The Faded Map: The Lost Kingdoms of Scotland

by Alistair Moffat

  Edwin quickly established himself as King of Northumbria, of both Deira and Bernicia, and it was the turn of the heirs of Aethelfrith to flee into exile. These periods of enforced absence were important, defining and had clear political and cultural consequences. Northumbrian exiles were taken in by neighbouring kings who hoped to gain advantage by offering what could be a dangerous shelter. When Edwin was installed on the Northumbrian throne by Raedwald’s army, the East Anglian king wielded great influence in the north and perhaps even claimed overlordship.

  The heirs of Aethelfrith went further north, to the Atlantic coastlands. Oswald and his brother, Oswiu, sought the protection of Eochaid Buide, the successor of Aedan macGabrain and their seventeen-year stay in Dalriada was enormously influential. Both young men were converted to Christianity on the holy island of Iona and they became fluent speakers of Gaelic, a detail which would be important later.

  While the Aethelfrith princes were raised in a thoroughly Celtic milieu, the much more English Edwin (from Deira, his instinct had been to flee south while the Bernicians of the Tweed Basin always seemed more comfortable in the north) began to wax powerful. Here is part of Bede’s account:

  At this time [625], the people of the Northumbrians, the English living north of the Humber, under Edwin their king received the Faith through the ministry of Paulinus, whom I have already mentioned. As a sign that he would come to the Faith and the heavenly kingdom, King Edwin received wide additions to his earthly realm, and brought under his sway all the territories inhabited either by English or by Britons, an achievement unmatched by any previous English king.

  Writing in Latin about a king with imperial, or at least expansionist, pretensions, Bede adds the aura of Rome to Edwin’s regime. The war band is called the comitatus, royal reeves or administrators are praefecti and the royal estates and fortresses are the villae regiae and the urbes regis. A royal progress through the countryside is also recorded by Bede and it reeks of Roman pomp and the panoply of the legions:

  So great was his majesty in his realm that not only were banners carried before him in battle, but even in time of peace, as he rode about amongst his cities, estates and kingdoms with his thegns, he always used to be preceded by a standard-bearer. Further, when he walked anywhere along the roads, there used to be carried before him the type of standard the Romans call a ‘tufa’ and the English call a ‘thuf’.

  And thirty years before Bede, Adomnan went further with the historical analogy when he hailed Edwin’s successor, Oswald, as Imperator Totius Britanniae, ‘Emperor of All Britain’.

  At Yeavering, now a deserted and windy valley leading into the eastern ranges of the Cheviots, Edwin did more homage to the memory of Rome. With an earlier Old Welsh name of Ad Gefrin, meaning ‘Goat Hill’, Yeavering was already a power centre before the 620s. But Edwin added much to its lustre when he ordered the construction of a remarkable new structure. Known as the ‘Grandstand’, it was made in wood – its reconstruction conjectured out of the pattern and depth of its post holes – and it resembled a wedge or a section cut out of a Roman amphitheatre. There may have been extant examples for the designers to copy at Catterick or York. The tiered seating was arranged so that everyone on it had clear sight and hearing from a dais built at the foot of the structure.

  The idea was to create an open-air meeting place where one man could talk to many at once. In a preliterate society, kings and their senior men laid down the law by speaking it out loud in a large group so that there could be no doubt and little room for interpretation. This ancient form of law-giving is still practised in the British Isles when, each summer, at St John’s on the Isle of Man, the Deemsters or Judges declaim aloud in Manx Gaelic any new legislation. It cannot be accepted and codified until this ceremony is enacted.

  The Grandstand may have been used for moots or meetings but the excavators at Yeavering believed that it also had a religious purpose. Behind the dais on the flat ground, in front of the tiered seating, there was a large post hole unrelated to any structure close at hand and whatever had been erected in it had not been removed but allowed to rot where it stood. Was it a large wooden cross?

  In the first passage from Bede, welcoming Edwin’s reign, the missionary, Paulinus, is noted. Sent north by Augustine’s church at Canterbury, he undertook the mass conversion of the Angles at Yeavering and elsewhere. Baptism was the central ritual and Paulinus’ mission is remembered in the place-name of Pallinsburn near the modern border between England and Scotland.

