The King in the North

by Max Adam, Max Adams

  Travel in the seventh century was a rather different matter: such a route would expose the traveller to unreasonable danger and hardship and it would take for ever. The first principle to grasp here is that water, for all the dangers of shipwreck and piracy and the vagaries of wind and wave, was a faster and more secure medium on which to travel than land. The second is to understand that Britain’s coasts and her hundreds of islands were not isolated by the sea; they were connected by it. It is wrong to think of the North Sea as a separator; in the Dark Ages and before it was a natural trading basin. The same goes for the Atlantic coasts of Wales, Cornwall and southern Ireland and for the northern waters of Man, Solway and the Western Isles: these were archipelagic communities linked by sophisticated networks of trade, information exchange, kinship and geopolitics. One might, in the same sense, think of the Roman road system in Britain as providing links between sea ports just as much as joining all the towns and villages of the mainland. When a Frankish bishop called Arculf turned up at Iona in the late seventh century bearing tales from the Holy Land, he arrived by sea—blown off course, as it happened, but no-one was particularly surprised.12 For one thing, he had self-evidently been sent by the providential whim of the Almighty. For another, seafarers from the Mediterranean were by no means unknown in these waters. Tableware, amphorae and glass from as far away as Constantinople turn up in archaeological sites on the Atlantic coast in regular—if small—numbers. This was a connected world, the more so after Oswald’s reign when a Christian elite shared a common language and culture.

  The Roman road system survived substantially into Oswald’s day. The fact that one can still drive along much of it should be evidence enough, but a cursory analysis of Early Medieval warfare shows that many military engagements took place on or near Roman roads, especially where they crossed major rivers. Fast-moving armies used them as highways. There is even some evidence that parts of the network were maintained by royal edict: kings, queens and the more pompous bishops liked to travel in chariots when they could, for dignity’s sake. There were many hundreds of miles of ancient native trails too, used for driving cattle and sheep between farmstead and summer pasture, linking estates and strongholds, rivers, hills and coast; these are sometimes a little harder to trace on the ground but there is little doubt that they existed.

  In Bernicia, with its striking north–south chains of hills and east–west river systems, the Tyne–Solway gap was the natural link between east and west coasts. Hadrian’s Wall, its accompanying military road, the Stanegate, and deep, wide tidal rivers at both ends provided fast access between the North Sea ports and forts at Tynemouth and the mouth of the rivers Irthing, Esk and Eden at the head of the Solway Firth near Carlisle (Roman Luguvalio). From Solway to Argyll by sea was a journey of a few days by boat, starting with some hard rowing into the prevailing south-westerlies, followed by a rapid run north and west from the Mull of Galloway with the wind on the port beam.

  Any overland journey undertaken fourteen hundred years ago was complicated not just by hilly, wooded and riverine obstructions, but also by the politics of its territories. Bernicia, very roughly, seems at the end of King Æthelfrith’s reign to have encompassed the lands between Tyne and Forth: modern Northumberland, Berwickshire and East Lothian. The latter, the ancestral lands of the ancient tribe of Gododdin, he annexed around the year 600. Æthelfrith seems also to have been recognised as overlord by the Britons west of the Pennines in the obscure but poetically resonant kingdom of Rheged. North-east of Rheged and west of Gododdin there is a hole in our knowledge of the territorial politics but Ayrshire and the Clyde Valley were held at this period by another group of Britons, the kings of Strathclyde, whose principal fortress was Alcluith, Dumbarton Rock on the north bank of the Clyde estuary. Bernicia and the Strathclyde Britons were old, implacable enemies.

  It is very difficult to say how passage through these lands might have been negotiated in the weeks and months after Æthelfrith’s fall. On the death of a king his writ and rule, his lines of patronage, his alliances and bonds collapsed like a captain’s authority on a sinking ship. Gododdin and Rheged may have regarded their tributary status as having dissolved. Uncertainty and apprehension would haunt the golden halls. Harbouring a new king’s enemies might be asking for trouble; on the other hand, there might be personal loyalties, historical friendships, markers to be cashed in. Then again, tributary nations expected and received protection from their overkings and the death of a king could expose a tribute nation to all sorts of predations. Power vacuums always create political instability. Rheged without Æthelfrith might be vulnerable to attack from the Britons of Wales and Strathclyde, the Scots of Dál Riata and from pirate attacks launched across the Irish Sea.

