The Fall of the House of Æthelfrith

by H A CULLEY

  Unwillingly the ealdormen agreed to send the mounted warriors in their gesiths and warbands with Eochaid. That would give him some one hundred and eighty men with which to hold the further pass. It was a tall order as the col between the hills was a mile wide. As they were about to set off Behrtfrith’s son, Beorhtmund, made a sensible suggestion.

  Although he was only fourteen, he had been allowed to succeed as Ealdorman of Dùn Barra without opposition. Kendra’s brother was as unlike his father as it was possible to be. He was quiet, thoughtful and diffident. He was also a lot better looking; something which didn’t endear him to his ugly sister.

  Now he hesitantly approached Swefred and asked if he could speak to him.

  ‘Of course, Beorhtmund, you don’t have to ask permission. You are an ealdorman as well as my brother through marriage,’ Swefred replied with a smile to put the boy at ease.

  ‘Well, why don’t you get archers to ride double with the warriors? I know it will slow them down but they’ll still be able to move twice as fast as the Picts on foot. That way we’d have a much better chance of delaying the Picts until our army can come up behind them.’

  His voice trailed away.

  ‘I’m sorry if it’s a stupid idea...’

  ‘No, it’s a brilliant idea! Well done. Would you like to go with them in charge of the archers?’

  ‘May I?’

  The boy beamed at him, his grey eyes shining with pleasure. Swefred had been Behrtfrith’s ally but the older man had been the dominant one in their relationship. He had a feeling that he had made a friend for life of his son and this time it would be Swefred who led. That could be useful when the inevitable clash with Osred came.

  ~~~

  Nectan cursed the day that he’d decided to try and move his border south to the Twaid. He’d convinced himself that a boy king on the throne of Northumbria made the kingdom weak, especially one as dissolute and unpopular as Osred. Now he was the one whose throne was under threat. He lost three of his mormaers when the first column was annihilated and now he had a feeling that the two accompanying him were plotting his removal one way or the other. Fortunately he ruled the most powerful of the sub-kingdoms and he was fairly certain he could recover from the fiasco, provided that he could extricate the rest of his army safely.

  At first he had believed the boy who’d escaped from the Northumbrians. In any case he didn’t want to be trapped in a hill fort with dwindling supplies. However, when his scouts reported his foes waiting for him across the North Esk, he became suspicious.

  He hung the boy over a fire so that his feet slowly cooked. The pain was unbearable but the lad had told the truth. Torture didn’t elicit any more information from him than he’d already divulged on arrival at the hill fort. Nectan eventually tired of his screams and thrust a spear through his heart. He was cut down and his body was left to burn as a warning to others. If his mormaers had been plotting against him, the fate of an innocent boy convinced them to tread extremely carefully. Nectan was safe for now.

  ‘Brenin, the Northumbrians are holding the pass head of us,’ the scouts reported as Nectan crested the first of the two cols.

  ‘In what strength?’

  ‘We could only see a couple of hundred but many more could be waiting on the reverse slope.’

  Nectan cursed. How had they got ahead of him? Unless the men waiting at the crossing over the North Esk had been a ruse to make him take the southern route.

  ‘Ride around to the south and see how many are waiting there.’

  ‘Is that wise, Brenin?’ one of the mormaers asked. ‘If they are merely a deception to delay us you are giving their main force time to catch us up.’

  ‘Do you think I’m a fool? Do you not think that I don’t know that? Unless you have something useful to say, shut up.’

  When he saw the scouts looking at him, their mouths agape at hearing one of the mormaers scolded, he turned his anger on them.

  ‘What in the name of Hell are you still doing here? Go! I want you back within the hour.’

  Eochaid wasn’t an apprentice in the art of war. It had occurred to him that Nectan might send out scouts to determine his strength before they attacked. However, he had expected them to climb to the top of the hill to the south of the pass to see how many men he had in the dead ground behind the col. He had therefore sent half a dozen mounted warriors and the same number of archers to secure the peak. He had placed them under Beorhtmund’s command in the mistaken belief that this would keep the boy out of harm’s way. He was under no illusion that he and his two hundred odd men would survive defending the pass against a couple of thousand Picts.

  When Beorhtmund saw the fifteen Picts mounted on their sturdy mountain ponies heading away from the main body he thought that they were heading his way, but they veered off towards another pass immediately to the south of his position. He was wandering what to do when one of his men scrambled up to where he was crouching between two rocks, screened from below.

  The man spat out a globule of phlegm before speaking, presumably to indicate what he thought of the Picts.

  ‘They’ll soon be in trouble. See that light green area, lord? It looks like grass but it’s sphagnum. It floats on top of water in a peat bog. Watch.’

  The horsemen below soon realised their mistake when three of their ponies sank up to their knees in the morass. It took them nearly an hour to extricate them and then they sat there debating what to do.

  ‘I’ve no idea where they live, but it’s evident that they haven’t come across that type of bog before,’ the warrior said as he spat once more in the Picts’ direction.

  Suddenly both men stiffened as the Picts started urging their ponies up the slope towards their position.

  ‘Go down and bring the archers up here, tell the others to mount, keep out of sight, and wait for my orders.’

  The archers quickly took up positions behind the various rocks that were scattered over the summit of the hill. There was a crag some fifty feet tall immediately below them so the enemy wouldn’t be able to make a direct assault on their position, but would have to go around to the west where the slope was covered in grass with few rocks.

  The first flight of arrows killed two men and a pony as well as wounding one of each. The wounded pony reared up, depositing its rider on the ground. He cracked his head on a rock and was killed instantly. The dead pony collapsed onto its side, trapping its rider’s leg beneath its body. In a few seconds the number of their foes had been reduced by a third.

  Buoyed up by their success, the archers gained confidence and took more careful aim at the remaining Picts as they quickly dismounted and started to charge up the hill. The archers’ next volley killed three more men and wounded two; one in the leg and one in the shoulder. The remaining five realised that they would never reach their foes alive and headed back to their ponies.

  They had just mounted when a third volley disposed of three more. The remaining two took to their heels but suddenly six horsemen appeared over the side of the hill to their right and slammed into them. A minute later it was all over. The wounded were killed and Beorhtmund was slapped on the back in congratulation by his delighted men. Fifteen dead Picts and none of them had even so much as a scratch.

  Meanwhile Nectan had got tired of waiting. The site of the skirmish had been hidden from view by the shoulder of the hill and so he had no idea what had befallen his men. He came to the reasonable conclusion that they had run into the rest of the Northumbrian army waiting on the reverse slope of the col and decided not to attack. Two thousand against perhaps double that number when the enemy held the high ground was not a recipe for success.

  Instead he turned and led his army north east along the line of hills heading towards the low lying area between the end of the hills and the Firth of Forth. Eochaid shadowed him, riding along the tops of the hills. He had sent Beorhtmund and his gesith off to find Swefred and appraise him of the situation. Now all he could do was to hope that the main body coul
d reach the end of the Monadh Pentland before Nectan did. They both had the same distance to travel, each having roughly one side of an equilateral triangle to cover, so it would be a close run thing.

