The Faded Map: The Lost Kingdoms of Scotland

by Alistair Moffat

  In any event, maenors tended to comprise twelve or thirteen farms in upland areas and six or seven in the more fertile lowland districts. In the Manor Valley, this ancient pattern is clear. Bounded by the watershed ridges of hills on three sides and entered where the Manor Water tumbles into the Tweed, the valley supported thirteen farms in 1845, according to the Statistical Account, and now has twelve. It contains all the other elements present in a classic seventh-century maenor. As Christianity spread northwards through the high valleys of the Southern Uplands, almost certainly radiating from the ancient church at late Roman Carlisle, the estates began to acquire their own churches, a religious focus for a clearly defined community. St Gordian was the now apparently eccentric choice for the lords of Manor and the survival of the eccles place-name shows how early Christian churches were speckled over the map – eccles derives from the Old Welsh eglwys which, in turn, comes from the Latin ecclesia ‘church’. Ecclefechan in Annandale means ‘the Little Church’ (probably in contrast to ‘the Great Church’ at the lost monastery at Hoddom), Eccles in Berwickshire retained its early sanctity and became the home of a medieval nunnery and Eaglescairnie in East Lothian, Eaglesham in Renfrewshire and several other sites can still be found. It is likely that all of them were sixth century or perhaps even earlier foundations associated with maenors.

  The maerdref was the central farm and the residence of the maer. In Wales, these were often found in the shadow of great fortresses such as those at Dinorben, Dinas Powys and Aberffraw, the principal seat of the powerful kings of Gwynedd. In the sixth century, below the halls of Maelgwyn Fawr, a famous victim of Justinian’s plague, there lay a church, a law court and the house of a maer. At the foot of the Manor Valley, near where the Manor Water meets the Tweed, the hill forts of Cademuir rise. Ancient, protected by the prehistoric ditches and stone obstacles known as chevaux de frise, these impressive fortifications continued to be garrisoned into the Dark Ages. St Gordian’s sanctuary stood some way to the south, further up the valley, but the cluster of buildings at Manor Hall, Manor Church and Kirkton suggest the presence of a maerdref. It may be that St Gordian’s served the upper valley and another church the people who lived at the mouth.

  In the stock-rearing society of the seventh century, the farms on the lower ground by the Manor Water and its feeder streams were known as the hendrefi, ‘the winter towns’. This name remembered the ancient journey of transhumance, when herdsmen drove their beasts up the hill trails in the spring to the high pastures. To allow the lowland fields to recover and the tender shoots of new crops to grow untrampled and unnibbled, flocks and herds summered in the unfenced grasslands up on the plateaux. The shielings where the herd laddies and their helpers slept and sheltered were known collectively as the hafod, ‘the summer town’. With its self-contained geography, the Manor Valley is perfect for transhumance as the hills above Manorhead over towards the Megget Valley offer good and extensive grazing. Even when the wind blew over Black Cleuch and Sting Rig, shelter for men and beasts could be found in the steep-sided hopes and deans between the green and pillowy hills. Their names recall the timeless tradition of summering out – Hog’s Knowe, Shepherd’s Cairn. And two others remind the map reader of one of the dangers faced by the flocks, the herdsman and their dogs – Wolfhope Law rises near the farm of Langhaugh and Wolf Rig stands over towards the Yarrow Valley.

  Close to where a shepherd found the hoard of Bronze Age metalwork at Horsehope Craig, the Glenrath Burn joins the Manor Water. The narrow valley of Glenrath Hope reaches into the hills to the east and, even though it is only ten miles to Peebles, feels very remote. Perhaps for that reason, an early Dark Ages settlement has been preserved on its northern slopes. The most extensive yet found in Scotland, the outlines of its fields are clearly visible and the foundations of a cluster of four small houses can be made out.

