The Faded Map: The Lost Kingdoms of Scotland

by Alistair Moffat

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  7

  Bernicia

  SUMMER WAS THE battle season. War was best waged when the grass grew and could feed grazing cavalry ponies, when the weather was better and when men could sleep out around their campfires without a winter chill numbing their bones after the embers had ceased to glow. And, on long summer days when the light died only slowly in the west, armies could advance great distances quickly, appearing as if from nowhere, surprising their unprepared enemies with sheer speed. Farmers could fight in the summer. Between the times of sowing and harvest, they could take up their spears and join the retinue of their lords, the well-armed, horse-riding Well-born. Politics brought armies to the summer battlefields of Dark Ages Scotland. When rival kings contested control of territory or settled a disputed succession, they rode out with their war bands and those who owed military service followed. The chroniclers relate that the green grass of June, July and August was often spattered with gore.

  Raiding was another matter. Certainly summer soldiers plundered but, for a society which counted its wealth and measured its prestige in livestock, especially cattle, winter was the time to saddle ponies and set out on raiding expeditions. Even though rain, wind, snow and mud will have dampened much of the excitement and discouraged extravagant displays of prowess, winter was better because the cows, sheep and other beasts were more readily available. The ancient rhythms of transhumance took the flocks and herds up into the high pastures from April to October and they scattered widely over the unfenced moorland. It was only when herdsmen brought their animals down off the hills at the end of autumn to the inbye fields of their farms and settlements that they were corralled in one place – and could be stolen.

  As the summer days of 603 shortened, one of the greatest kings of the west was planning a raiding party. The rock of Dunadd rises almost sheer out of the Moine Mhor, the flat, sodden wastes of the Great Moss. On the banks of the meandering River Add, which flows into the Atlantic at Crinan, at the northern end of the Kintyre Peninsula, the citadel of Dunadd was one of the principal seats of the kings of Dalriada – and surely their most impressive stronghold.

  Now Dunadd is a windswept, bare outcrop. But at the summit there are traces of departed grandeur. Cut into a flat stone is the shape of a footprint. Often puddled with rain, it once had a powerful, venerable and central importance in the inauguration of kings. Perhaps symbolising royal control of the land, it was where a king probably stood when he took an investiture oath. Nearby is a rock-cut basin for libations, a carving of a boar which was perhaps an animal totem for the prehistoric peoples who lived around Dunadd and an inscription in the magical treelanguage known as Ogham. When a new king stood on the footprint rock, he looked out at a deeply sacred landscape, a place where men had communed with their gods for millennia. At nearby Kilmartin there lies a series of burial monuments and standing stones which still dominate. Mysterious rock carvings can be found in the hills around these valleys, marking the margins of a sacred landscape and the remains of henges and an earthwork known as a cursus will have been even more obvious in the early seventh century. Those who watched the ceremonies will have understood that the kings of Dalriada were part of traditions which stretched back beyond mere memory, to a time of gods and heroes.

  Into the Christian era, the links between sacred and temporal power emerged in the historical record. Writing only fifty years after the reign of Aedan macGabrain, Adomnan compiled a hagiography of St Columba. Almost without exception the cults of popular early saints were established by biographies which listed their miracles, prophesies and the important details of their exemplary lives. Later canonised himself, Adomnan was the ninth abbot of Iona after Columba and his claims for ‘the praiseworthy man’ will have greatly enhanced the prestige of his monastery.

  One of the most striking assertions in the Life of St Columba is that Aedan was consecrated as King of Dalriada by the saint. In a ceremony of anointing and blessing, probably modelled on biblical accounts of the priest, Samuel, and kings David and Solomon of Israel, the early church appears to have insisted upon, or at least aspired to, a central role in the power politics of the day. Almost two centuries before Charlemagne was surprised to be crowned Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III as he rose from praying at Christmas Mass in 800 in Rome, Adomnan wrote of a similar ritual in Dalriada. It may be that Aedan regarded the ceremony with the same scepticism as Charlemagne but he may also have valued the additional buttress of ecclesiastical – and sacred – support for his authority.

  Archaeologists have discovered the remains of a large stronghold on Dunadd with buildings perched on a series of terraces below the footprint stone at the summit. In one of these, in 603, King Aedan macGabrain sat with his captains and his allies, and they talked of a great raid, a foray far to the east into the lands of the south-east, the plump lands of Bernicia and its Anglian kings. It is likely that Aedan held a feast. Fragments of fine glass vessels made in Gaul have been found at Dunadd and they will have been unloaded from merchant ships with containers of wine from Europe. On the eastern edges of the rock, a great deal of debris was found which spoke of metalworking. Moulds, crucibles and even traces of gold, silver and precious stones have turned up and they date to the seventh century. These are the traces of prestige and the exercise of power. The moulds were used to make a classic design of brooch, one shaped like a small torc and with a pin through it. These were probably badges of rank given by King Aedan to his warriors and noblemen. Also found were the remains of an Anglo-Saxon buckle, almost certain proof that craftsmen came north to work in Dalriada.

