The most learned scholar in the historiography of Britain between 400 and 700, what still might usefully be called the Dark Ages, was John Morris. With a humbling and dazzling grasp of texts in Old Welsh, Irish Gaelic, Latin and Anglo-Saxon, he wrote a controversial book, The Age of Arthur. Morris’ academic contemporaries attacked it and the author with uncommon savagery – even for the tetchy, jealous world of academic scholarship. Not only did they object strongly to his use of the name of Arthur in the title and all the mystical, new-age baggage that came with it (to say nothing of naked commercialism – the very idea!), they also believed that Morris was much too trusting of his sources, too credulous. After a lifetime of hard work, delving where few other researchers had bothered to look, it must have been hard to bear.
The central difficulty for sources for this period was, as ever, the reliability of material caught up in the rhyme and metre of bardic poetry or stuck in the webs of complex and semi-mythical genealogies. Almost all compiled centuries after the events they describe, these sources were and are thought to be without much value. Where most scholars place their trust is in written sources, preferably contemporary with or close to events, and in archaeology and its tangible, concrete results. Forensic, even scientific, most historians feel they must approach their period or their ‘field’ with clear-eyed objectivity and take nothing at face value.
The reductio ad absurdum is to suspect everything and believe nothing, not even beyond a reasonable doubt. Much that has been generally accepted for generations is now rejected, famous names and traditions cast into an outer darkness of discredit. In order to make their names, new generations of historians, especially those specialising in the Dark Ages, feel compelled to dismiss the work of those of the generation before them. They must make the old new, formulate a ‘new’ approach, for the reputation and finances of their university department may depend on it.
This sort of approach makes for bleak reading and, in the time between the end of the Roman Empire in Britain and the takeover of England and part of Scotland by the Anglo-Saxons, almost no reading at all. Many of the iconoclasts, the re-interpreters, have cast doubts without the benefit of John Morris’ skills. Some current historians of Scotland, for example, feel comfortable in pronouncing and condemning without knowing a word of Gaelic or Old Welsh. Morris understood the essence of this period better than any other historian because he could hear its distant voices, sense its cultural nuances and feel passion for its great events. This was the time Britain was unmade, when Scotland, England and Wales emerged, when their languages settled and when the word of God was everywhere heard. Morris’ great text may need, on occasion, to be treated with caution but his achievement as a historian is immense.
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What Have the Romans Ever Done?
There are few more distinguished historians of Wales than John Davies and his excellent one-volume history has no peers. Generously, he lists the influences of Latin on Welsh – these are fascinating, showing the difference between a literate and non-literate society – and the number of Roman names which have become common in Wales (Emrys from Ambrosius, Tegid from Tacitusand, Iestyn from Justinus are only the most relevant here). But his critique on the empire is devastatingly eloquent:
The demise of the Roman Empire has been mourned to excess. Its essence was violence and its accomplishments were fundamentally second-rate. Its achievements in the world of science and technology were few; what need was there for new inventions in a society which had an abundance of slaves. Its literature and fine arts were a pale reflection of the splendours of classical Athens. As Mortimer Wheeler, among the most distinguished of the interpreters of the Empire, put it: ‘I suffered from a surfeit of things Roman. I felt disgusted by the mechanistic quality of their art and by the nearness of their civilisation at all times to cruelty and corruption.’
But nevertheless raw political and military power can be dazzling.
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He refused to reject the work of the bards out of hand because he grasped the importance of their role in a non-literate society. They were historians, propagandists as well as poets in the modern sense. They recited the genealogies as political texts, as underpinnings to authority. But they wrote nothing down. Why should what was held in memory be more unreliable than a written source? Both sorts of record have survived by accidental process and the whole picture for the period must be patchy. Morris argued that it made sense to take everything into account in compiling the jigsaw of early British history. Many pieces were missing and there would of course be blanks no amount of conjecture could fill. But surely what men believed, the stories they told themselves through their bards and genealogists, was as important as what a very few, self-selecting commentators reported, at second, third or fourth hand, that they did.
If taken in this spirit, The Age of Arthur is like an Aladdin’s cave of glittering treasures, some of fool’s gold or paste, but there are real nuggets to be found, especially in the vast appendices or where the footnotes and references direct the curious.
One of these nuggets is the story of Germanianus. Old Welshspeaking bards knew of him and the genealogies reckoned him a ‘son of Coel Hen’, ‘Old Cole’, probably the last imperial general appointed by Rome in the north. Roughly contemporary with Cunedda, in the first half of the fifth century, Germanianus was the commander of a war band who preferred to adopt a Roman title. Like Claudius Britannicus or Commodus Britannicus and other emperors eager for an association with a conquest or military victory, this man celebrated his defeat of Germanic warriors. It may be that he led his men against raiders who had landed on the North Sea coast or come up from the south. In any event Germanianus is closely associated with the kings of the Votadini, the kindred which later morphed into the Gododdin. The king lists place him in the lineage of Morcant Bwlc, perhaps at a distance of five generations. But where did these men hold power?
