow of war, it is very likely that groups of Anglo Saxons were establishing themselves in Yorkshire and the north-east. The rebellion of Germanic mercenaries against the Vortigern in the early fifth century might well have been repeated elsewhere. Did Arthur go to war against the ancestors of warriors who would later establish the magnificent and powerful kingdom of Northumbria? It seems likely.
Gildas and other sources offer unexpected help and general agreement on the dating of Arthur’s great campaign against the barbarians all Britain called the Saxons. Many were Angles from Angeln on the borders of modern Denmark and Germany, others were Jutes from Jutland, to the north of them, Frisians to the south and there were even Swedes and Franks amongst the settlers and land-grabbers. But, in all of Britain’s Celtic languages, the word is the same – Sais in Welsh, Sasunnaich in Gaelic and variations in Manx, Irish and Cornish. Gildas called them furciferes, literally ‘fork-bearers’ or ‘servants’, and it is sometimes translated as ‘rascals’. In any event, he and other chroniclers rejoiced at what they saw as an emphatic, momentum-halting defeat at the siege of Badon Hill and they reckoned that the battle was fought in 500.
Since that date attracts unprecedented consensus amongst the sparse sources, it ought to be taken gratefully as a fixed point. And, if it was such a final and decisive encounter, then it strongly suggests that Arthur’s campaign against the Saxons was fought in the 490s. The latest mention of the great general is in a battle said to have been fought at a place called Camlann in 517. The entry in the annals reads: ‘The battle at Camlann, in which Arthur and Medraut fell, and there was plague in Britain and Ireland.’ Castlesteads Fort on Hadrian’s Wall was known as Camboglanna and, like Camlann, it means ‘Crooked Glen’ or ‘Valley’.
* * *
British Cuckoos
A Cornishman who spent much of his professional life in Scotland, Professor Charles Thomas, was more aware than most of the links between the ancient lands of the Old Welsh-speakers. He noticed a trio of place-names in Dumfries and Galloway and East Lothian – Terregles, Penpont and Tranent – and compared them with three in Cornwall – Treveglos, Penponds and Trenance. This sort of awareness is to be applauded but it is not recent. Sir John Clerk of Penicuik was the origin of Walter Scott’s The Antiquary and he called his home Mons Cuculi, a Latin version of the Old Welsh name and it means ‘Cuckoo Hill’.
* * *
Medraut is a Celtic name, certainly not a Saxon one, and Camlann sounds like a battle between British kings, their generals and their war bands. Gildas complained that this sort of internecine bickering was a principal cause of the ruin of Britain. Tradition insists that Arthur and Medraut, or Mordred, were enemies and, in what Lord Tennyson called ‘the last, dim, weird battle of the west’, the great hero may have died.
Arthur’s legacy has been enormously powerful and almost all of it has clung to the south-west of Britain, to Glastonbury, Tintagel, Cornwall and Wales. Many of these associations were confected in the Middle Ages, and such traces as can be found in the threadbare historical record of the fifth and sixth centuries suggest a northern figure, a general who rode out of the half-forgotten Celtic kingdoms of southern Scotland.
At the Battle of Guinnion Castle, which may have stood in the valley of the Gala Water, another route to the Forth and the north, Nennius recorded that ‘Arthur bore the image of the Holy Virgin, the mother of God, upon his shield, and through the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, put the Saxons to flight, and pursued them the whole day with great slaughter’. By 500 and Badon Hill, all of the native kingdoms of Britain w
ere Christian and those in the north talked of the war against Y Gynt, ‘the Gentiles’, ‘the Heathens’, by which they meant the Saxons. When they sang of the deeds of their own armies, the royal bards sang of Y Bedydd, the warriors they called ‘the Baptised’.
6
The Baptised
IN THE 530S, THE Roman Empire was resurgent. Under Justinian’s dynamic rule, generals led seaborne expeditions to recapture Italy, North Africa and even parts of southern Spain. Perhaps Rome might reach out as far as Britain once more and come to the aid of the combrogi, the fellow citizens. The Vandals, the Goths and the Visigoths had all been vanquished and surely the Saxons could not resist the legions of the emperor as the Mediterranean again became a Roman lake. But it was not to last.
The Faded Map: The Lost Kingdoms of Scotland Page 13