  Gifts and luxury goods were more than usually important to King Aedan as he planned his expedition. As the war band mustered, princes came from afar. From Ireland, Mael Umai macBaetain led his men to Dunadd and, most importantly, the Dalriadan host would fight with Hering, the son of Hussa, former king of the Bernicians. Perhaps it was Aedan’s intention to do more than plunder. If the raid went well, Hering may have expected to be installed as the new king of Bernicia, one who would be helpful or maybe even subject to Dalriada.

  The chroniclers wrote of Aedan as a great warrior, an audacious general who led his men on ambitious and long-range campaigns, from Orkney to the Isle of Man. Certainly the muster list known as the Senchus Fer na h’Alban reckoned the military strength of the kindreds of Dalriada in naval terms. Oarsmen for seven-benched seagoing curraghs must also have fought as marines and the expeditions to Man and Orkney will have been launched from their beaches and bays. But the raid to the east was to be predominantly overland. Curraghs may have ferried men and ponies down sea lochs and perhaps into the mouth of the River Clyde but, from there, Aedan’s men moved across country. Perhaps their scouts directed them along the military way which ran immediately to the south of the Antonine Wall. In 603 much will still have been extant and no better road linked the Clyde with the Forth.

  The Roman fort at Cramond almost certainly continued to be occupied long after the departure of the imperial army and indeed well into the seventh century and beyond. Built over the principia, the military headquarters building at the centre of the fort, Cramond Kirk is a very early foundation and very suggestive of continuity. Inside the crumbling walls and gateways, native peoples could enjoy both an enhanced sense of security and whoever of the Well-Born was powerful locally could bask in enhanced prestige, an inheritor of Rome’s mighty legacy. The importance of Cramond for Aedan’s war band was that it marked the northern terminus of Dere Street, the road south, the road to glory and plunder.

  Winter raiders always avoided wet ground if they could and the hard paving of the old Roman highway will have been welcome, even if it was fraying in places. The war bands may have forded the Water of Leith at the ancient crossing below where the Dean Bridge now soars. Dere Street is thought to have then followed the line of Lothian Road before skirting the western edge of the Meadows and beginning its climb out of what is now Edinburgh at the junction with Nether Liberton. Still clearly vi
sible on the northern flank of Soutra Hill, some distance to the west of where the modern A68 takes a traverse up the gradient, the old Roman road passes close to the ruins of a medieval hospital.

  When Aedan’s scouts breasted the rise at the southern edge of the Soutra plateau, Lauderdale opened before them, the route down into Bernicia, the Tweed Basin and herds of cattle and other beasts fat from a summer’s grazing. No details of the raid have survived but it is likely that little attempt was made at stealth. According to Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, the Dalriada captains and their allies led ‘an immense and mighty army’. Perhaps like the lords of the Border Reivers a thousand years later, Aedan simply used his overwhelming force to intimidate any farmers or local landowners who might have – only for a moment – considered resistance. In the reiving centuries, large raids established temporary headquarters and sent out smaller forces to ingather plunder.

  What is recorded is the reaction. Even though it was only three years after the Gododdin defeat at Catterick, it appears that the defender of the Tweed Basin was not a prince like Catrawt of Calchvynydd or an alliance of the Well-Born. Aedan had passed through the heartland of the Gododdin without report of any battle or hindrance. Perhaps Catterick broke utterly the power of the kings who ruled from Din Eidyn, Edinburgh’s Castle Rock and Traprain Law. Perhaps some of the remnants of the Gododdin’s war bands rode with them. For when a response to the Dalriada raid came, it was from an Anglian king, perhaps the greatest ever to rule Bernicia.

  Aethelfrith’s reign began in 592 and the genealogists counted him as the grandson of Ida, the first to rule from the stronghold at Bamburgh. Here is how Bede introduced him:

  About this time [AD 603], Aethelfrith, a very powerful and ambitious king, ruled the kingdom of the Northumbrians. He ravaged the Britons more cruelly than all the other English leaders, so that he might well be compared to Saul, the King of Israel, except of course that he was ignorant of true religion. He overran a greater area than any other king or ealdorman, exterminating or enslaving the inhabitants, making their lands either tributary to the English or ready for English settlement . . .

  Alarmed at his advance, Aidan, king of those Irish who lived in Britain, came against him with a large and strong army, but was defeated and fled with very few, having lost almost his entire army at a famous place known as Degsastan, that is, Degsa’s Stone.

  No longer famous, the exact location of Degsastan is a matter of conjecture. Historians agree that the battle must have been fought in the Borders and a traditional, and little interrogated view was that the armies met at Dawston, a place-name that still clings to a burn flowing through the high and windy valley of Liddesdale. This must be unlikely. For raiders, the pickings are slim in the Cheviot ranges and the country rough and difficult for large numbers of warriors to move through and sustain themselves. Moreover Aethelfrith’s victory at Degsastan secured for him and his lords the Tweed Valley and Dawston is simply in the wrong place for that to have happened so quickly and completely. Writing in the fourteenth century, the Scottish chronicler, John of Fordun, has no hesitation in stating that the Dalriadan army and their allies attacked the Borders from the north and by far the most likely route was the Old Roman road of Dere Street. It passed very close to a place with a prime claim to be the location of the great battle.