Quoting bardic sources, John Morris made an uncharacteristic blunder. He believed that Catraut or Cadrawd of Calchvynydd’s kingdom lay to the south of Powys on the mid-Wales borders. Evidently it was vigorous with an active war band but Morris insists that its men fought the Saxons in the English Midlands. In the great death songs for The Gododdin, composed around 600 by Aneirin in Edinburgh, the author sang of a prince, a sub-king, known as Catraut of Calchvynydd. He joined the royal war band as it rode south out of Edinburgh to Catterick in Yorkshire and battle with an Anglian host. Calchvynydd is the original Old Welsh name for Kelso and monastic records of the twelfth century still call it Calchou or Calco. One of the streets in the modern town preserves the old name in Scots in Chalkheugh Terrace. Calchvynydd, or Kelso, means ‘Chalky Hill’ and it was the focus of a shadowy sixth-century kingdom.
Morcant Bwlc was the heir of Germanianus and the ancestor of Catraut – and the ruler of a kingdom based on Kelso and perhaps the great fortress at Marchidun across the Tweed. When he joined Urien’s coalition at the siege of Metcaud, Lindisfarne, he had the most immediately to gain and the most to lose. Calchvynydd lay on the borders of Bernicia and the attack on the island was a critical political moment.
The British kindreds knew Lindisfarne as Metcaud because of the herbs which grew in profusion in this beautiful, windswept place. They were famously medicinal and toponymists believe that the island was known as Medicata Insula, hence Metcaud. Only an island twice a day when the tides ripple over the broad sands between it and the mainland, it is a unique, atmospheric place which would become much beloved by Cuthbert, Aidan and countless generations of monks in love with the contemplative life and the isolated peace that the tides gave them.
Theodoric, Fflamddwyn the Firebrand, was likely the Anglian king besieged by Urien, Morcant and their allies. He valued Lindisfarne for its stunning, singular rock at the east end and the beach lying below it. Now the site of a romantic castle ingeniously designed by Sir Edward Lutyens, a building which seems both to cling to and grow out of the rock it sits on, it was no doubt seen by Theodor
ic as an impregnable stockade which would repel the armies of the British as they massed on the mainland shore. Islanders still know that the fairy castle of the nineteenth century stands on Bebloe’s Rock, named after an Anglian queen, Bebba. From the ramparts of the sixth-century stockade, those who looked out over the sea to the south could see another fortress named after her. Bamburgh was ‘Bebba’s burh’, the queen’s stronghold. And on the southern horizon Theodoric could see that it had fallen to a furious assault. Perhaps smoke plumed above the stockade.
The Irish chroniclers wrote of Fiachna, a king in Ulster who joined Urien’s coalition. He reigned after 589 and was in Britannia in the 590s with his warriors. No matter that a wooden palisade and ditching below it was all that defended Bamburgh, the rock was sheer in places and archaeologists have recently discovered that the only weak point, the gate at the northern end, was well defended with a double rampart. But Fiachna’s men burst in, took hostages and then almost certainly hurried north around the sand flats of Budle Bay to take part in the siege of the island.
What made both Bamburgh and Lindisfarne excellent bases for the Angles was the accident of geography which put a high and defensible rock next to a shoreline good for beaching ships and dragging the keels above the high-tide line. Both fortresses also acted as clear seamarks visible from long distance in good weather. And, on an otherwise flat and sandy coast, the value of this combination was much enhanced. Below Bebloe’s Rock there were beaches close at hand and when the British camped at the mouth of the River Low opposite the island, Theodoric and his desperate defenders will have seen their ships as the only means of escape. This time the Germanic invaders would be driven into the sea.
Morcant Bwlc understood the significance of the moment and that he and the British kings stood at the hinge of history, certainly in the north. The Sais might have overrun Gloucester, Bath, Cirencester and the other cities of the Roman south but the Gwyr Y Gogledd, ‘the Men of the North’, would not suffer the same fate. But Morcant also knew that the victor in this struggle would quickly grow more powerful – the High Kingship of the North, perhaps of all Britain, waited. And Urien, not Morcant, would be hailed by the bards and acclaimed by his allies as the victor. Here is the conclusion of the entry in the Historia Brittonum: ‘But while he was on the expedition, Urien was assassinated, on the initiative of Morcant, from jealousy, because his military skill and generalship surpassed that of all the other kings.’ And perhaps because Morcant had been made other promises. Native British warriors, Bernician aristocrats, may have stood defiantly on the ramparts of Bebloe’s Rock with Theodoric. These men would have been known to Morcant and perhaps there were ties of blood for his kingdom on the Tweed was close by. And then there was Fiachna and the Irish war band. They had taken Bamburgh and Urien had allowed them to keep it even though the fortress and its hinterland should have naturally been joined to Morcant’s domain. Perhaps it was indeed jealousy that drove home the assassin’s dagger – ruthless politics and nothing to do with generalship.
When Urien was murdered, the coalition broke apart, the British kings and their war bands saddled their ponies and rode into the west. And the history of Britain and Scotland shifted decisively. The war between Rheged and Bernicia did not end with the treachery amongst the sand dunes of Northumberland, but there were no more reports of battles in the east. Bamburgh was retaken but Theodoric met the war band of Rheged again, for the last time.