  ~~~

  Now fully recovered, Ælfflaed was furious when she heard what had happened. She blamed the Witan for being weak without Behrtfrith to dominate it, but there was no way that she was going to hand over power as regent to her nephew when he reached sixteen. She was would soon be sixty but she hoped to live long enough to see out her role until Osred reached eighteen. However, she needed another regent to help her. The obvious choice was Swefred, the new hereræswa. The problem was the king’s antipathy towards the whole family.

  Eventually she decided that to appoint anyone other than the Hereræswa as regent would be foolhardy, given the power he wielded. Her nephew would just have to get on with it. She prayed long and hard for his survival during the current war with the Picts and sat down to write to him and to the three bishops. She would need their support in the Witan to overturn the decision to allow Osred to rule alone from this December. It was now October so time was short.

  ~~~

  Beorhtmund had suffered under his domineering father all his life. He was constantly criticised and told he would never be a strong enough character to succeed him when the time came. It was no surprise that the boy lacked self-confidence and was afraid of his own shadow.

  However, he was clever and had qualities that his father had lacked. One of these was charm. His diffidence and warm personality won him friends and those nobles who had derided him before now praised him for wiping out the Pictish scouts and consequently saving the lives of Eochaid and his men.

  If he didn’t manage to overcome his shyness and lack of self-assurance straight away, it went someway to changing his opinion of himself. From now on he took Swefred and Eochaid as his role models and tried not to think about what his father would have said every time he had to make a decision.

  Swefred saw in the boy some of the strategic ability he knew that he himself possessed. He left him in command of the archers but he also brought him into the small group who he used as a sounding board before he put his plans to the war council. Once or twice Beorhtmund found solutions to problems that Swefred had failed to solve himself. One of these was how to recover from the fact that the Northumbrians had arrived at the northern tip of the Monadh Pentland two hours after the Picts had.

  The only silver lining to that particular cloud was the fact that they had managed to capture the Picts baggage train and recover the spoils from their looting, together with some of the livestock they’d stolen. There wasn’t a great number of sheep and cattle left as the Picts had been unable to forage much recently and feeding two thousand men and all their camp followers had reduced the animals they’d collected to a handful. Nevertheless it would feed the Northumbrians for a few days whilst the Picts went hungry.

  ‘All we can do now is to harry their retreat back to their homeland,’ Swefred said dejectedly to his half a dozen close companions.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Beorhtmund said quietly.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, my idea may be nonsense, but how many ships are there at Dùn Èideann?’

  ‘I’ve no idea, but there are usually a few trading knarrs and some birlinns...’ Swefred’s voice trailed away. ‘You mean use them to transport part of the army along the Firth and land them ahead of the Picts?’

  Beorhtmund nodded. ‘Do you think it could work?’

  ‘I’ve no idea, but it’s worth a try. At best an army on foot can travel at two miles an hour, including necessary stops; a ship can sail at five or six knots if the wind is in the right direction, as it is at the moment.’

  ‘How far is it to the head of the Firth?’ Eochaid asked.

  ‘About twenty five miles by sea from Dùn Èideann and some thirty miles by land from where the Picts must be now.’ Swefred mused. ‘Five hours by sea plus allow another five for the men to get there and embark; twelve hours allowing for disembarkation and getting into position. It’ll take the Picts fifteen hours or more to get there, and it gets dark soon so they’ll have to stop for the night.

  ‘Right. Let’s get the men embarked tonight and we’ll set sail at dawn. I’ll take the blocking party by sea; Beorhtmund, it was your idea so you can come with me. Eochaid, will you chase the Picts but don’t hurry them too much?’

  In the end Swefred managed to load all the archers and three hundred of the professional warriors onto the various craft he commandeered from the harbour below Dùn Èideann. It was fewer than he’d hoped but it would have to do.

