This man was given a more secluded dwelling in the monastery, so that he could devote himself more freely to the service of his Maker in unbroken prayer. And since this place stands on the bank of a river, he often used to enter it for severe bodily penance, and plunge repeatedly beneath the water while he recited psalms and prayers for as long as he could endure it, standing motionless with the water up to his loins and sometimes to his neck. When he returned to shore, he never removed his dripping, chilly garments, but let them warm and dry on his body. And in winter, when the half-broken cakes of ice were swirling around him which he had broken to make a place to stand and dip himself in the water, those who saw him used to say, ‘Brother Drythelm (for that was his name), it is wonderful how you can manage to bear such bitter cold’. To which he, being a man of simple disposition and self-restraint, would reply simply: ‘I have known it colder’. And when they said: ‘It is extraordinary that you are willing to practise such severe discipline’, he used to answer: ‘I have seen greater suffering.’ So until the day of his summons from this life he tamed his aged body by daily fasting, inspired by an insatiable longing for the blessings of Heaven, and by his words and his life he helped many people to salvation.
Such lives of constant prayer and extreme privation seem extraordinary now, even faintly ridiculous, but, by enduring severe hypothermia, like Drythelm, monks hoped to induce euphoric, trance-like states as they edged ever closer to death. It was as though they stood in the ante-chamber of Heaven, within touching distance of glory, almost on the point of meeting their Maker. These episodes were very dangerous and groups of monks almost certainly kept vigil (literally vigilant, on the lookout for signs of danger) with their brothers as they underwent extraordinary suffering in search of purity and a greater knowledge of God. Those watching will have been ready to end these trances before they went too far.
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Mortification of the Flesh
The phrase means, literally, ‘putting the flesh to death’. In Christian teaching, it is an idea which appears early, with references in the gospels and from St Paul – ‘Put to death what is earthly in you: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire and covetousness,’ he said. And the way to achieve purity was to deny the body comfort, most commonly food. Fasting became part of most monastic rules. The repeated and deliberate inflicting of pain and discomfort was also practised early and Drythelm’s immersion in the freezing River Tweed was mild compared to some examples. St Dominic Loricatus was said to have given himself 300,000 lashes. Self-flagellation also became common and sometimes it was done publicly. Others, such as St Thomas More and St Ignatius Loyola wore hair shirts and heavy chains. It all seems extreme to us now – holiness measured in blood and pain – and there were certainly those who suffered in order to induce trance-like states of religious ecstasy.
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What manner of men were willing to submit themselves to a life of such severity? It appears that many were aristocrats, wellborn people of varying degrees. St Columba was perhaps the best connected – a prince of the royal house of the Cenel Conaill, the rulers of lands in north-west Ireland. When he left in 563 to found a monastery, he took twelve companions with him. A conscious imitation of Christ and his Apostles, it was also a group which included at least two aristocratic relatives – his cousin, Baithene, and his uncle, Ernan. Like them, Columba could trace his lineage from the semi-legendary Irish king, Niall of the Nine Hostages (one for each of the sub-kingdoms he had dominion over) and most of the abbots who ruled in the seventh and into the eighth centuries at Iona were descended from the same line. St Aidan came from the same part of Ireland and, when he came to Bernicia at the request of King Oswald, he may well have brought relatives with him.
Although they seem like family affairs, the early Celtic monasteries were also cosmopolitan and certainly quickly grew famous. Amongst the founding community at Iona after 563, there was a British monk (that is, a man who came from one of the Old Welsh-speaking kingdoms of southern Scotland), a Pictish monk and two Englishmen, Pilu and Genereus. It is important, in this secular age, not to underestimate the magnetic power of saintliness and a place made ever more sacred by the lives and prayers of the holy men who lived there. And islands like Iona and Lindisfarne added to a sense of spirituality, of otherworldliness.