  Protected by a series of elegantly curved enclosing walls, each had a courtyard, a series of pens where animals could be brought inbye for milking, where a midden of their muck might be piled up and where firewood and peats could be stacked. The houses were round and built in a long-lasting and sophisticated style seen in many parts of Scotland. Using only materials close at hand, their construction was simple and efficient. Once shallow founds had been dug and a drystone wall built up to waist height or higher, a conical set of roof trusses was assembled and jointed at the apex, often using only the weight of interlocking beams secured with cords. Bracken still grows in profusion on the steep sides of Glenrath Hope and this or turf was used for roofing. A beaten earth floor with some stone flags set at the only entrance (to keep the winter mud manageable) was made and perhaps strewn with more bracken. Archaeologists have found the remains of sweeter smelling herbs mixed in with floor debris in roundhouses. In the centre, a hearth of flat and raised stones was set out. There were no windows and the only light came from the doorway. Often this was placed in the east for the first rays of the morning sun or, if advisable, in the lee of the prevailing wind.

  Most light and heat came from the downhearth in the middle of the house. It was used for cooking in the winter months and families sat and slept around its glow. Sparks floating up to the roof might be thought a hazard but the perpetually burning fire soon created a layer of carbon monoxide which extinguished them. Smoke filtered through the roof but the interior will have been eye-watering, encouraging people to squat or sit on low benches.

  In the blast and ice of the winter these roundhouses will have been snug enough but there can be no doubt that, in the summer and periods of better weather, their inhabitants spent most of their time outdoors. The light was of course much better for the delicate work of weaving, for example, and a beautifully decorated spindle whorl was found on the site. It was used as part of the apparatus for spinning yarn from the wool pulled out of the fleeces of the sheep which grazed around Glenrath Hope.

  The inbye fields were marked off by stone dykes whose footings have survived and earth banks which are less clear. Most were laid out on the northern slopes of the narrow valley so that they were canted southwards to catch as much of the warming sun as possible. Crops will certainly have included grain but not the range of other produce which comes out of modern fields. Milk, cheese, bread, meat (from game as well as domesticated animals) and a wild harvest of berries, fruits, nuts and fungi formed the staple diet of the farmers who lived in Glenrath Hope in the seventh century.

  Who were they? A combination of Welsh and Scottish sources offer answers. In the society of southern Scotland around the time of the fateful battle at Catraeth, the most fundamental distinctions were between those who were free, those whose freedom was circumscribed and those who had none. The Bonheddwyr, the ‘Well-born’, were the sort of men who rode to battle with the Angles at Catterick on the banks of the Swale. They had what their enemies lacked – lineage – and, because they could trace their genealogy, they also had title to land and privileges. That was why a list of impressive ancestors mattered and why the generations sometimes wound back into myth-history and borrowed authority, like Coel Hen and the Roman prefects of the fourth century. When the bards of the Bonheddwyr sang of their lineage, they also reminded listeners of what they owned and controlled. Just as kings could maintain a teulu, a war band, the more powerful of the Well-Born could sustain a household which probably included a small cadre of professional soldiers or at least well-armed men trained in the arts of war. On occasion, lineage itself will not have been sufficiently assertive.

  The farmsteads at Glenrath Hope were the homes of a lower class of people, the taeogion. These men and women were bound to the land they cultivated and tended and owed a series of rents and obligations to the Bonheddwyr. But every taeog on an estate had a right to farm and, depending on the nature of the ground to be worked, it could be a good life. There was a system of rotation known as the tir cyfrif and it was in the gift of the maer. Caethion were slaves – men and women who had no rights whatsoever and were the property of whoever had bought or a
cquired them. It is likely that many caethion were war captives.

  Society appears to have been rigidly stratified and, while taeogion could be productive, they were bound always to remain farmers. By definition, they were not Well-Born and were automatically excluded from the priesthood, from being trained as a bard – or a blacksmith.

  * * *

  The Law of the Innocents

  One of the most outstanding figures of the Dark Ages was St Adomnan. Much more than merely the biographer of St Columba, he was a politician and intellectual of considerable power. Perhaps his most notable initiative was the Law of the Innocents. At the Synod of Birr in central Ireland held in 697, he proposed that women, children and clergy be protected from the brutal realities of Dark Ages warfare. Nothing else like it had been promulgated in Europe. It was underwritten by an impressive list of Irish, Dalriadan and Pictish kings. Adomnan’s protection of women extended further with penalties for sexual assault – ‘If a hand is put under her dress to defile her . . .’, a fine was to be paid – and an attempt to improve their lowly status as cumalaich or ‘little slaves’. As a balance, women were not to be treated too leniently if they themselves were guilty of a crime – ‘For a woman deserves death for the killing of a man or woman . . . that is to say, she is to be put in a boat of one paddle as a sea-waif upon the ocean to go with the wind from the land.’ Unusual.