  When Nectan’s scouts came back to report that the Northumbrians were holding the bridge across the River Forth he was incredulous. He knew that the main body was nipping at his heels, killing stragglers and barely being delayed by his rear guard. Now it seemed that he was trapped between them and another force who had somehow captured the bridge that led to safety. He rode forward to see for himself, half hoping that his scouts were mistaken.

  They weren’t. Not only were the men holding the far bank seasoned fighters wearing byrnies and helmets but the banks to either side of them were lined by archers who would inflict terrible damage on his men if they tried to contest the bridge.

  ‘Brenin, the rear guard have broken. The Northumbrian horsemen are now riding along our column cutting our men down. Every time we stop to fight them off they ride away and come back again as soon as we move again. What should we do?’

  The King of the Picts looked at the chieftain who’d spoken and shook his head. The women and children who’d been with the baggage train had already been captured and would be no doubt sold into slavery. The whole campaign had been a disaster.

  ‘I’ll try and negotiate a truce,’ he said wearily.

  A short while later he rode alone, except for his standard bearer, to the south side of the bridge.

  ‘I am Nechtan mac Dargarto. Where is your king? I wish to negotiate.’

  ‘King Osred isn’t here, Brenin, our commander is the Ealdorman Swefred. If you advance alone and unarmed to the centre of the bridge he will meet you there. I will accompany him as interpreter.’

  ‘No need. I speak English, probably better than you do. Tell him he too must come unarmed.’

  When Swefred met him in the middle of the bridge Nectan nodded his head in greeting before speaking.

  ‘Before we discuss anything, I would be grateful if you would send a messenger to your army to halt the carnage at the rear of my column.’

  ‘If you grant my messenger safe conduct, I will do so, but only for two hours. If I haven’t send another messenger by then my men will continue to take their revenge on yours for the plundering of our land and the slaughter of our people.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  After Beorhtmund had ridden off to find Eochaid with one of Nectan’s mormaers to ensure his safety, Swefred told Nectan his conditions for allowing the rest of his army to return to their homeland unmolested.

  ‘You will provide a thousand sheep and five hundred head of cattle to make restitution for the losses suffered by us.’

  ‘I have little option but to accept the terms, though you may have to wait a while for me to gather so many animals.’

  ‘Two weeks, no longer. You will bring them here. You will also give your oath on holy relics not to invade Northumbria again whilst you are king, and you will surrender your two sons to me as hostages. The elder will be returned to you once the livestock are handed over, but your younger son will remain as my guest until he is sixteen. If you fail to keep your word, and that includes preventing other Picts from raiding across the border, your son will die and die painfully.’

  Nectan chewed his lip in agitation. Both his sons were dear to him but the younger, a boy of nine called Óengus, was his favourite. To lose him for seven years was unthinkable, but what option did he have, he asked himself. Eventually he nodded.

  ‘My eldest son is with
me but Óengus is with his mother. It will take time for him to get here.’

  ‘Don’t play games with me, Nectan. I sent an emissary to the fortress of Stirling as soon as we landed here. I know your wife is up there.’

  ‘You landed...’

  Now it was clear how Swefred had got ahead of him. He had to admire the man’s ingenuity, little thinking that the idea was that of a fourteen year old boy.

  ‘I see,’ he continued, ‘very well I’ll send a man to tell my son to join me. Is that all?’

  ‘Yes, I will let you know when I’m ready for you to make your pledge. Bishop Eadfrith will administer the oath but he will have to obtain a suitable relic. I’ll send a birlinn to Lindisfarne. The arm of Saint Oswald should suffice, don’t you think?’

  Nectan might be many things but Swefred knew he had a reputation for being a devout Christian. He would never break a vow sworn on such a holy object.

  Chapter Twenty Two – Death of a Tyrant

  714 - 716 AD

  ‘It’s not entirely Osred’s fault you know, both he and Otta were spoilt by their elderly father.’

  ‘You’re just making excuses for him. Whatever your brother’s errors in bringing up his sons, we are faced with the consequences. Osred is immoral, self-indulgent, unpredictable and irresponsible. And now it looks as if Otta is travelling down the same path, no doubt led astray by his elder brother. The only one of the three who seems normal is Osric, but he’s fourteen and has only just started his training as a warrior with Eochaid.’

  Thankfully the Witan had baulked at allowing Osred to rule at sixteen and, much to the latter’s rage, had deferred in once more; this time to eighteen.