  Also excavated at Yeavering were the classic timber halls well known from poems such as Beowulf. When Bede related the story of the conversion of the Anglian kingdom of Edwin, he wrote of a meeting of leading men and counsellors. Perhaps it took place on the Grandstand. In any case, he employs a telling image which seems to make the life of the time come alive for a moment:

  Another of the king’s chief men signified his agreement with this prudent argument [that the kingdom should convert to Christianity], and went on to say:

  ‘Your Majesty, when we compare the present life of man on earth with that time of which we have no knowledge, it seems to me like the swift flight of a single sparrow through the feasting-hall where you are sitting at dinner on a winter’s day with your thegns and counsellors. In the midst there is a comforting fire to warm the hall: outside, the storms of winter snow or rain are raging. This sparrow flies in swiftly through one door of the hall, and out through another. While he is inside, he is safe from the winter storms; but after a few moments of comfort, he vanishes from sight into the wintry world from which he came. Even so, man appears on the earth for a little while; but of what went before this life or of what follows, we know nothing. Therefore if this new teaching has brought any more certain knowledge, it seems only right we should follow it.’

  While Edwin and his counsellors sat around the winter fire and debated the adoption of a Christianity sent from Rome, hundreds of miles to the west, on the island of Iona, another group of Angles was also entering into the arms of Holy Mother Church. Oswald and Oswiu, the exiled sons of Aethelfrith, were baptised by the monks of Columba’s famous monastery. And their teachings had a profound effect.

  At the Battle of Hatfield Chase in 633, Edwin was killed by the warriors of Cadwallon, King of Gwynedd. Commentators have sometimes described Hatfield as a rare and late victory for the native British over the English but the reality was probably much more complicated with war bands from both ethnic groups fighting on both sides.

  Nevertheless names and origins were beginning to matter. In the seventh century, a curious dichotomy developed. Many different groups of Germanic settlers had come to Britain after the end of the Empire – Angles from Angeln, Saxons from Lower Saxony, Jutes from Jutland in northern Denmark, Swedes (Raedwald of East Anglia may have been the most famous), Franks from what is now France and others from Northern Europe. But only 150 years after the Adventus Saxonum, these Germanic groups began to acquire a common name.

  The instigator of the famous mission of St Augustine, Pope Gregory I, called King Aethelbert of Kent Rex Anglorum even though he was almost certainly of Saxon origin. The term quickly gained currency. In the early eighth century, Bede wrote his Ecclesiastical History of the English People – not the Saxon or Jutic People – and, in the version of Old English spoken by his generation, the Germanic groups had come to know themselves as the Angelcynn or ‘Angle-kin’. By AD 1000, a nation had been named. Englaland meant ‘the Country of the Angles’ and they spoke various dialects of English.

  It may be that the early dominance of the Bernician and Deiran kings had a powerful influence beyond the lands they controlled directly. They were the true Angelcynn and it may be that others wished to be included or associated with the prestige of kings like Aethelfrith, Edwin and their successors.

  But what is immediately striking is the name conferred on them by the Celtic natives of Britain. Without exception, they declined to call the Germanic incomers the Angles. In Welsh, they are still t
he Sais, in Scots Gaelic the Sasunnaich and in Cornish the Sostenagh. And these Saxons live not in England but in Sasunn or Saxony. All of these terms speak of the Saxons and it may be that this is an accident of early contact – the Saxons came first and people like them, the Angles, came later. But they were similar, spoke similar languages and were also land hungry. In a further poignant historical twist, the Welsh word for England is not a version of Saxony but Lloegr, ‘the Lost Lands’.

  The misnaming was mutual. In Welsh the Cymry live in Cymru. Wales is an English word and comes from wealas, a word meaning ‘a foreigner’. The natives were the foreigners and the incomers an undifferentiated tide of Saxons, no matter what they called themselves. This dichotomy describes an atmosphere of cultural apartheid, a time when the much more numerous natives simply had as little to do with the rampant and ruthless military elite who would eventually force their language on all but the Celts who clung to their independence in the west and the north.

