Catastrophe: An Investigation Into the Origins of the Modern World

by David Keys

  Cynddylan’s hall is desolate tonight

  Where once I sat in honour.

  Gone are the men who held it, gone the women.

  Cynddylan’s hall. Dark is its roof

  Since the English destroyed

  Cynddylan, and Elvan of Powys.¹

  A Welsh poet whose name has been lost in the mists of time wrote these words, probably in the third quarter of the seventh century. They still speak across the centuries with tragic power about the end of the Anglo-Saxon conquest of what is now England. Cynddylan was a mid-seventh-century ruler of the central Welsh kingdom of Powys, and his hall (his royal palace) was almost certainly located in the city of Wroxeter—the same city that a century earlier had been hit by the plague.

  The plague epidemic in the mid–sixth century and the fall of Wroxeter in the mid–seventh century are two events that at first sight appear unconnected. But nothing could be further from the truth, for it was the plague that fundamentally destabilized the geopolitics of Britain.

  Whereas much of the British-ruled west was devastated, the Anglo-Saxon east was not. Almost certainly the plague did not reach the Anglo-Saxon part of the country until well into the seventh century.² Essentially, sixth-century Britain was an ethnically partitioned land. The contemporary British monk and historian Gildas wrote that pilgrims weren’t even able to visit sacred martyrial shrines in the east because of “the unhappy partition of Britain.” For virtually the entire sixth century (until the 590s) not a single west British monk is recorded as having even attempted to preach to the pagan Anglo-Saxons in the east.

  On the whole, the British absolutely hated the Anglo-Saxons and refused to have much contact with them. Even abroad, several continental writers were shocked at the stubborn refusal of the British to dine with Anglo-Saxons or even to sleep under the same roof when they encountered each other abroad.

  Gildas did not even like uttering the word Saxon. Speaking of “impious easterners,” “villains” with “dreadful claws,” he described them as “ferocious Saxons (name not to be spoken), hated by man and God.”³ Indeed, he, and no doubt most other Britons in the west, would have dearly liked to see them exterminated.

  There was very little trade between the two halves of partitioned Britain. Archaeologically, virtually no Anglo-Saxon items made before c. 570 have been found in western Britain, and no western British products that can be definitely attributed to the sixth century have been found in the Anglo-Saxon east. None of the early- to mid-sixth-century medieval pottery types used in western Britain ever seems to have reached the east of the country. Anglo-Saxon trade with the near Continent was virtually nonexistent. The archaeological evidence suggests that even Kent, so near to France, only started regular trade with the European mainland in the 580s or 590s. Indeed, there are very few Continental coins found in Kent that were minted before approximately 570.

  By contrast, western Britain was busy trading with not only the Continent but also the Mediterranean. One can assume direct shipping links with southwest France (Bordeaux, for example) and Spain, and either direct or indirect links with North Africa, Greece, and Asia Minor. The artifacts excavated at Tintagel (see Chapter 13) and evidence of burial feasts suggest that not only Mediterranean goods but Mediterranean people were arriving as well. Western Britain was wide open to plague infection—and was devastated. Anglo-Saxon eastern Britain—shut off from the west by ethnic hatreds, British fear, and large forests—escaped, at least till the seventh century.

  The main geopolitically important effect of the plague was demographic. Population levels dropped in the west but not in the east (see Chapter 13). In the west, the plague had hit in 547, and it is highly likely, given the normal behavior of the disease, that it struck again in the 550s. Before long, Anglo-Saxon settlers were pushing west to fill what must have been in many areas a demographic and political vacuum. The Anglo-Saxon advance, which had paused for some forty years, thus restarted.

  By the 560s the renewed movement west was under way. Clashes were reported in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as having occurred in the 550s.4 In 571 the south Midlands appears to have fallen to the Saxons, and six years later Gloucester, Cirencester, and Bath fell. At around the same time, the Saxons advanced into Dorset.

  Meanwhile, in the southwest Midlands, other Anglo-Saxons—the Hwicce—were penetrating Worcestershire and north Gloucestershire by c. 580. By around 600 another group, the Magonsaete, were beginning to penetrate Herefordshire and south Shropshire.

  The filling of the demographic vacuum often substantially preceded the filling of the consequent political one. Demographically weakened Celtic areas would be slowly colonized by Anglo-Saxon groups, thus weakening traditional native British political authority. At some stage in each area, political reality would catch up with demographic reality and Anglo-Saxon political power would replace increasingly irrelevant, weakened, and isolated British political power.

  In south Shropshire this last stage in the process happened in c. 656, when King Cynddylan was killed and Wroxeter finally fell. The poet of Wroxeter—the same Welsh bard whose name is now lost to us—wrote movingly after his city had fallen:

  Gone are my brethren from the lands of the Severn

  Around the banks of the Dwyryw

  Sad am I, my God, that I am still alive.5

  It isn’t known whether northwest Britain was also affected by the plague, but even if it wasn’t (as seems possible), the geopolitical ripples from the British southwest’s demographic and political catastrophe would have had an indirect effect on the situation in the north. The precise political and other mechanisms by which this happened are not fully understood, but at virtually the same time that the Anglo-Saxon advance was relaunched in the south, the same thing began to happen in the north.