When Aidan founded Old Melrose around 635, his monks will have needed a sponsor to sustain them as they set up the new community. Since King Oswald invited them, it is likely that they enjoyed royal patronage from the outset. But like Iona and Lindisfarne, Old Melrose will have aimed at self-sufficiency. Aristocrats some of them may have been but they needed to do all sorts of menial jobs for the community to thrive and not require the constant intervention of those not in holy orders. At Iona, there were blacksmiths, woodworkers and a gardener and, at harvest time, the abbot toiled with his brothers in the fields.
Almost all trace of Columba’s monastery at Iona has disappeared except for the vallum and the free-standing stone crosses. They were originally painted in vivid colours and used not only as a focus for worship but also for biblical instruction. Raised in the early eighth century, the beautiful Anglian cross at Ruthwell in Dumfriesshire has four scenes from the gospels and, carved in runic script, a vivid poem about the crucifixion. No remains of the monastery’s crosses have yet been found at Old Melrose but the five discovered at Jedburgh may not all have been placed inside the vallum. These new foundations quickly became a magnet for pilgrims and sometimes crosses were erected as waymarkers and signs that a sacred area was being approached. Around the ancient church at Coldingham on the Berwickshire coast, place-names – at Applincross, Whitecross and Cairncross – remember this habit.
Once pilgrims and more exalted visitors arrived at the gateway through the vallum, their ardent wish was simply to enter the monastery and walk where holy men and saints had walked. Shrines could be visited and touched while praying hard but, by the late seventh century, a fascinating belief had developed. Kings in Scotland began to request burial inside the precinct of the monastery at Iona and other aristocrats followed suit. More specifically, they believed that their impure bodies would be cleansed by burial in the sacred soil and thereby dramatically improve their chances of reaching Heaven. Kings may have had more on their conscience than most and, until the early medieval period, many were buried on Iona. And all significant monasteries, including Old Melrose, will have taken the sinful and wellconnected laity into their cemeteries.
More than most, Christianity is a religion of the Word. Through both testaments, believers hold that God speaks and bibles and gospels are therefore in themselves sacred objects. And one of the most impressive legacies of the early Christians in Britain and Ireland, what is known as the Age of the Saints, is the great corpus of illuminated manuscripts. The Lindisfarne Gospels is one of the most glorious. Commissioned by Bishop Eadfrith at the beginning of the eighth century, it was a sumptuous and expensive undertaking. Some of the work may have been done at Old Melrose and tradition holds that materials for the binding and the covers came from the banks of the Tweed.
When Aidan founded the monastery around the year 635, the opulence of the Lindisfarne Gospels lay in the future. More immediate political concerns occupied the mind of Melrose’s patron, King Oswald. With the catastrophic defeat of the Gododdin at Catterick in 603, it appears that their lands quickly fell under Anglian control. The seizure of much of the Tweed Basin, what might be seen as Greater Bernicia, probably allowed Oswald to extract tribute from the native lords in the Lothians. But the decisive event was not long in coming. For the year 638, the Annals of Ulster record the siege of Etin, more conventionally Dun Eidyn, now Edinburgh.
With the fall of the great stronghold on the Castle Rock, the Lothians saw an influx of English-speaking lords and settlers. Place names mark their progress, especially in East Lothian. Those which contain the elements ingas, ingaham, ingatun or ing are reckoned by toponymists to be early and there is a clutch of them along t
he banks of the River Tyne, a pattern which strongly suggests arrival by sea. Tyninghame means simply ‘the settlement of the people by the Tyne’. Nearby was the lost name of Lyneryngham, what East Linton used to be called. It incorporates an Old Welsh word, linn, for a pool. And Whittinghame recalls the name of one the leaders of the early Anglian colonists. It was ‘the settlement of the people of Hwita’. Another magnate left his name in Haddington, the old county town. He was Hoedda. There are many other, possibly later, English elements in East Lothian place-names such as ham in Morham, Auldhame and Oldhamstocks and botl, meaning ‘a hall’, in Bolton and Eldbotle, a medieval settlement now deserted.