  There is an old saying that you need to be careful how you treat people on the way up in case you meet them again on the way down. The opposite works too: invest in an atheling when he is young and weak and it might pay off in the long term. Besides, there seems to have been a sort of code of hospitality that enabled noble and royal refugees to turn up at a king’s court and plead their case for protection. Even so, there are sufficient cases of such supplicants being killed out of hand or turned over for bribes to warn that refugees have never held very strong cards. Æthelfrith’s widow Queen Acha, her retainers, a band of young warrior-nobles and her children might have chanced their arm in Rheged, but a pragmatic British court would encourage them to move on. It is hard to believe that they would have risked the historic enmity of the court at Dumbarton Rock.

  Ultimately, the children of Æthelfrith were received at the court of King Eochaid Buide of Dál Riata, whose ceremonial seat was a tiny rocky fortress at Dunadd, near the modern village of Kilmartin at the top of the Kintyre Peninsula in Argyll. The Dál Riatan Scots were Ulstermen who had carved out a small territory on the west coast of Caledonia in the fifth century. They maintained their historic links with the great royal houses of the northern Irish and by the end of the sixth century Dál Riata held parts of Ulster tributary. Their royal house, the Cenél Gabráin, was Christian; its historical significance lies in its gift of the island of Iona to Columba in the year 565.

  Today, the site of the greatest monastery of the period is reached by many thousands of tourists and latter-day pilgrims from Fionnphort (pronounced Finnafort) after a long, sometimes hair-raising passage along the single-track roads of the Isle of Mull. It is only in the context of the sea, in placing the island at its maritime heart, that one can understand Iona’s geopolitical significance. Mull is one of the largest of the Scottish islands, with the soaring, cloud-wreathed step-pyramid of Ben More dominating its stream-torn boggy landscape. From Oban on the mainland it is a mere forty-minute Calmac ferry crossing to Craignure at the opposite end of Mull from Iona. At Fionnphort sleek air-conditioned coaches disgorge passengers; cars packed with children and camping equipment pull up, realising suddenly that they have reached the end of the island—practically the end of the old world, for there is almost no more land between here and the coast of Labrador three thousand miles away. There is a shop, a pub and a small visitors’ centre, an RNLI second-hand bookshop and a tiny ticket office, which handles the disproportionately large number of foot passengers wishing to cross the Sound to Iona. No tourists’ cars or coaches may cross to the island, as if to protect it from being sullied by the modern world.

  There is no dock to speak of. The pilgrim is confronted with a concrete ramp and a breathtaking view of the medieval abbey set against the granite rump of Dun I (I from the original Hii). From a mile away across the clear turquoise waters of the Sound you watch the ferry rounding the sand bar which almost divides the Sound in two, its wake bowing in the strong current that runs north here, choppy white wave-crests bashing rhythmically against its side. The ferry’s arrival at Fionnphort is announced by the crunch and grind of its hull engaging the ramp, where it sticks, swaying, diesel engines panting to keep it steady in the swell. It is an odd sort of anti-climax for pilgrims who have t
ravelled halfway around the globe to visit one of the Christian world’s holiest and most evocative sites.

  It is nearly always windy on Iona and the seas are notorious. Two miles to the south Robert Louis Stevenson shipwrecked his young Kidnapped hero David Balfour on the tidal island of Erraid. The seas are littered with wrecks. Iona’s monks were consummate sailors, though: Iona lay at the centre of their world. The monasteries and princely strongholds of Ireland, of Skye and Jura, of the Hebrides and Kintyre, of the Picts of the Great Glen all lay within easy reach. Those modern visitors dedicated enough to have read something of Colm Cille might hold firmly in their hand as they step on to the ferry a copy of Adomnán’s Life of Saint Columba (Vita Columbae). They might even hold it open at the page on which Adomnán, himself an abbot of Iona in the time when Oswald’s nephew was king of Northumbria, describes shouts being heard by the monks on the island from their brothers at Fionnphort for a boat to be sent to fetch them. They must have had loud voices, the monks, and none louder than Colm Cille, whose call ‘could be heard sometimes as much as half a mile away, sometimes even a mile, for it was uplifted unlike any other’.13

  As late as the nineteenth century those wishing to cross would either hail a boatman on the other side if it was a still day, or light a beacon using heather to make thick smoke.14 A similar reply confirmed receipt of the call. The location of his fire gave each boatman a distinct call sign, so to speak. The monks probably used a similar system thirteen hundred years before. Sometimes the weather was so bad that for days on end the Sound could not be crossed unless Colm Cille called for heavenly intercession, in which case his monks would set out, in fear of their lives and perhaps in greater fear of incurring their abbot’s displeasure. They were hard men; he was harder.