  By 570 an Anglo-Saxon group called the Bernicians had used military muscle to declare themselves independent of the weakened local British political authority. At roughly the same time, another Anglo-Saxon group, the Pecsaete, began to expand into the Peak District. By 590 other groups had taken over the Lincoln area in the east and what is now the Leeds and Huddersfield area in the north. By 595 the geopolitical balance had deteriorated to such an extent that one of the greatest of the British kingdoms, that of Rheged in the north Pennines, began to collapse.

  Even the military intervention of the far northern British kingdom of Edinburgh failed to stop the takeover. In 595 the Edinburgh rescue expedition was routed in one of British history’s most historically important battles, that of Catterick in Yorkshire.

  A poetic lament lends immortality to its heroes:

  Men went to Catraeth [Catterick]

  Shouting for battle

  A squadron of horse.

  Blue their armour and their shields,

  Lances uplifted and sharp,

  Mail and sword glinting

  Though they were slain, they slew.

  None to his home returned.

  Short their lives,

  Long the grief,

  Among their kin.

  Seven times their number,

  The English they slew.

  Many the women they widowed

  Many the mothers who wept.

  After the wine and after the mead

  They left us, armoured in mail.

  I know the sorrow of their death.

  They were slain, they never grew grey

  From the army of Mynydawc, grief unbounded,

  Of 300 men, but one returned.6

  The intervention had failed, much of Rheged had fallen, and as the Wroxeter bard had recalled the sadness of his king’s wasted palaces, so a northern poet was soon to describe the fate of Rheged’s once warm royal hearth and hall.

  This hearth, wild flowers cover it.

  When Owain and Elphin lived

  Plunder boiled in its cauldron.

  This hearth, tall brambles cover it.

  Easy were its ways.

  Rheged was used to giving.

  Thi
s hearth, dock leaves cover it.

  More usual [once] upon its floor

  Mead, and the claims of men who drank.

  This pillar and that pillar there.

  More usual [once] around it

  Shouts of victory, and the giving of gifts.7

  Within ten years of the partial collapse of Rheged, ancient Chester fell to the Bernicians. For the first time, Wales was cut off from the other remaining Celtic British territories—the Cornwall/Devon peninsula and the northwest. In a sense it was then that Wales, as a separate cultural as well as purely geographical entity, was born. By 680 the takeover of what is now England was virtually complete, with only Cornwall remaining outside Anglo-Saxon control.

  Although “England” was still split into more than a dozen different kingdoms, first one and then another dominated. The ruler of the dominant state was not just king of his particular polity, but was also Bretwalda (overlord) of all England.8 In a way, then, England was born out of the demographic and political changes that took place in the hundred years following the mid-sixth-century climatic crisis and plague. Plague could be said to have been England’s midwife, not just in a geopolitical sense, but also in a linguistic and cultural one.

  The demographic vacuum, or partial vacuum, explains to an extent why Celtic was entirely wiped off the linguistic map in most of what was to become England. Indeed, only ten Celtic words have transferred into English from the language once spoken by England’s inhabitants. In terms of law, government, and even folk tradition, England owes its inheritance to its Germanic past, not its Celtic one.

  In a sense, Anglo-Saxon expansion never really stopped. By 840 Cornwall had lost most of its independence, and it was fully taken over by 930. By 1200 most of eastern Ireland was under English (Anglo-Norman-led) control. By 1300 Wales was occupied. First moves toward intercontinental expansion took place in the late fifteenth century and the sixteenth century. In 1607 the English colonization of North America began in earnest. By 1624 and 1630 colonization of the Caribbean and Central America, respectively, had begun. The Kingdom of Scotland was integrated into the British state in 1707. The year 1801 saw Ireland follow suit. The eighteenth century witnessed the takeover of India and Australia, while the nineteenth century saw the empire grow to include New Zealand, much of Africa, and many other territories worldwide. English is now the most widely spoken language in the world (after Chinese) and the most widely distributed. English culture has been successfully transplanted to North America and Australasia and has merged with local cultures in India, Africa, and elsewhere to produce world history’s most influential cultural-linguistic complex. Today the world’s most powerful country, the United States, is very substantially an English creation in origin.

  The dominoes that fell in Britain over the centuries following the climatic and epidemiological events of the sixth century ultimately changed the world, perhaps even more spectacularly than the legacies of most other nations from that period.

  And in similar, though far from identical, ways, the climatic and epidemiological chaos of this era also helped give birth to three other key western European nations.