What is also striking is how quickly the newly converted Anglian settlers acquired their own saint. Now largely forgotten, the cult of St Baldred or Bealdhere was once popular and his feast day on 6 March was celebrated widely. Now, only place-names hint at his old renown – near the mouth of the Tyne is a rock formation known as St Baldred’s Cradle, off North Berwick is an outcrop called St Baldred’s Boat and at Auldhame Farm, reputed to have been the holy man’s birthplace, there is a St Baldred’s Well. At some point in the seventh century, he is said to have founded communities of monks at Tyninghame, Preston Kirk (where there is another St Baldred’s Well) and at Auldhame. When the Vikings began to raid the eastern coasts of Britain in the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries, Baldred’s church was reported as a target. It must have been wealthy to attract such unwelcome attention. But the life and work of Baldred himself (even the date of his death, sometimes given as late as 756) lack substance and much of his story may have been safely ignored as myth-history or, at best, a series of whiskery traditions – until a remarkable archaeological find came to light.
In May 2005, a dig at Auldhame Farm uncovered the remains of a very old church. Small, with rounded corners and several other telltale signs of great antiquity, the building may have dated as early as the seventh century – according to tradition, precisely the period of Baldred’s ministry. And around the founds of the church lay a cemetery with more than two hundred grave sites.
The finds at Auldhame not only appear to confirm Baldred’s birthplace, they also occur in the midst of the small group of other place-names which remember him. One of these is very intriguing. From the old church at Auldhame, it is possible to look directly out to sea and the looming mass of the Bass Rock. Perched on the outcrop are the medieval ruins of St Baldred’s Chapel – was this the site of a diseart, a Celtic hermitage like that on Skellig Michael which rises dramatically out of the Atlantic off the Irish coast? A saint with an English name founding a diseart? There may well be more layers to Baldred’s story than first appear.
Particular to East Lothian, this central figure in a highly localised and intense cult may have closer links to the area and its Celtic past. Like a landlocked version of the Bass Rock, Traprain Law dominates the landscape east of Haddington. It was certainly a principal stronghold of Gododdin kings, and archaeologists have established a long sequence of occupation. But no excavator was prepared for what came to light on Monday, 12 May 1919.
After the turmoil of the First World War and having himself been badly wounded on the Western Front, George Pringle must have longed for the relative peace and slow pace of archaeology. But, when he set his workmen on digging at the western end of the spectacular hill fort of Traprain, Pringle’s hopes for a quiet life evaporated. On that Monday afternoon, a pit full of treasure was discovered. Buried beneath what turned out to be the floor of a house, workmen found more than a hundred items of fine Roman silverware. There were tableware, cups, spoons, bowls, flagons and coins. Little value appears to have been placed on the craftsmanship for many of the objects had been cut up or folded in such a way as to suggest they might be melted down. These were not objets d’art but bullion. Perhaps it was tribute paid by the government of Britannia towards the end of the life of the province. The eclectic nature of the pieces certainly suggests an improvised exercise, valuables raised in ad hoc taxation from wealthy individuals. The territory of the Gododdin lay in a strategically vital position, between the Pictish kings on the northern shores of the Forth and beyond and the sparse garrison of Hadrian’s Wall. The coins found amongst the spoons and cups were datable to the reign of the Emperor Honorius, from AD 395 to 423. It was a huge and immensely valuable hoard.
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St Ethernan
Also known as Itarnan, a name derived from the Latin word for ‘eternal’, St Ethernan is remembered on the Isle of May in the Firth of Forth. Like St Baldred at the Bass Rock and the holy men on Inchkeith, the islands in the Forth made good disearts – they were apart from the world but in sight of it. St Ethernan died around 669 and was buried on the Isle of May, which soon became a place of pilgrimage. Many early Christian burials, dating from the fifth to the tenth century have been found and, in the ninth century, a drystane chapel for a shrine to St Ethernan was built. In the twelfth century, a priory of Benedictine monks was established and, near the high altar, in a place of great sanctity, a young man was buried sometime in the fourteenth century. Excavators found something remarkable. Wedged into the mouth of the skull was half a scallop shell. It was the badge of pilgrims to the shrine of St James at Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain. The young man had been there and the shell was buried with him so that St Peter might more easily recognise his piety. And his family had redoubled his chance of reaching Heaven by having him buried on one of Scotland’s most sacred islands. Now St Ethernan is almost completely forgotten and the Isle of May no more than part of a picturesque view.