  It was into the hands of this man’s successors that Acha Yffing entrusted the futures of her sons. There can be no doubting Oswald’s significance to the community of Iona: a hundred years after Colm Cille’s death, the first of scores of miracles attributed to him by Adomnán in the Life of Columba was his ghostly appearance in Oswald’s tent the night before the Battle of Heavenfield. That Oswald himself, in his first years as king, told the story to its abbot in person strongly suggests that the significance and empathy was mutual.

  On the death of Æthelfrith Iding, Bernicia, its peasants, slaves, drengs and remaining thanes and ealdormen, its royal estates and great halls, were left to the disposal of a new king in the north, Acha’s brother, Edwin Yffing of Deira. He must now impose his will and military might to keep the two kingdoms united and reconquer the lands won and lost by his predecessor. The Idings of Bernicia were now no more than strangers in a foreign land; their fates lay in the hands of kings who, on the face of it, can have had no obligations towards them. Such was the legacy of Æthelfrith, first of the Bernician kings to unite his lands with Deira.

  Æthelfrith, son of Æthelric, son of Ida, son of Eobba, was a pagan in a pagan world. The bare factual bones of his career are few but they resonate with the sound of hammer on anvil. This was no ordinary man. For Bede he was rex fortissimus et gloriae cupidissmus (a very brave king and most eager for glory), forgiven his heathenism because he was an instrument of divine retribution, striking down the impious. The ninth-century British historian known as Nennius used the native Brythonic epithet Flesaur (from the Latin flexus): Æthelfrith the Twister. Æthelfrith had form as far as the British were concerned.

  He emerges from the fuzzy boundary between myth and historical reality in the last quarter of the sixth century. Even the basic outline of the dates of his predecessors is a matter of long-nurtured debate: our few available sources seem to contradict each other; the numbers, on the face of it, simply don’t add up. I have made my own attempt to untangle these chronological knots and I offer a solution; but this is tricky stuff, so I have confined it to an essay called ‘The Bernician king-list problem’ at the end of this book, graphically summarised in the genealogy of the Bernician royal house.*1

  Suffice it to say that Æthelfrith was a grandson of Ida, the legendary founding warlord of Bernicia. Ida established himself, probably at the rocky coastal fortress of Bamburgh, some time in the late 550s. No-one has been able to explain where he came from. If the Angles had come from across the North Sea a hundred years before, where had they been in the meantime?*2 Four of Ida’s sons reigned after him, but their hold on Bernicia was tenuous for the best part of half a century. In the mid-580s, perhaps, a coalition of British forces from across the North attempted to dislodge the Idings, and to drive them back into the sea whence they came. Æthelric, father of Æthelfrith, may have been the intended victim of this campaign but he survived, apparently in exile, to fight another day. The culmination of the campaign was a siege in which his brother and successor Theodoric was blockaded with his forces on the island of Lindisfarne, called by the British Metcaud.*3

  Whatever the precise sequence and causes of the campaign which ended at Lindisfarne, it was a British disaster. The senior British warlord, the fabled Urien of Rheged, was betrayed and the alliance collapsed. Only once more did the northern British take on the growing might of Bernicia, as Theodoric and successive Bernician kings gradually established their hold over the lands between the Tyne and Tweed.

  The greatest early poem in Old Welsh is Aneirin’s Y Gododdin. It is a grand oral lament, written down long after its form was polished in firelit song, for the last great expedition of the northern British against the English. The hopeless campaign it celebrates seems to have been launched some time after the Lindisfarne siege, on the Deiran stronghold of Catræth (Latin Cataractonum, modern Catterick), whose Roman ramparts are shamelessly bisected by the line of the A1 dual carriageway where it crosses the River Swale in North Yorkshire. The assault is otherwise unrecorded in history. The names of the defenders are unknown and irrelevant to the poet who, portraying himself as the only survivor out of an army of three hundred and three score and three warriors tells a tale of feasting and drink, of boasting, of Dutch courage, of noble failure and of black ravens glutting themselves on the bodies of fallen heroes…

  The men went to Catræth; they were renowned;

  Wine and mead from golden cups was their beverage;

  That year was to them of exalted solemnity;

  Three warriors and three score and three hundred,

  wearing the golden torques.