  16

  I R I S H C O N C E P T I O N

  Weapons press forward, men press forward

  In the great [Derry] swamp of Daire Lothair

  A cause of strife discomforted

  Around the King of [Ulster’s] Cruithin [Dynasty],

  Aed Brecc [Fiery Freckles!]

  The battle of all the Cruithin is fought

  They burn [the subkingdom of] Eilne

  The battle of Gabar Liphi is fought

  And the battle of Cúil Dreimne

  Hostages are taken after the war

  Away, west, like a human harvest

  [Captured by the Lords] Forgus, Domnall, Ainmire

  And Nannid son of Daui.

  Splendid moves

  [King] Baetán’s steed upon the host

  Well satisfied is Baetán of the yellow hair.

  With these words the Annals of Ulster describe a series of battles that helped to unite vast tracts of Ireland under one high king.¹

  Fought in the 560s, they marked the beginning of a long and bloody military struggle that would eventually lay the foundations for the unification of the island of Ireland four centuries later.

  The second half of the sixth century saw the conception, if not the birth, of protomodern Ireland in other ways, too—especially in terms of religion and language. And, as in England, it was almost certainly the natural catastrophes of the mid–sixth century that destabilized the geopolitical and cultural status quo, opening up the way for massive and rapid change.

  The period 538 to 553 was one of almost total disaster in Ireland. The worldwide climatic chaos of the mid-530s led, in Ireland, to crop failure and famine. As noted in Chapters 13 and 14, the Annals of Ulster say that there was a “failure of bread” in 538. This crop failure was part of a particularly severe overall disruption of plant growth in Ireland that is testified to in the tree-ring record for 536 to 540—a record that has been compiled by cross-sectioning and analyzing the trunks of waterlogged ancient oaks discovered in Irish peat bogs.²

  Then in the early or mid-540s a terrible epidemic broke out. Irish sources provide two conflicting dates for this disaster. One of them, the medieval Cronicum Scotorum, gives 541, a date suggesting that the epidemic (perhaps smallpox or a similar disease) was triggered by the 538 famine.³ More likely is the date provided by the Annals of Ulster, 545. In that year both France and Spain were already infected with plague, and it is probable that it spread to Ireland from either of these areas or directly from the Mediterranean. As mentioned in Chapter 13, some Irish population centers (Lough Shinney, near Dublin, and the royal fortress of Garranes, near Cork) are known, from archaeology, to have ceased to function in or immediately after the mid–sixth century. Even the greatest in the land were taken by the epidemic; the annals record that one of the country’s leading churchmen, Mo Bí Clárainech, died of it.

  But worse was to come, for in 550 Ireland was engulfed by a second epidemic—this time almost certainly plague. Referred to in the annals as the Mortalitas Magna (Great Death), the disease must have wiped out a substantial proportion of the population, including a large element of the relatively small literate and governing elite.

  The Annals of Ulster actually record the deaths of five prominent victims—senior churchmen from Bangor in the northeast, Tipperary in the south, the Dublin area in the east, and Leinster and Lough Derg in the center and west of Ireland. The dead clerics probably represented the loss of 20 to 30 percent of the top tier of churchmen in this one outbreak alone.

  Then in 553, practically before the survivors had recovered from the horrors of the 550 outbreak, a third epidemic, again without doubt plague, broke out.

  From a geopolitical standpoint, the plague and even the pre-plague period had been relatively peaceful. In the forty-five years prior to 555 there were only eleven battles recorded in the Irish annals.4 But immediately after the depopulating experience of the famine and plague years, all hell seems to have broken loose. In the forty-five years after 555, twenty-seven battles are recorded—almost two and a half times more than in the equivalent preceding period. Indeed, in the ten years from 556 to 565 there were no fewer than eight recorded battles—more than three times the average known warfare rate for the previous four and a half decades.

  As in other parts of Europe, the plague affected certain parts of Ireland more than others. If normal plague patterns pertained, areas that were more densely populated and often richer were devastated to a relatively greater extent than sparsely populated ones. The pandemic therefore had the effect of reducing population-level differences between fertile and less fertile areas. This afforded a rare opportunity for post-plague expansion to less prosperous warlords in less fertile and therefore less densely populated districts—especially those farthest from contact with the Continent.

  That is precisely what
seems to have occurred. The warfare that engulfed Ireland after the pandemic was characterized by the rise to power and prominence of a hitherto little-known family from the relatively infertile northwest of Ireland—the Uí Néill. Prior to the arrival of the plague, the Uí Néills had been local warlords, little known outside the Sligo Bay area on the Ulster-Connacht border. Yet within a decade of the end of the pandemic, they had seized much of west and central Ulster and large tracts of Meath. The poem quoted at the beginning of this chapter records their victories in Ulster and central Ireland in the 550s. “Well satisfied” was “Baetán of the yellow hair,” say the Annals of Ulster, referring to the delights of conquest enjoyed by the king of the Uí Néills.