Even now it is immensely difficult to wrench the mind-set of historians and their readers away from the south, almost impossible to convince them that the centre of defining action in Britain could be elsewhere. Both the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Bede’s Historia had as a part of their purpose the legitimation of the Saxon kings of Wessex and the Angle kings of Northumbria, and broadly the conquest of most of England. Their patrons became the heroes of their histories, their enemies barely mentioned. Because the fifth and sixth centuries in Britain went almost completely unreported by contemporaries, these later versions of what happened in that time have come to be believed. They are not untrue, but they are not the whole truth.
Taking all of that together it is easy to see why the P-Celtic kingdoms of southern Scotland have been virtually forgotten. Of their names, Rheged, Manau and Gododdin resonate little; only Strathclyde is recognized because it was the name of a Scottish local authority. And yet these four offered the only serious initial resistance to the invasions of the Germanic tribes in the fifth and sixth centuries. Disciplined by their Roman allies, hammered by war into four warrior kingdoms, Gododdin, Manau, Strathclyde and Rheged resisted the Picts in the north and the Scots in the west. They were the crucible for the origins of Welsh language and literature; the poetry of Taliesin has come down to us; and in ‘The Gododdin’ they left the earliest piece of European literature in a vernacular language. With Ninian at Whithorn a century before Augustine arrived in Kent, Patrick the son of a Rheged nobleman converting pagans in Ireland, Kentigern a bishop in Glasgow and the ancient Celtic monastery at Melrose, the four kingdoms also kept the faith.
And this was no brief flicker. There were Strathclyde kings at Dumbarton for a thousand years. In 1018 King Owain the Bald fought alongside his Q-Celtic overlord Malcolm II MacMalcolm at the Battle of Carham on the River Tweed. As the Scottish host fought the Northumbrians to establish the river as the south-east frontier, the Strathclyde king was killed in the midst of the battle on the wide riverbank. He was the last of his ancient dynasty, of a tribe described by Tacitus in 80, the end of the Damnonian line. After Owain, the Gaelic-speaking MacMalcolms would tolerate no more Strathclyde kings.
In the fifth and sixth centuries the four kingdoms were the last light in the west before Britain sank into its Dark Age. And none shone brighter among them than Arthur, their great leader of battles, who held back the darkness long enough to keep us British.
Rheged was the largest of the kingdoms, running from an old fort that remembers the name, Dunragit, in the western end of Galloway near Stranraer all the way east to Dumfries, Carlisle and south through Cumbria, Lancashire and down to an industrial town that also carries the name of the old kingdom. Rochdale was first recorded as Recedham in the Domesday Book of 1086. At its zenith Rheged compassed all the territory of the Novantes in Galloway, the lands of the Carvetii around Carlisle and the Eden valley, the hill country of the western Brigantes in Cumbria and Lancashire. With the exception of the Carvetii, these tribes noted by Tacitus had been hostile to Rome, but as time wore on they came to learn from their enemies at close quarters. The mouth of the Solway and the western end of Hadrian’s Wall was one of the most intensively militarized zones in the Roman Empire. And at Ribchester, Bremetenacum Veteranorum, where the Sarmatian Cavalry of the third century had been granted land, Rheged incorporated a tradition of military horsemanship not surpassed in Britain.
After the imperial government left Britannia to protect itself in 410, there is a historical belief that anarchy gradually took hold, civil institutions withered and towns were abandoned. In fact in the heart of Rheged where the kingdom hinged south on Carlisle, Roman civic life carried on much as before. By 369 the status of the town had been elevated to one of Britannia’s five provincial capitals.⁴⁷ The Roman site was large, enclosing seventy acres. And in the twelfth century the reliable medieval historian William of Malmesbury noted an arched building of great antiquity still standing. It carried a Latin inscription to Mars and Venus.⁴⁸ When Roman buildings in Carlisle fell into disrepair in the fifth and sixth centuries they were rebuilt in a classical style, but in wood. The town was an important road meeting and the old straight ways were kept in repair, while Carlisle’s aqueduct was still in use in 685.