  * * *

  This last prohibition is striking and may be an inheritance from prehistoric times. When metals were first worked in Britain, almost four millennia before the taeogion toiled in the little fields of Glenrath Hope, those who had the skills to convert lumps of ore into bright, shiny objects were probably considered to be in possession of magical powers. Certainly they were seen as people of very high status. One of the richest prehistoric graves ever found in Britain, that of the man known as the Amesbury Archer, contained much gold and bronze, and other items showed clearly that he had been a smith.

  In the Manor Valley, six leading smelting sites have been found. The carbon dating of the charcoal places their use more than a thousand years ago. Lead has a low melting point and small furnaces were built to extract pure metal from the ore picked up on the valley bottom. Peat and charcoal were used as fuel. Inside a low, square drystone structure with gaps to allow the wind to act as a bellows, the fuel was layered with ore which had been broken down into fragments. Under this structure a clay-lined pit collected the molten lead. Easy to work, it was used to fashion both everyday objects and exotic ones, like jewellery. When combined with tin, it made lustrous pewter. All of these activities will have been the work of smiths, men of high status in the Dark Ages in the Manor Valley and no little skill.

  A Scottish historical document dating back to the tenth century and probably reflecting society long before that, provides fascinating insights into how the society of southern Scotland functioned. Known as the Leges inter Brettos et Scottos, it recognised an enduring cultural distinction between the Britons of the south and the Scots of the west and north. The Old Welsh-speaking cultures of the kingdoms of the Gododdin and Strathclyde were still sufficiently vigorous to merit a different and detailed legal status and resist homogeneity.

  A central concept of the Leges was blood-price. Called cro in Gaelic and galanas in Old Welsh, it consisted of a table of precise amounts to be paid in cattle as restitution for the killing of a man. From kings to slaves, the tariffs were tabulated with great clarity but it cannot have been as tidy as it seems. The notion of galanas developed for sensible reasons – as an attempt to avoid bloodshed and feud – but, no matter how many cattle were offered, some men will still have thirsted for and taken vengeance.

  Women were heavily discounted in the tables of blood-price and generally reckoned as worth half of a man of equivalent social status. For the price of one king, two queens could be murdered. But, even if they were cheaper, women were not without legal rights. Perhaps harking back to the uncertain customs of a pre-Christian past, marriage was seen more as a contract than an absolute sacrament. If a husband was not faithful and constant or was unreasonably severe, even cruel, divorce was permitted and the injured wife could expect to be legally compensated in any settlement.

  * * *

  The Welsh Alphabet

  Celtic languages do not sit easily in the mouths of monoglot English speakers and pronunciation is made even more difficult by a different alphabet. All those consonant clusters can be alarming and Welsh crossword puzzles have larger boxes so that dd or ch letters can be accommodated. Most letters of the alphabet are similar to English but there is no k, q or z in Welsh and y is a vowel. Here is a list of the letters not used or heard in English:

  ch like the Scots loch, a sound the English affect to be unable to pronounce although many manage the name of the German composer, J. S. Bach, well enough.

  dd sounds like th in the so that Dafydd for David ends rather more attractively.

  f sounds like a v. The Welsh for little is fychan which gives the surname Vaughan and Dafydd is pronounced davuth.

  ff f as in off.

  ll the toughest Welsh letter, it is best managed by clamping the tip of the tongue to the top palate and hissing the English letter l.

  rh another difficult sound, this is an aspirated r which does not occur at all in English – similar to the difference between the w in when (aspirated) and the w in went (not), although sadly this distinction continues to fade.

  y like i as in sit. Usually.

  There are significant differences in usage between South and North Wales and all sorts of accents are used – the grave, acute and diaeresis are the most common. Both Welsh and Gaelic are very beautiful to listen to, especially in poetry and song, and their rhythms are designed to be remembered.