  Above the modern farm at Addinston are two very well preserved prehistoric, ditch-and-bank fortresses. They glower over Lauderdale and protect the steep-sided valley of the Cleekhimin Burn directly below – and they make a perfect location for a raiders’ base camp. The fortresses sheltered men and perhaps ponies while the steep-sided glen corralled stolen beasts and watered them while they waited to be herded away north up nearby Dere Street and over Soutra Hill.

  Not only is the name of the farm at Addinston in upper Lauderdale a clear toponymic descendant of Degsastan, the full seventh-century version of Aet Aegdanes Stan shows the link more precisely. ‘Aedan’s Stone’ is the meaning and it is intriguing. Why was the place of battle named after the defeated king if it had not been near a base fortified by his war band? At seventy, he was an old man to be leading an army and perhaps he was killed at Addinston. Certainly so little is heard of Aedan after 603 that some believe that he was forced to abdicate. The chroniclers reported his death in 609. In any event, the stone is a monument of some sort to the man who took part in a battle which was a signal event in the flood-tide of Bernician, and later Northumbrian, advance.

  Here is the remainder of the passage form Bede:

  In this battle, Aethelfrith’s brother, Theodbald and all his followers were killed. Aethelfrith won this fight in the year of our Lord 603, the eleventh of his reign, which lasted twenty four years . . . From that day until the present, no king of the Irish in Britain has dared to do battle with the English.

  Bede saw Degsastan as an unequivocal turning point and, throughout his great history, he never misses an opportunity to underline the inevitable advance of English power – and the fact that it was morally right. Even though Aethelfrith was a pagan and Aedan a Christian, Bede nevertheless enlists the Anglian king on the side of history as he saw it. And the frequent references to nationality, to the English overcoming the Irish or the Britons, lends a definition to the wars of Aethelfrith and Aedan which was almost certainly inappropriate. Plunder, raiding, the ability to exert power over regions and their inhabitants – all of these mattered much more than the ethnic identity of those who fought at Degsastan and the battles and campaigns of the time. It seems very likely that the English-ing of south-eastern Scotland, making lands tributary or ready for English settlement, as Bede has it, was achieved with the collusion of many who were not English. And it was also a contest between military elites. A closer analysis of the events around Degsastan will support this view.

  The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle described Aedan’s force as a ‘raiding army’, even though all accounts said it was large. No farmers followed on foot with their spears. Rather, this was likely to have been an alliance of war bands and their lords brigaded together under the leadership of King Aedan. Reports of the fighting confirm this. The Irish prince, Mael-Umai, was said to have killed Eanfrith, Aethelfrith’s brother and perhaps even more seriously another brother, Theodbald, also died ‘with all his followers’. These casualties reinforce the sense of lords and princes at the head of their war bands clashing in the winter hill country above Lauderdale. And also qualifies somewhat Bede’s assertion that Aedan was routed rather than merely defeated at Degsastan.

  Momentum was nevertheless firmly with Aethelfrith and, a year after his victory in the north, he turned his warriors south and his attention to the neighbouring Angle kingdom of Deira. After the death of King Aella, his son and heir, Edwin, was driven out by Aethelfrith and, by 604, Bernicia and Deira united to become what was later called Northumbria.

  Twelve hundred monks were said to have been slaughtered at a battle fought in 613 at Chester. They were praying for victory for the kings of Powys and the defeat of the pagan Aethelfrith. Bede reported this appalling act without comment, no word of criticism for the slaughter of so many of the faithful, even blaming their British guards who fled at the Bernician assault. The attack on the monks may have been a tactic, a means of diverting the warriors of Powys, perhaps flanking them. In any event, Aethelfrith appears to have been an inventive general and he attracted the Old Welsh nickname, Am Fleisaur. Meaning ‘the Trickster’, it may have been conferred by his British allies, impressed at his resourcefulness. Just as Hering, son of Hussa, and Yrfai map Golistan could be found in the war bands of British kings, so native princes could have sided with the most successful and wide-ranging Anglian king of the early seventh century. Perhaps the speed of Bernician takeover in the Tweed Valley should be attributed to the making of astute alliances. Although Aneirin insisted that, along with the entire Gododdin host, Cadrawd of Calchvynydd perished, his son may have thought it wise to ride with Aethelfrith and his men. History appeared t
o be running with them.

  Politics as well as military skill would soon combine to make Northumbria even more powerful in the north. Edwin of Deira had sought refuge at the court of King Raedwald of East Anglia, the man probably at the centre of the spectacular ship burial found at Sutton Hoo. Having managed to have another Deiran rival poisoned when he fled to the kings of Elmet, Aethelfrith offered gold to Raedwald if he would give up Edwin. Instead a battle was fought on the banks of the River Idle in Nottinghamshire and there the Trickster ran out of ideas and luck as the East Anglians cut him down.