St Patrick was not an Irishman. He was a P-Celt with an original name of Sucat. Around 400 an Irish raider chieftain named Milchu beached his boat on the Carlisle shore of the Solway and went inland for plunder and slaves or hostages. He abducted Sucat, who later escaped to Gaul where he joined a Christian community and took the Latin name Patricius. He did much in Ireland that is famous but the important thing here is his Confessio or autobiography written around 450. In it he describes the kingdoms of Rheged and Strathclyde as peaceful, organized places where taxes were still raised, courts of law functioned and in a letter to Ceretic, King of Strathclyde, Patrick addresses him as ‘fellow citizen’.
It is very likely that the saint was describing only what he knew in Carlisle rather than generalizing about the new Celtic kingdoms. However it is clear that order was maintained in the Romanized north, that the rulers of Rheged, Strathclyde, Manau and Gododdin saw themselves as the inheritors of the empire, not its destroyers. There is a toponymic reference to Patrick a few miles from Carlisle: it is the town of Aspatria which means ‘Patrick’s Ash Tree’.
Rheged was linked as much by sea as by land, arranged, as it was, around the Solway Firth and Morecambe Bay. It was an enclosed sea, easy to navigate and with the Isle of Man in its centre, it must have been difficult to sail far out of sight of land in good weather. Although no sources mention fleets or sea battles and naval archaeology is non-existent for this period, the men of Rheged would have been seafarers. When the Scots of Irish Dal Riata left the Antrim coast first to raid and then to settle, they could on a clear day see the white beaches of Galloway. But they sailed instead to the mists and rocks of Argyll. Not by choice, I believe, but because Rheged resisted them successfully.
Seabourne commerce was alive in that time. Excavations at the royal centre of Rheged, the Mote of Mark near Dalbeattie, have turned up expensive glassware from the Rhineland and also pottery from Bordeaux, hinting at a wine trade.⁴⁹ The Mote of Mark also has another, more fanciful connection. In the later Arthurian legend, Tristan went on his tragic journey to find Isolde for his uncle King Mark of Damnonia, making him King of Cornwall. Perhaps, and not for the first time, Dumnonia and Damnonia became confused.
In any event there is much more certainty about another tale. All the dynastic lists for Rheged name a man called Coel Hen as a progenitor. His name is often sung by schoolchildren. Hen is the P-Celtic or Welsh word for old, and whether or not Old King Cole was merry, or liked fiddle music is not recorded anywhere except in a nursery rhyme. Perhaps the song is a distant reverberation of his power, for Coel Hen was the last British king to rule both sides of the Pennines and all of Rheged, even up to the Ayrshire coast where the district of Kyle remembers him.
In the middle of northern Rheged lay Whithorn, an unusual name because it is an Anglicization of a Latin place-name, Candida Casa. It means ‘White House’ and refers to the rare construction of a stone building, a new church. Bede wrote that the southern Picts had been converted by a bishop who was born in Britain but trained in Rome. His name was Nynia, more recognizable as Ninian, and he was the son of an aristocratic P-Celtic family, possibly, like Patrick, from Carlisle.⁵⁰
Some time between 366 and 384 Ninian travelled to Rome, where he was received by Pope Damasus I, consecrated bishop and then sent into the tutelage of St Martin of Tours, the Apostle of the Franks. Ninian came home, probably as Bishop of Carlisle, to evangelize the southern Picts. That is why he built Candida Casa, as an outpost close to the heathens. If the term ‘Pict’ had historically been understood to cover Novantes, Selgovae and Brigantes then the location makes sense.
There are traces of Ninian all over south-west Scotland. He founded churches, abbeys, monasteries and nunneries
and according to his medieval biographer he also made an effort to convert the northern Picts, travelling through Angus and Aberdeenshire as far as the Cromarty Firth.
St David of Wales, or Dewi Sant, journeyed to Whithorn for instruction before he returned to Christianize north Wales. By the time Ninian died in 432, Rheged was becoming a Christian kingdom, and much of Celtic Britain had been touched by his mission. Archaeological evidence is scant for this period but it is surely significant that three Christian gravestones have been found in the valleys of the Southern Uplands. All have Latin names inscribed on them and together they make possible a reasonable conjecture: namely that the survival of the memory of Rome was linked to the spread of Christianity.