  Of those who hurried forth after the excess of revelling,

  But three escaped by the prowess of the gashing sword,

  The two war-dogs of Aeron, and Cenon the dauntless,

  And myself from the spilling of my blood, the reward of my sacred song.*4

  The raid was planned by Mynyddog Mwynfawr, Lord of Din Eidyn, or Edinburgh. The poet relates that it took him a whole year to rouse the passions of his warriors for one last assault on Bernicia’s growing threat to the south; this may be a poetic metaphor for the time it took him to assemble the forces of other British kingdoms: Picts, Britons of Strathclyde and of North Wales (though conspicuously not of Rheged), after the failure of the Lindisfarne assault. Its destination might have been chosen from a romantic idea of revenge, because Catræth had been the eastern outpost of Urien’s lordship. With Urien betrayed and his confederacy shattered, the English must have overrun the ancient Roman fort and now held it, defiant, against whatever depleted forces the North Britons could muster. But there may also have been a more pragmatic context. Catterick lies at the mouth of Swaledale, a location of supreme strategic value in controlling the northern Vale of York and the Swale–Tees borderlands between Deira and Bernicia. Archaeologist Andrew Fleming has convincingly argued that a series of great earthworks near Reeth, blocking the dale a few miles upstream from Catterick, must reflect attempts by the British of Rheged to hold that part of the Pennines against the English, preventing penetration of their heartlands from the east.15 If this is right, the great raid of Y Gododdin may have been intended as a relieving counterpunch by Rheged’s allies. Aneirin was not a histo
rian but a poet; one must treat the details of the verse with extreme caution partly because of the inherent poetic obligation to elegise and exaggerate but also because later accretions and ‘improvements’ are hard to disentangle from whatever the original work sounded like. But Aneirin’s reference to the warriors of Lloegr, that is to say the English, being drawn from a united Bernicia and Deira, does seem genuine. This ought to confine the date of the raid to a time when Deiran and Bernician warbands were allied, but before the kingdoms were united in about 604. The late 580s fits that bill.

  The English protagonists at Catræth can be identified as Æthelfrith and his father. Æthelric’s reign in Bernicia ended in 584 but he appears in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle under the entry for 588 as the successor to King Ælle of Deira, reigning there for five years. I suggest that either the Bernician father-and-son deposed Ælle and then fought the British at Catræth; or conversely. Either way it must have been by force of arms and either way, if my resolution of the king-list problem is right, Æthelric was succeeded by Æthelfrith in Deira, not in his homeland of Bernicia, in about 592.

  After twelve years of ruling Deira, that is in about 604, Æthelfrith was strong enough to attempt to reclaim the kingdom lost or given up by his father and unite all the English beyond the Humber. He accomplished this by a judicious combination of battle and marriage. The battle was waged on him by an external aggressor, King Áedán mac Gabráin of Dál Riata. Like the British confederacy before him, Áedán seems to have decided on a pre-emptive strike against the growing threat posed by the northern English. The place where the two armies met in about the year 604 was so famous that it could be identified as late as Bede’s day in the early eighth century. Degsastan, that is, Degsa’s stone, was sufficiently well known that Bede did not feel the need to tell his readers where it was. It is most annoying. Various locations have been put forward over the years; there is no absolute consensus, although Dawston Rigg in Liddesdale, in the grimly bleak Debatable Lands of the western Anglo-Scottish border, is the most favoured candidate. This is well outside Dál Riatan territory, in the lands that bordered Strathclyde and Rheged. The assault was carried out overland with or without the permission of the king of Strathclyde, or conducted from a sea-borne landing on the Solway Firth. It is possible that Strathclyde was, at this time, subject to Dál Riata, in which case her support would have been obligatory. Strathclyde might equally have sought the intervention of Dál Riata against her English enemies. Whichever was the case, the Scots came mob-handed and fought ‘with an immensely strong army’ that may have included contingents from the Irish mainland as well as, it seems, aspiring Bernician athelings. But Æthelfrith was ready for them. As Bede recorded, the whole host were cut to pieces and fled with few survivors: ‘From that time no Irish king in Britain has dared to make war on the English race…’16 Æthelfrith’s victory over the kings of northern Britain was now complete but for the loss of his brother Theobald who fell at Degsastan with his entire warband. Áedán survived and ruled for another three years, but so politically weakened that one can date the decline of Dál Riata’s fortunes from this time: their kings must now regard themselves as subject to Bernician overlordship. It was Áedán’s son Eochaid who accepted the sons of Æthelfrith, his father’s enemy, into his court in 617, which lends the events of that year a certain piquancy.