  When the frustrations of exile ended with Edwin of Northumbria’s death at the hands of Cadwallon in the autumn of 633, the sons of Aethelfrith made their plans. The medieval chronicler, John of Fordun, related that their protector and sponsor, Domnall Brecc, King of Dalriada, sent a war band to accompany them south and ensure the succession. It was a wise precaution. After the slaughter at Hatfield Chase, Cadwallon’s warriors and those of his ally, Penda of Mercia, plundered Deira and Northumbria was once again divided. With Dalriadan backing, Eanfrith took an uncertain control of Bernicia but, when he attempted a diplomatic settlement with the ferocious Cadwallon, the result was conclusive. Eanfrith was taken and beheaded.

  The news of this outrage galvanised the new king, Eanfrith’s brother, Oswald. He mustered an army in the Tweed Basin and, probably supported by the war bands of both Dalriada and Pictland, the Bernicians crossed Hadrian’s Wall near Hexham. At Denisesburn, they clashed with Cadwallon, broke through the royal war band and killed him. The effect was dramatic and immediate. Like Aethelfrith and Edwin before him, Oswald moved quickly to re-establish himself in Deira and reunite Northumbria. His decisiveness catapulted him into the exalted status of Bretwalda. Meaning ‘Britain Ruler’, it was a term coined later but the political reality was less ambiguous. After the victory at Denisesburn, Oswald was the most powerful king in all Britain.

  Like his predecessors, the Bretwalda pursued his rivals relentlessly, driving Edwin’s heirs into exile. Elsewhere he followed an aggressive policy, always moving forward, always seeking to extend his reach and strength. But, in the midst of all that campaigning, politicking and planning, Oswald never forgot the peace and spirituality of Columba’s monastery at Iona. And he sent messengers to the west.

  So that the conversion of the English begun by St Paulinus might continue, the new king asked the Abbot of Iona for missionaries. He did not seek help from Canterbury or, by extension, from Rome but from where Oswald had himself been baptised with his exiled family. Based as it was in the Tweed Valley, Bernicia’s instinct was again to look northwards rather than south as Deira had done. After the failure of the first mission, Aidan made the long and arduous journey across Drumalban, the range of high mountains which runs north from the head of Loch Lomond, what Adomnan called the montes dorsi Britanniae, the ‘mountains of the spine of Britain’. When he at last reached Bernicia, Aidan began the work of creating a Christian community, a bishopric. For its centre, he chose somewhere peripheral. Following his hermetic, Celtic instincts and with the example of Iona in mind, Aidan came to the beautiful tidal island of Lindisfarne. Only two generations before, Urien had besieged the English here and been murdered in his tent by assassins sent by Morcant Bwlc.

  Like Iona, Lindisfarne retains an unmistakable air of sanctity, a spiritual place dominated by sea and sky, somewhere on the edge of the land but somehow not of it. It was a diseart, less stormtossed and harsh than the extraordinary foundation on the island of Canna but without doubt in the same tradition.

  As he travelled around his new bishopric – on foot in imitation of Christ and not on horseback like the aristocrat he was – Aidan set up at least four other communities whose geography was thought to encourage the contemplative life. Far inland, the new monasteries depended not on the waves of the ocean for their seclusion but on the bends and loops of Border rivers.

  Continuity of sanctity is a clear theme in early Christianity in Scotland. Up on Eildon Hill North, a long circle of ditching was dug around the summit, not for defence but to mark off a sacred precinct. Hills and particularly prominent hills like the Eildons, which were not part of a range, were thought of as being magical, perhaps closer to the sky gods. The ditching around many in southern Scotland was the beginning of an ancient idea – the holy of holies, the sanctum sanctorum, the consecrated ground where men might commune with their gods.

  Aidan and his followers chose a place within sight of the pagan sky-temple on Eildon Hill North. The Celtic monastery at Old Melrose was probably founded in 635 or soon afterwards. On three sides, it is enclosed by a lazy loop of the River Tweed and on the fourth by a ditch, the monastic vallum. What may have attracted Aidan to bends in rivers was a sense that they represented a boundary made not by mud-spattered monks hacking at the ground with mattocks and piling up earth with baskets but by the hand of God. Just as He made the Palestinian deserts surrounding the hermitages of the Desert Fathers and the waves of the Atlantic which cut off Iona, Canna and other island monasteries from the temporal world, so He put the protective arm of a river around His monks at Old Melrose.