  * * *

  Amongst the taeogion, there were more everyday obligations and those owed to kings were detailed. A food rent known as cylch was due to the royal war band, presumably when it rode into the maenor or was somewhere nearby. By their nature, food rents were seasonal and had to be collected and consumed on a peripatetic basis. Until modern times and the advent of easier transport and refrigeration, royal courts were in the habit of eating and drinking their way around the countryside, like a swarm of Well-Born locusts.

  Hunting appears to have become a royal passion in the Dark Ages. When kings wished to chase the deer and other game, taeogion were obliged to feed their pack of hunting dogs, carve paths through the forest (this sounds as though it might be a reference to beating out game rather than finding a way through a primeval and long gone wildwood) and to house members of the royal party. To the Well-Born, the farmsteads of the taeogion were bound to render a food rent known as gwestfa, a portion of which could, in turn, be handed on to the ever-hungry royal household.

  The Leges inter Brettos et Scottos was not a unique apparatus. In the late seventh century, the law codes of King Ine of Wessex made exceptional provision for the Old Welsh-speaking communities in the south of England. What is surprising about the Scottish Leges is their longevity. Up to the tenth century and on into the medieval period, long after the Celts of England had all but vanished from the historical record, there persisted a need for the recognition of native British legal status.

  The differences between the Anglo-Saxon settlers and the native Celts were of course also cultural. In what is now eastern and southern England, the conversion of the Germanic peoples happened very gradually, only beginning with the papal mission of St Augustine to Kent in 597, more than 150 years after the first arrivals, what historians used to call the Adventus Saxonum. Elsewhere in the post-Roman west, it was very different. The process of conversion was completed very rapidly indeed. Only fifteen years after the fall of the last Roman ruler of the province of Gaul, King Clovis effected the mass entry of the Frankish nation into the church of Christ. But, over much of Britannia, the Baptised natives faced the armies of the Heathen invaders for many generations, long enough for deep enmities and divisions to solidify. This fau
lt line was also emphasised by power politics and it may explain why the emerging dialects of English borrowed only a tiny dusting of vocabulary from the Celtic language of near neighbours. These were people who had developed an ancient, accurate way of describing the detail of a climate, a landscape and its flora and fauna. Colonists often gratefully adopt native terms for things foreign to their experience but, in Britannia, this simply did not happen. The reasons are almost impossible to fathom but perhaps the fact of a long-lasting religious divide offers a partial explanation.

  What is certain is that a northern dialect of English was established in the south-eastern quadrant of Dark Ages Scotland and it gradually became the language of the Lowlands. Old Welsh shrank back into the hills and high valleys and, although it lingered for many centuries, the English of the low country and its fertile farms and fields was without doubt the language of the future. And the political and cultural phenomenon of Bernicia was the catalyst which forced most Scots to adopt it.

  * * *

  What Happened to Welsh?

  Perhaps the most intractable of all the mysteries swirling around the history of the Dark Ages concerns language. Around the year 400, the fading Roman province of Britannia had a population of between three and four million. It appears that most of them, the overwhelming majority who lived in the countryside, spoke dialects of Old Welsh but could probably get by in Latin when they visited markets in towns or had any dealings with the army or the provincial government. In the next 150 years, the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and other Germanic peoples came, conquered and settled. And, despite holding on to its Celtic language throughout the Roman occupation (unlike France or Spain where languages based on Latin developed), most of Britannia quickly became English-speaking. Why? The new settlers cannot have been very numerous – small groups of men in small boats, perhaps as few as 50,000 and no more than 200,000, tiny percentage of the existing Celtic population. What happened? Did all of the natives flee to the west or die of the plague or fall at the hands of the invaders? Surely not? Bernicia may offer a hint of an answer. Where political and military fusion took place, cultural fusion followed and, amongst the different dialects of Old Welsh, Early English became a lingua franca. Or perhaps the answer is even simpler. Colonised populations often have to adopt the language of the colonisers whether they are Romans on Hadrian’s Wall or the tiny number of soldiers and managers employed by the East India Company to govern a vast subcontinent. Where a spear or a gun pointed, words followed.