More than that, all this early Christian activity, uniquely early in Britain – more than a century before Augustine arrived in 592 to convert the south – speaks of consent and order. It could only take place in the context of a society run by a firm government, organized, sufficiently centralized and consistent, and relatively peaceful.
After the death of Coel Hen, Rheged split its southern territory into three portions: a kingdom based at York, another west of the Pennines and a third around Leeds. This last survived into the sixth century as the small British kingdom of Elmet. Its territory was approximately the same as an area of hill country which the Romans knew as Ladenses for the tribe who originally lived there. Ladenses is the P-Celtic ghost-name for Leeds, the central place of Elmet.⁵¹ An interesting circle.
By 573 at the Battle of Arthuret, rival kings in Rheged were fighting and killing each other. But then, almost immediately after that, a king emerged who united all the lands of Coel and who ruled from Galloway in the west and down as far south as the Mersey. This was Urien of Rheged and the most successful of the P-Celtic kings in the north. He is well remembered because his bard was the great Taliesin and the poetry has survived.
Urien of Echwyd most liberal of Christianmen
Much do you give to men in this world
As you gather, so you dispense
Happy the Christian bards so long as you live …
Sovereign supreme ruler all highest
The strangers’ refuge, strong champion in battle.
This the English know when they tell tales.
Death was theirs, rage and grief are theirs
Burned are their homes, bare are their bodies
Till I am old and failing
In the grim doom of death
I shall have no delight
If my lips praise not Urien.⁵²
He united the four kingdoms and drove westwards to attack the Angles. The eighth-century chronicler Nennius wrote that:
Hussa reigned seven years. Four kings fought against him. Urien and Riderch Hen, and Gaullauc and Morcant. Theodoric fought bravely against the famous Urien and his sons. During that time sometimes the enemy, sometimes our countrymen were victorious, and Urien blockaded them for three days and three nights on the island of Metcaud [Lindisfarne].⁵³
And then later Nennius added: ‘But while he was on the expedition, Urien was assassinated, on the initiative of Morcant, from jealousy, because his military skill and generalship surpassed that of all the other kings.’
Although Urien was immediately succeeded by his son Owain who inflicted more defeats on the Angles, deploying his cavalry brilliantly, his achievements were short-lived. Owain died some time after 593. Rheged’s power quickly diminished, and its famous name was not heard again in the poems and songs of the bards.
The name that endured and lives on even now is Strathclyde. Encompassing the largest local authority area in Britain, it includes the whole of the River Clyde basin and also broad swathes of the Highland areas which bound its penetrating firth and the long-fingered sea lochs that reach into the heart of the mountains. It is a hybrid P- and Q-Celtic name, which will seem appropriate once its story unfolds. The first element comes from the Gaelic strath for a ‘wide valley’ and the second P-Celtic river name Clyde from the root clouta called by Roman cartographers Clota, which means ‘the cleansing one’. The original name of the tribe described by Tacitus, the Damnonii, did survive but not in the name of the kingdom.
The limits of the kingdom of Strathclyde were tighter than most of the modern local authority. Place-names mark them. At the head of Loch Lomond where the road climbs away north up towards Crianlarich, there is a place in the pass known to the Q-Celts as Clach nam Breatain, or ‘The Stone of the Britons’. It marks a geographical, linguistic and political boundary, probably a battle-site and a place where messengers, embassies or kings met to talk. And yet there is nothing now to mark the site, one of the hinge-points of Dark Ages Scotland. Only the windswept crags, the tussocky grass and mounds of road grit waiting for the winter.
To the west the wide Firth of Clyde bounded Strathclyde and kept the Scots of Dalriada in their sea kingdom in Argyll. The Galloway Hills separated it from western Rheged and in the east there must have been a political settlement with the P-Celtic kings of Manau and Gododdin because, aside from Hart Hill and the protection offered by Flanders Moss, the frontier was not well guarded by geography. None the less the Damnonians of Strathclyde were the least accessible of the four kingdoms of the north – from the south. The Romans penetrated to the upper Clyde valley as far as Crawford, but their objective was to encircle the Selgovae, not subdue the Damnonii. There are relatively few Roman camps or roads in the west, suggesting that like their Votadinian neighbours, these tribesmen brokered an arrangement with Agricola which allowed the imperial army to concentrate on the east coast and their Caledonian enemies. The men who came to be known as the Picts would have been a threat to the green fields of the Clyde and compliance no doubt brought political gain.