Somewhere in the north, the bards offer no clues in their wonderful paeans, the Angle king was cut down in the charge of the Rheged cavalry:
When Owain slew Fflamddwyn,
It was no more than sleeping.
Sleeps now the wide host of England,
With the light upon their eyes,
And those who fled not far,
Were braver than was need . . .
Splendid he was, in his many coloured armour,
Horses he gave to all who asked,
Gathering wealth like a miser,
Freely he shared it for his soul’s sake,
The soul of Owain, son of Urien,
May the Lord look upon its need.
Taliesin’s celebration of the defeat of Theodoric is also the death song for Owain and, after that, there were no more victories for native kings in the north. The bards mourned internecine warfare, much informed by hindsight, and they whispered that Rheged was brought low by its neighbours as much as the Angles in the east. Gildas’ dire warnings on disunity were coming to pass. There is much poetic convention in what follows but there is little doubt that the deaths of Owain and his brother, Elfyn, and the decline of Rheged fatally weakened the native hold on the north:
This hearth, wild flowers cover it.
When Owain and Elfyn lived,
Plunder boiled in its cauldron . . .
This hearth, tall brambles cover it.
Easy were its ways.
Rheged was used to giving.
This hearth, dock leaves cover it.
More usual upon its floor,
Mead, and the claims of men who drank . . .
This pillar and that pillar there.
More usual around it,
Shouts of victory, and giving of gifts.
Carlisle’s halls did not fall to the Angles immediately. It is much more likely that Urien and Owain’s authority fractured and its pieces were squabbled over by rival native factions. The house of Urien did not fall extinct for his son, Rhun, was still alive in the 620s. He took a crucial role in later developments but his calling as a monk may have disqualified him from kingship.
The pace of political change accelerated after the siege of Metcaud and whatever power remained with the royal house of Rheged was soon to be overtaken by events. The hegemony of the north passed to the Gododdin kings in Edinburgh but their time in the front rank was brief. Aneirin composed the great poem which bears their name, the earliest example of sustained literature to survive in Britain:
The men went to Catraeth,
Shouting for battle,
A squadron of horse.
Blue their armour and their shields,
Lances uplifted and sharp,
Mail and sword glinting . . .
Though they were slain, they slew.
None to his home returned . . .
Short their lives,
Long the grief
Among their kin.
Seven times their number,
The English they slew,
Many the women they widowed,
Many the mothers who wept . . .
After the wine and after the mead,
They left us, armoured in mail.
I know the sorrow of their death.
They were slain, they never grew grey . . .
From the army of the mountain court, grief unbounded,
Of three hundred men, but one returned.
In other recensions of the great epic of The Gododdin, the composer, Aneirin, claims to have been the sole survivor, the bearer of the news of disaster at Catraeth, Catterick. Even though bards would have accompanied war bands as witnesses of their deeds, this is, of course, a poetic convention. Nevertheless the overall truth of the tale is that there had been a terrible slaughter and that the warriors of the kings of Edinburgh and their allies had been utterly defeated.
Bards sang or recited their compositions while using a small harp, known as a clarsach in Scots Gaelic and a crwth in Old Welsh, to add drama and shape. With its carefully made metrical structure, the poetry had its own music and it drove the narrative using a mixture of devices like alliteration, assonance, repetition and rhyme. Chords on the harp were probably plucked to point up climactic moments or punctuate changes in mood, pace, time or place.
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Lords of Catraeth
The epic of death songs known as The Gododdin has been open to many interpretations. Sometimes ambiguous, sometimes opaque, the Old Welsh used to transcribe it had certainly changed since the songs were first composed. The ki
ng of the eponymous kindred of the Gododdin is said to have been Mynyddog Mwynvawr but the words could plausibly describe a place as well as a person. Since there is no mention of Mynyddog at the Battle of Catraeth or Catterick – and, if he had been there and been killed, there surely would have been – scholars have preferred to see the name as a reference to the citadel of the Gododdin, Edinburgh’s Castle Rock. Mynyddog Mwynvawr could mean something like ‘the wealthy mountain court’. It seems likely that Yrfai map Golistan led the host but Gwlyget of Gododdin is also cited. He was the steward of the king – or the wealthy mountain court. Even more complications begin to pile up with the contention that, at Catraeth, the Anglian host was led by a British king, who was none other than Urien of Rheged, and his war band. In a description of an overwhelming victory at Gweith Gwen Ystrat, ‘the Battle of the White Valley’, Urien is described as Lord of Catraeth. Some scholars have conjectured that the two battles are in fact the same but seen from opposite sides and that Catraeth/Catterick was essentially a conflict between Rheged and Gododdin with the Angles involved as allies. That, in turn, would imply an earlier date than 600 but it is not an impossible interpretation. The underlying value of these contradictory views is that they further break down the easy ethnic division of native British against Germanic invaders by showing a potentially very complex picture – maybe too complex in this case.
The Faded Map: The Lost Kingdoms of Scotland Page 16