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It was also an archaeologist’s dream, what almost everyone who delves into the soil of an ancient site hopes to find. The official director of the dig on Traprain Law was Alexander Curle, who ran the National Museum of Antiquities in Edinburgh and his weekly visit was not due for another five days. George Pringle judged that Curle ought to be informed immediately of this extraordinary find and a workman was sent down off the hill to nearby East Linton to make a telephone call. This was 1919 and privacy on the phone was not always assured as operators connected callers so Pringle advised his messenger to be discreet – too discreet for Curle waited until the following day to make his way east from Edinburgh. But, once he climbed the hill and looked into the uncovered pit, the impact must have been jaw-dropping. Treasures like Tutankhamen’s were the stuff of archaeological legend and, while the Gododdin king who sat on Traprain Law was no pharaoh, Curle could see that this glittering hoard meant that he was no grunting savage either. Silver gathered together on this scale meant power and, in the Dark Ages, military power.
But what was its precise significance? Something as precious as the Traprain treasure is likely to have been buried only in time of peril and it must be significant that a new rampart was thrown up around the old stronghold at about the same time as the coin dates. And then, sometime after 400, the occupation of the site appears to have come to an abrupt end. The silver was left in its pit and forgotten for 1,500 years.
Recent excavations on the summit of Traprain Law have come across evidence of early Christian burial and, like the emergence of Baldred and his church from the mists of tradition and conjecture, these new finds may hint strongly at something more. Despite his English name, Baldred is believed to have been a Celtic priest, or at least a priest trained and ordained in a Celtic atmosphere, and to have been sent from the west by St Kentigern to convert the heathen Angles who had settled in East Lothian. Kentigern, or Mungo, has a more substantial historical personality and his principal fame is as the apostle of Strathclyde, the old kingdom of Alt Clut. But his beginnings were said to be at Traprain.
At this point, the story begins to blur into incredibility. Kentigern’s medieval biographer, Jocelyn of Furness – an abbey in South Cumbria – appears to have understood Old Welsh and possibly Gaelic. The great scholar, K. H. Jackson, believed that the life of the saint was adapted and translated in Latin by Jocelyn and that it may preserve featu
res of a much older tale. In any case, it seems that Kentigern was born of royal Gododdin blood and conceived in or around Traprain Law – but not legitimately. His illicitly fornicating mother, Princess Thenu, was condemned to be thrown off the cliffs of the law as a punishment handed down by her pagan father. But after prayers to the Virgin Mary, presumably for a soft landing, she was cast adrift in a coracle in the Firth of Forth. After having fetched up at Culross, the seaside sanctuary of St Serf, Kentigern was born. And his exemplary life followed. Stripped of its Old Testament overtones, the tale may reflect the reality of banishment to the periphery of the Gododdin kingdom. And, as with Columba, it may confirm the aristocratic origins of one of the north’s most famous saints.
Whether or not the legend that Baldred was sent by Kentigern to East Lothian to convert the Anglian settlers has any substance, the reality was that the new arrivals appear to have organised themselves into parishes and attracted priests to minister to them. The churches at Auldhame, Tyninghame, Haddington and East Linton may have had their fabric frequently changed and renewed but they are all very ancient foundations, perhaps predating the expansion of Bernicia into the Lothians in the seventh century.
To the south of the Lammermuir Hills the more famous church at Old Melrose was flourishing. And the atmosphere of piety around it began to attract young men who believed they had a vocation. One of these would become Britain’s greatest medieval saint, a man whose holiness was revered all over Western Europe, the most famous Bernician who ever lived, who would inspire one of the world’s greatest cathedrals and whose powerful, charismatic personality still inhabits a beautiful and otherworldly island.
The Faded Map: The Lost Kingdoms of Scotland Page 21
