Overlooked by the Cheviot foothills and by the sandstone scarp on which Old Bewick perches is the line of the Devil’s Causeway. Originally built by the Romans to link Corbridge with the sheltered harbour at Berwick-upon-Tweed, lengths of it have variously been replaced or overlain by the A697 Coldstream road and by the so-called Corn Road of the eighteenth century, which transported Northumberland’s harvest to the coast at Alnmouth for export to London. In a land whose natural warp runs east–west along its rivers from sea to hills, the Roman road and the sea itself linked north and south so that Bernicia was a joined-up land, a geographical whole. But there were other ancient routes through this landscape and some of them can, with care, be reconstructed. One of the most important linked the ancestral seat of the kings at Bamburgh with the tribal holy mountain and cult centre at Yeavering. I imagine Oswald and his court making that journey of twenty miles or so towards the end of April because May Day, or Beltane in the British calendar, seems to have been the date when cattle renders from subject kingdoms were collected.164 Cattle, probably horses too, were brought from across the north of Britain to be scrutinised and counted; no doubt more than a few were slaughtered for feasting. It was part conspicuous display of wealth, part rodeo, an opportunity for men to judge flesh and wrangling skills. Horses were prized above all things by kings, whose pride in weaponry and horseplay were key to their status as charismatic warrior leaders. Cattle were the principal measure of earthly wealth in a world where crops were necessary, but hardly romantic; their cultivation was menial, plebeian. At Yeavering the infrastructure for such ceremonial taxation was present in the great palisaded enclosure, a corral enclosing nearly three acres. The cowhands and wranglers of America’s heroic western cattle country would have felt perfectly at home here. Perhaps the famous grandstand hosted part of a ceremony of oath-swearing, cattle-counting and submission—no finer natural stage for such pomp can be imagined.
The modern pilgrim on wheels must cross the rivers, meadows, plains and fells which separate fortress from palace along a series of small roads which seem to cut across the grain of the land, intersecting with the A1 and the London to Edinburgh North-Eastern Railway, the A697 trunk road and the line of the Devils’ Causeway. Here and there you encounter a sharp right-angle bend that shows that the route has had to adapt to the new shape of the land imposed by agricultural enclosure acts a thousand years after Oswald’s day. On the ground, on foot, a more probable route for the royal progress can be traced in footpaths, bridleways and fords, which follow a more natural trail, using rather than abusing the topography. One startlingly beautiful clear day in November 2011 I set out with my son Jack to trace that route.
From the foot of the indomitable crag on which Bamburgh Castle sits, the trail lay west and south for about two miles to the bank of the Waren Burn just before it empties into the tidal flats of Budle Bay. This was a busy landscape: Bamburgh was not just a fortress but a township; there were many steadings nearby and the proliferation of early English place-names in this part of Bernicia suggests widespread, if perhaps not very efficient, cultivation. The Waren Burn formed the southern boundary of the early Lindisfarne estates and the north-western edge of the scir, or royal shire, of Bamburgh. At the foot of the hill called Spindlestone Haughs, on which sits an early defended enclosure, the path is diverted to the south and follows the burn along its right bank through open, rolling farmland towards the tiny village of Lucker, past the site of a British Christian cist burial, across the high-speed electric rail line and over the modern road. The hamlet is now part of the parish of Adderstone-with-Lucker but it must originally have been its own parish, with the burn as the compound boundary of township, parish and shire. The path continues to trace the wavy line of the burn as far as Warenford, whose location rather speaks for itself (waren seems to be derived from the Brythonic word for the alder tree). One must cross the river here to avoid steeper, boggier ground to the west, and shadow the burn on its north side for a mile or so, past the empty gatehouse of the Twizell estate, beneath the roaring traffic of the A1 in a bespoke but unappealing concrete tunnel and then through beech and hazel woodland to the site of an old sawmill at Twizell. Twizell is an ancient name for a fork in a river and here, where the Waren emerges from a steep-sided dene, it is joined by Cocklaw Burn. It is a place to pause and engage the sense of a place that may have lost much of its significance but can have changed physically hardly at all in fourteen hundred years.
Crossing this second ford, the path takes advantage of a gently sloping natural ridge as it emerges from woods on to open moorland pasture, avoiding higher ground to north and south and hugging the contours of rough upland pasture until it descends into the village of Chatton. At their highest point the sandstone fells reach over a thousand feet. The Iron Age hillfort of Ros Castle dominates the ridge and the vale to the west, but nowhere on the trail from Bamburgh climbs to more than half that height. From the point of view of the traveller on foot, in a waggon or on horseback it is perfectly adapted to be passable in all seasons. Looking at the first-edition six-inch Ordnance Survey map gives one a strong idea of continuity in this landscape, for this long-used route, now a series of apparently disconnected footpaths whose whole significance can only be understood by walking it, is overlooked by settlements and burial cairns from the Bronze Age onwards. It is a landscape layered with meaning and significance, peopled by the ghosts of ancestors, where the plaintive wail of the curlew and chattering squawk of the partridge must have brought to the minds of Bernicians the voices of lost spirits. The waterfall called Roughtin Linn, an aptly applied Brythonic name meaning ‘roaring pool’, must have been a refreshment spot for generation after generation of travellers plying this same route: salters, shepherds, robbers, kings’ couriers and royal baggage trains alike. Their footsteps have long faded but they would still recognise every fold in the hillside, every line of the Cheviot massif in the misty blue distance, standing out like a whaleback and often, in late autumn, wearing a fresh crown of icing-sugar snow.
At Chatton, horse and waggon alike must have crossed the wide bed of the Till, the defining river of north Northumberland, which drains the east side of the Cheviots into the Milfield Basin and thence discharges into the Tweed. At any ford, each one a natural choke-point and a time for tension but also for breaking the monotony of the journey, the party must have slowed. Reluctant animals had to be coerced, recalcitrant wheels needed a shoulder’s encouragement; regal bottoms must occasionally have had to dismount. Scouts must have gone on ahead, impatient retainers cursed and nervously watched the skyline. A flash flood might have held up progress for a night or two so that leather tents, equipment, firewood and supplies would have to be disgorged from the baggage train. All in all it must have resembled something of a circus, but one so fatalistically inured to the fortunes of the road and the seasons that one suspects not much would have fazed the protagonists. For the local inhabitants it was a chance to gawp at the great, perhaps to ingratiate oneself, often to be co-opted into temporary service.
A mile or so west of Chatton the trail made a crossroads with the Devil’s Causeway and one imagines a staging post here with fodder for horses and food and ale for those on the king’s—and later the church’s—business. This, perhaps, was a more salubrious place to make the night’s stop, although a mounted party travelling at decent speed and unencumbered by the trappings of a royal entourage could certainly expect to accomplish the Bamburgh–Yeavering journey in a single day and would press on. The keeper of the mansio here would have been a cæpman, the origin of the surname Chapman. He was both hotelier and trader, purveyor of news as well as victuals and supplies; he may even have been officially a king’s man, such was the importance of maintaining the establishment with its potentially crucial role in intelligence gathering and in the summoning of the king’s host.
The Bernician kings’ progress towards Yeavering encounters no more than gentle slopes after Chatton but must make one more crossing of a significant rive
r, perhaps at Haugh Head two miles south of the town of Wooler where five parish boundaries intersect close by a ford across the Harthope Burn. Immediately to the south, tucked into a sharp bend in the main road, is Surrey House, a wonderfully enigmatic, down-at-heel, pantiled gingerbread farmhouse which has stood on the site since at least 1513 when the Earl of Surrey used it as his headquarters before the Battle of Flodden Field. Beyond the ford the trail keeps to the higher ground between Wooler Water and the Cheviot foothills, avoiding the flood-prone east bank, skirting the site of the present bridge at Wooler before turning west into the mouth of Glendale, in sight of Yeavering Bell, the ‘holy’ mountain.
A similar journey must often have been made by Aidan in Oswald’s reign and afterwards. Bede implies that he had his own cell and church built at Yeavering, as well as other royal estates, as a base for preaching among the more remote communities and certainly as a means of ensuring that the fragile shoots of the Ionan mission were not allowed to die for lack of encouragement.165 The provision of a cell, perhaps a circular building not unlike an Iron Age roundhouse in plan, allowed Aidan to associate himself with royal power and yet dissociate himself from its excesses. Irish bishop-missionaries were nothing if not acutely aware of the ironies of their position. Oddly enough, Brian Hope-Taylor identified the distinct traces of a circular house building at Yeavering, some twenty-three feet in diameter, built into the defunct remains of what must have a been a sort of grand kitchen designed to prepare for great pagan feasting ceremonies (Building D3). Was Aidan more inclined than Augustine to heed Pope Gregory’s softly-softly approach? Was this his modest cell?
Bede’s portrayal of seventh-century kingship and the early years of the Ionan mission is intensely personal, event-driven and providential. The Ecclesiastical History is, after all, a story of how good kings prospered under the guidance of holy men and bad kings were punished by the divine hand sub-contracting to human agents. Modern historians are more interested in the things that Bede does not reveal, or what he actively conceals; archaeologists like to reconcile his portrait with that provided by excavation and the surviving evidence of the landscape—those parts of the past which, fundamentally, we can say we share with Bede and his kings and clerics. It is not enough, though, to follow Oswald and Aidan through their landscape, to imagine peasants working in the fields and accept, as Bede did, that there was a natural order to these things. We must try to understand how it all worked. If there was order, on what was it based, and how long had it been that way? This was, after all, a very different land from the one ruled over by the Roman emperors. The Britain of the seventh century, unlike the kingdoms of the Franks in Merovingian Gaul, had no functioning towns or civil service, no professional judiciary, no standing armies; no coinage or exchequer. And, what is more, there was no-one alive in the seventh century who could have said what life had been like under the lost race of giants—not even Bede, who knew more than anyone else about the centuries of the legions.
The lands north of Hadrian’s Wall had always been peripheral to the Empire, even during the brief period in the second century when the Antonine Wall lassoed and temporarily enclosed them. That is not to say that the British between Forth and Tyne were left unchanged by Romanitas. Roman interests and influence spread far beyond their frontiers and, contrariwise, the peoples on the outer edge of the Empire took an intense interest in what went on inside. There is evidence, for example, that in the second century ad the Britons of the Breamish Valley were cultivating grain for the armies of Rome; and they seem to have done rather well out of it, because they built substantial villages of some architectural pretension, including the remarkable caput at Greaves Ash, and they cultivated huge tracts of fertile volcanic slopes in the foothills above Ingram.166 In five summers of excavating in this landscape I came to a position of deep respect for these entrepreneurial, adaptable, tough and bold native peoples.
The tribes beyond the frontier, particularly the Votadini (the same Gododdin whose disastrous hung-over onslaught on Catterick was celebrated in epic Early Welsh verse) seem to have enjoyed, if that is the right word, a client relationship with the Romans as a buffer state between citizen and Pict. The Roman road system, strategically linking forts and signal stations, created a web of fast communications far into what is now Scotland. If the Romans failed to permanently conquer these lands it was probably not because they couldn’t but because the game was not worth the candle. Their mineral prospectors knew where the most northerly exploitable ores were and decided that nothing beyond the frontier of Hadrian was worth their permanent attention.
From the third century onwards the predations of Scots, Irish and Picts forced periodic reinforcement of the Hadrianic wall, increasingly garrisoned with commanders and then whole warbands recruited from the famously skilled warrior elites of the unconquered tribes north of the Rhine. German names, German gods, German warriors and their guttural language were all familiar to the Roman Britons of Bryneich. Even after the so-called Barbarian Conspiracy of ad 367, when a concerted and organised attack on the frontier by the northern tribes and Saxons acting in cahoots with the Wall garrisons led to widespread destruction, civil chaos and brutal repression, Rome had sufficient resources to re-impose military order in the North. Indeed, the theme of the period between 370 and 410 is the use of Britain as a platform for military usurpers to stake their claims to the western half of the fragmenting Empire.
There is emerging evidence that several of the Wall forts survived to function in some form during the fifth century. At Birdoswald, at Housesteads and Vindolanda, at Arbeia in South Shields and elsewhere excavation has revealed the footprints of timber structures erected over the remains of stone barracks and storage barns, along with tentative evidence for fifth-century Christianity and a mixture of ‘British’ and ‘Germanic’ artefacts. It is here, perhaps, that we see the traces of a transition from the bureaucratic, regimented and centralised imperial army system towards the local governance and mead halls of the earliest English kingdoms. Tony Wilmott, excavator of Birdoswald, and Brian Roberts, the historical geographer, see in the adaptation of the Wall forts and in the civil organisation which began to emerge along the frontier a clue to its evolution.167 Suppose that at some point in the early fifth century, when we hear disturbing rumours that the British have been given permission to look to their own defences, the pay waggons carrying the soldiers’ salaries—the same pay waggons which had proved so attractive to the Irish, Picts and Scots—no longer found their way to Britain. It was not that the Empire took no interest in Britannia: her natural resources, both above and below ground, were just as valuable as they always had been. It is no coincidence that the most lasting permanent border structure of the Western Empire was built just a few miles beyond the most northerly state-controlled lead mines in Britain, in Weardale and Allendale. But the late fourth-century Empire no longer had the unity or the means to exert influence over Britain or to pay for her defence. Governance devolved to the civitas capitals, the ancient tribal centres whose great families had embraced Romanitas for good or ill.
Along the Wall garrison commanders of the limitanei, the frontier troops, faced with the unattractive prospect of unpaid troops taking matters into their own hands, were forced to extract renders from the areas around their forts and to organise the fort hinterlands as economic units of production—they possessed, after all, both legal and military rights of control over the native population. Brian Roberts believes that the pattern of townships which later developed along the line of Hadrian’s Wall—and it is a salutary fact that only in two places does the Wall itself form a later civic or parochial boundary—directly reflects the geography of these hinterlands. Along the mid-Tyne zone between Haydon Bridge and Newburn we find townships straddling the Wall with significant names: Walbottle, Heddon-on-the Wall, Portgate and the village of Wall itself, not very far from Heavenfield. These townships may preserve units of render or taxation with surviving forts at their cores. It is not hard to envis
age an emerging pattern of small economic units organically developing from ancient geographical topographies and new political realities, gradually coalescing into more formalised polities at a scale suitable to a post-Roman world. That is to say, the new Britain was not imperial, nor even regional, but local. The irony of this new reality is that the dying Roman frontier might have given rise to a new, post-imperial political core-land, the country of the mountain passes: Bryneich, Bernicia. The garrisons themselves had shrunk from their greatest strength in the early Empire. Rob Collins estimates that they ranged from one hundred and fifty men up to perhaps five hundred at the largest forts—still substantial in the context of North Britain.168
When historians look at the institutions and boundaries that are fossilised in later documents such as tax rolls, charters and monastic donations, they see that this new world reflected both ancient tribal custom and much that was new and foreign. The more successful leaders were able to extend their zones of control over several townships, sufficient that they could support an entourage in their hall and reward the service of warriors fighting in their warband. In return for renders the local big man offered protection from the predations of others. Institutionally it is not very different from the organised crime cartels which grew up in the United States during the Great Depression of the 1930s or, for that matter, as Stuart Laycock argues, the post-Soviet Balkans.169 One man’s tax collector is another’s racketeer. Command is devolved and inherited along family lines; by and by a dynasty emerges, to be legitimised by claims of descent from mythical beings. In the case of the Bernician kings, in a land where the military commanders were predominantly German, the forebear of choice was Woden. In parts of Britain where Germanic warbands played no significant role in the organisation of defence, one sees dynasties claiming to descend from the late Roman general cum usurper Magnus Maximus.*1 Where there were no military garrisons we can infer that government and taxation devolved locally from civitas capitals down to individual landowners. If British landowners thought it politic to marry their daughters to handsome young warriors from Angeln, bringing a few of their young, manly comrades with them from their last posting, who can blame them? As a means of securing their land and its future it seems only rational.
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