Strathclyde never fell to the Angles. It was first and last a Celtic kingdom which understood itself in P-Celtic and finally in Q-Celtic before its memory faded in the eleventh century. As such it became the creator, receiver and preserver of traditions which will inform much of what follows. It endured centuries longer than the Gododdin and developed a powerful P-Celtic culture which, as I will show, politics pushed south to Wales at the end of the ninth century. Strathclyde absorbed the stories of the Gododdin, of Rheged and of Manau and of their Q-Celtic neighbours and produced a Welsh-language version of Dark Ages Scotland which was later mistaken for a recital of events far to the south.
Riderch Hael is the first Damnonian king to assume recognizable historical shape. He reigned at about the same time as Urien of Rheged and was as vigorous in establishing his borders. But before these men begin to appear like conquerors whose armies redrew the map and coloured it deeply, it is important to remember that very small numbers were involved. There is a definition in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle which may not have applied only to them.⁵⁴ Up to thirty men was a war-band or a raiding party and anything over that was understood as an army. Battles between powerful kings may have been fought between two groups of fifty warriors. These men certainly went on short campaigns in the summer fighting season but they sought plunder rather than territory. Lacking the organization and the resources to do more than lift what was valuable and removable, they could hold power over river valleys and ranges of hills but would not have seen geography as valuable in itself. Fighting was the core of the culture of the professional warriors who dominated the P-Celtic kingdoms of the north. They travelled far on their tough ponies and fought battles often very distant from their bases but their thoughts rarely strayed from what they would bring home – glory as well as plunder. They were raiders, not conquerors, and it is of more than passing significance that the words ‘raiding’ and ‘riding’ are etymologically very close indeed, and they also connect to a word that came originally from the Scottish Border: reiving.
When other war-bands arrived to compete with the aristocracy of the P-Celts, then it is proper to characterize warfare as political rather than simply economic. Urien drove the Angles across the Tweed down to Lindisfarne because he wanted to dis
courage them and not because he was embarking on the conquest of Northumbria
There is another determinant matter here. To say that the kingdom of Rheged extended across the Tweed and into the north of England would be a misunderstanding. The power of Urien, King of Rheged, did temporarily encompass Northumbria but that is not the same thing. Urien’s skill as a general meant success for his warriors whose loyalty and obligation was personal to him as long as they continued to collect the spoils of war. Rheged belonged, in a tangible sense, to Urien and to his son Owain. When they died there was no sense that Rheged would produce an heir or that an internecine process would produce a capable heir. Rheged was Urien’s personal possession and when he failed, it declined.
The resilience of Strathclyde has much to do with this way of thinking. The Damnonian kings were great generals who in turn defeated all comers for close on 400 years. When the kingdom of the Gododdin collapsed in the mid seventh century, the Scots of Dalriada threatened to move east into the area around Stirling. Owen of Strathclyde led his war-band to Strathcarron where he caught the Scots, destroyed their small army and slew their king Domnall Brecc.
Forty years later another ambitious king came to grief, this time indirectly at the hands of the men of Strathclyde. In addition to war, their statecraft extended to diplomacy, dynastic marriage and what may have been peaceful coups d’état. Owen’s brother was known to history as Bridei son of Bili and a man the Irish annalists confirm as ‘the son of the King of Dumbarton’. The army of the Picts, Strathclyde’s northern neighbours, was destroyed in 672 by Ecgfrith, the Angle King of Northumbria. In the aftermath, Bridei became at some point King of the Picts. No doubt bolstered and guided by his fellow Damnonians, he drew Northumbrians across the Forth and Fife and at Dunnichen Moss in 685 he utterly annihilated them. Anglian power was pushed far to the south over the Lammermuir Hills and down into the Tweed basin.
Arthur and the Lost Kingdoms Page 11