  Similar instincts may have guided Aidan and his missionaries elsewhere in the Borders. There are tantalising remains found at Jedburgh which point to an early foundation. Fragments from five stone crosses have been recognised as well as parts of a shrine with beautiful carvings of vine scrolls and birds. Bishop Ecgred of Lindisfarne certainly founded a community at Jedburgh in 830 but there was probably an earlier church. Traces are unlikely ever to come to light since they likely lie under the magnificent ruins of the medieval abbey. It stands in a bend of the River Jed but the remains of any monastic vallum will have long since been obliterated by the surrounding town.

  At Dryburgh Abbey, this time on a site almost made an island by a loop in the Tweed, a fragment of another early stone cross hints at a long past. And a sixth-century figure, St Modan, was listed as being the abbot of a community of monks at Dryburgh. Tradition places him as a missionary around Falkirk and Stirling and there are several ancient dedications to him in the area. Perhaps he came south to found a community. At Kelso, in another bend of the Tweed, there was a pre-existing church on the site of the medieval abbey, although no archaeology has emerged to suggest an early date. It may be significant that all of the medieval dedications of the four Border abbeys were to St Mary, maybe an echo of an earlier cult of the Virgin.

  As often in the story of Dark Ages Scotland, place-names offer flickers of light and that of Old Melrose is illuminating. In Bede’s writings, the spelling of Mailros makes the derivation clearer. The second element ros is a Gaelic word and it means ‘a promontory’ or ‘peninsula’, a straightforward description of the tongue of land almost encircled by the River Tweed. The first part of the name is harder to understand. In imitation of Christ’s crown of thorns, monks had themselves tonsured, that is, the crown of their heads shaved to leave only a fringe of hair. Aidan’s followers had also been tonsured but in a different way. Known as the ceudgelt, this Irish style was thought to have druidic origins and, not only had it signified a holy man for many centuries before the coming of Christianity, it was perhaps more dramatic than what was known as the Roman tonsure. Hair was shaved back from the front of the scalp to a line from ear to ear and left to grow long at the back. In any event, the Gaelic word maol came to signify someone who was not only bald but a shaved or shorn monk or more precisely ‘the holy man’s servant’. This last is a reference to Columba and it survives in the popular Scottish Christian name of Malcolm. As maol-chaluim, it originall
y meant ‘a servant of Calum or Columba’ – in other words, ‘a monk’.

  What all of this shows is how a place-name can carry a great deal of historical freight and that Melrose means ‘the Promontory of the Monks’ – specifically, monks from Iona. When King David I refounded the monastery in the twelfth century, he had both the church and the name removed to the site of a village called Fordel two miles upriver. Part of the reason was Old Melrose’s long association with one of Britain’s greatest saints whose cult centre lay beyond the king of Scotland’s control. But all these concerns lay far in the future.

  When Aidan’s missionaries began work at Old Melrose, their first task was probably the marking-off of the sacred precinct. The vallum across the neck of the promontory is one of the few features of the monastery still detectable. Against its banks monks may have built their cells and, like them, the church will have been built out of wood. Similar structures from the same period which have been excavated had an A-frame at each gable and stanchions and beams on the long sides to tie them together. The walls would have been made from clay daubed on to woven screens or hurdles or planking driven into the ground. Kings and high lords feasted and slept in wooden halls of the same shape and scale and, when Bede wrote that Benedict Biscop had had the church at Monkwearmouth built in ‘the Roman manner’, he meant that, very unusually, it had been made with dressed stone. Perhaps such stone was robbed out of the nearby Roman fort at Trimontium but no trace of it remains on the site of the old monastery.

  Old Melrose was small and its buildings rudimentary, and its comforts were few. In fact discomfort was something the monks actively sought. In a rare flash of genuine colour and character, Bede tells the story of Brother Drythelm: