Scotland and England shall one monarch have.
Quoted by Walter Scott in 1807 when it was already at least 400 years old, this probably dates back to Thomas the Rhymer who in turn attributes it to Merlin.
Before dealing with the substance of this, I want to pin this place on the modern map. Pausyl is the same word as Possil in Glasgow and it is P-Celtic for ‘settlement’, but it is not noted anywhere on the Ordnance Survey. Flowing through the hamlet is the Drumelzier Burn, but knowledgeable local people not only remember its original name was Powsail but also that in the last century it was diverted into the Tweed at a point 500 yards upstream from its original outfall. If the Pausyl and the Tweed still met in the same place, the junction would be very near a standing stone which is clearly visible on the flood plain. Which would confirm another local tradition: that the old stone marks Merlin’s grave.
Now there are lots of traditions about lots of things which confirm nothing more than fertile imagination. However this is different. In his Life of St Kentigern Jocelyn completes the saint’s Christian triumph over Myrddin by noting that he claimed to be near death when he was graciously admitted to the church. More than that, he predicted the method of his own dispatch and its place. Jocelyn writes that Myrddin expected ‘a triple death’ and, by the banks of the Tweed, that is exactly what happened. Caught by shepherds, he was stoned and beaten before slipping into the river to be impaled on fishermen’s stakes while simultaneously drowning. However impossibly theatrical, or unlikely that might sound, it is the where and not the how that counts.
Finally there is the provenance of the prophecies. By quoting the ancient couplet that grand old unionist Walter Scott was looking for local agreement with the Union of the Crowns in 1603. Since ‘Scotland’ and ‘England’ are concepts which postdate Myrddin by many centuries, how can these prophecies relate to how he thought?
Here is the linking passage, the last stanza from the poem ‘Greetings’.
But I predict that after many things
With one bridge on the Taw
And another on the Tywi
There will be an end to war.
While this feels like a general plea for unity and peace of some sort, it is most likely, given Myrddin’s experience at Arthuret, to mean to encourage P-Celtic unity against the common enemies to the east and north. And the bridges suggest, in the original Old Welsh, bridges of human bodies, not of wood. The rivers are very hard to place but if Myrddin made these prophecies and he lived on the Tweed and he held to the Druidic belief that water-meetings were magically powerful, then he may have meant the junction of Tweed and Teviot at Kelso.
Back upstream there is an important historical nugget to be found in all of this prophecy, toponymy and hagiography. Given the presence of both men in Drumelzier and Stobo, and remembering the highly partial slant Jocelyn would have given the meeting of Kentigern and Myrddin, I think it likely that the saint would have had to suffer interruption to his sermons. A powerful Druid in exile, whose prophecies have come down to us, rode two miles to Stobo from Tinnis Castle and harangued Kentigern as he attempted to say mass to his new converts. Paganism would have died hard in the Border hills and a line from ‘Appletrees’ might remember the enmity between Merlin and Kentigern: ‘I am hated by Riderch’s strongest scion.’
What is certain is that Christian tradition, written down by Jocelyn, gave Merlin a uniquely savage death and that in itself may be a memory of great hatred.
My point is a simple one. In arguing that the P-Celtic kingdoms of southern Scotland saw the genesis of Arthur, it cannot be insignificant that the same place also gave birth to the legends of Merlin. Although they can never have met, it was no cultural accident that Geoffrey of Monmouth and later writers put them together. They were both Men of the North, two figures whose shadows are cast worldwide, who form a bipolar national myth of order and wildness, of reason and magic. They came from the same time and the same place, somewhere described happily by its natives as obscure: the Scottish Border country.
9
THE MEN OF THE GREAT WOOD
Shortest-lived, furthest east, the P-Celtic kingdom of Gododdin is the keystone to this story. Shortest-lived because it lay to the east, exposed to the Germanic invaders from continental Europe, the fourth Welsh kingdom of Scotland is named differently from the other three. Gododdin is the clear onomastic descendant of Votadini and this description of a people lived on in the style ‘Y Gododdin’ or ‘The Gododdin’.⁶⁰ A tribe rather than a place like Rheged, Strathclyde or Manau.
They held three strongholds, each on impregnable hilltops. Traprain Law in East Lothian is a solitary crag with a flat top, standing tall in the midst of rolling cornfields. Archaeologists have found quantities of Roman coins and a remarkable horde of silver from Gaul which was beaten, ready for smelting. Perhaps a tribute. Across the Tweed to the south sits Yeavering Bell, another hilltop fortress near the confluence of the Rivers Glen and Till. A strange name, P-Celtic, which comes from Ad Gefrin meaning ‘Goat Hill’.
The third Gododdin stronghold was Eildon Hill North, near Melrose and in the centre of the Scottish Border country. There are traces of more than 300 huts on Eildon, an easy name meaning ‘old fort’. At its foot, hard by the Tweed and Dere Street, was the busy Roman garrison of Trimontium. Counting its soldiers and auxiliaries and the local tradesmen who settle around it in a township and the traffic passing through, Trimontium (there are three Eildon Hills, side by side) was the nearest thing to a Roman city in Scotland with perhaps as many as 5,000 inhabitants.
The Gododdin were different from the other three kingdoms in another way. They wrote their own epitaph. Traditionally composed in Din Eidyn, or Edinburgh, by a man called Aneirin, there is a long poem ‘The Gododdin’ which describes the preparations for a battle thought to have been fought at Catterick in AD 600.⁶¹ The imagery is pungent: warriors feasting for a year in the hall of King Mynyddawg of Edinburgh, tales of impossible valour, the hyperbole of battle and the bloody carnage of failure. Weighed down as they are by the glut of gory deeds, the values of these men are easy to miss. Loyalty, constancy and unwavering bravery are what the Gododdin admire. Against the background of the Christian struggle of the Men of the North against the pagan forces of Anglo-Saxon darkness, the Gododdin are heroic figures. Golden torcs around their necks, jewelled brooches clasping their woollen cloaks as they sit in the circle of firelight reciting tales of glory, inciting themselves to greater fame. Comrades bonded in battle, dependent on each other, the Gododdin show an early version of chivalry, a word based on the French word cheval for a horse and giving an under-meaning of ‘the code of the horsemen’. And if Aneirin is to be taken literally, they practised what they extolled. At Catterick, all the Gododdin save one warrior were slaughtered by the Angles.
Because ‘The Gododdin’ is a transcribed and later version of an oral work, mistakes and anachronistic additions have certainly been made, but the sense of it and the drive of the thing come out all in a piece. It is authentic, give or take a bit of lexical quibbling.
‘The Gododdin’ survives in two compilations both included in the late thirteenth-century Book of Aneirin. The A version is longer and better organized but the B version uses older spelling forms and is probably the earlier and less corrupted rendition. Although each version contains verses that do not appear in the other, the content is basically the same, as is the style. Here is a flavour of the great poem.
Wearing a brooch, in the front rank, bearing weapons in battle, a mighty man in the fight before his death-day, a champion in the charge in the van of the armies; there fell five times fifty before his blades, of the men of Deira and Bernicia a hundred score fell and were destroyed in a single hour. He would sooner the wolves had his flesh than go to his own wedding, he would rather be prey for ravens than go to the altar; he would sooner his blood flowed to the ground than get due burial, making return for his mead and the hosts in the hall. Hyfeidd the Tall shall be honoured as long as there
is a minstrel …
The men went to Catraeth, swift was their army, the pale mead was their feast, and it was their poison; three hundred men battling according to plan, and after the glad war-cry there was silence. Though they went to the churches to do penance, the inescapable meeting with death overtook them …
The retinue of Gododdin on rough-maned horses like swans,
With their harness drawn tight,
And attacking the troop in the van of the host,
Defending the woods and the mead of Eidyn.
The men went to Catraeth with the dawn, their high courage shortened their lives. They drank the sweet yellow ensnaring mead, for a year many a bard made merry. Red were their swords (may the blades never be cleansed), and white shields and square-pointed spear-heads before the retinue of Mynyddawg the Luxurious …
A Gododdin warrior
The men went to Catraeth, they were renowned, wine and mead from gold cups was their drink for a year, in accordance with the honoured custom. Three men and three score and three hundred, wearing gold necklets, of all that hastened out after the choice drink none escaped but three, through feats of sword-play – the two war-dogs of Aeron, and stubborn Cynon; and I too, streaming with blood, by grace of my brilliant poetry …
The men hastened out, they galloped together; short-lived were they, drunk over the clarified mead, the retinue of Mynyddawg, famous in stress of battle; their lives were payment for their feast of mead. Caradawg and Madawg, Pyll and Ieuan, Gwgawn and Gwiawn, Gwynn and Cynfan, Peredur of the steel weapons, Gwawrddur and Aeddan, charging forward in battle among broken shields; and though they were slain they slew, none returned to his lands.
The men went to Catraeth in column, raising the war-cry, a force with steeds and blue armour and shields, javelins aloft and keen lances, and bright mail-coats and swords. He led, he burst through the armies, and there fell five times fifty before his blades – Rhufawn the Tall, who gave gold to the altar and gifts and fine presents to the minstrel …
It is grief to me that after the toil of battle they suffered the agony of death in torment, and a second heavy grief it is to me to have seen our men falling headlong; and continual moaning it is, and anguish, after the fiery men lying in the clodded earth – Rhufawn and Gwgawn, Gwiawn and Gwlyged, men of most manly station, strong in strife; after the battle, may their souls get welcome in the land of Heaven, the dwelling-place of plenty …
In the older B version there is a stanza that is pivotal for my own narrative. It is written in praise of one of Mynyddawg’s greatest cavalry warriors, Gwawrddur, who fell in the slaughter at Catterick. But despite his valour he suffers by comparison.
He struck before the three hundred bravest
He would slay both middle and flank
He was suited to the forefront of a most generous host
He would give gifts from a herd of horses in winter
He would feed black ravens on the wall of a fortress, though he were not Arthur
Among the strong ones in battle
In the van, an alder-palisade was Gwawrddur
This is the earliest, the first reference to Arthur. The poem was composed in Edinburgh around 600, and tells an epic story of the Gododdin in battle against the Angle invaders of north-east England. There is other, reliable evidence to show that Catterick was a historical event that certainly took place, and not something that lived only in the imagination of the bard Taliesin. The reference pins Arthur in time and in place. He lived before 600 since the reference and comparison to Gwawrddur is a memory – this man who fell at Catterick was a brave warrior, but he was not so brave as our kinsman, the hero Arthur. That is the sense of the stanza. And it is a crucial and convincing piece of evidence for Arthur as a battle leader of the Gododdin.
The mention of Arthur is not in a poetic sense dissonant. Nor is it illogical. If the interpolation was later and had a deliberate purpose behind it, then that can only have been to build the fame and importance of Arthur at some point after his legend had begun to develop. And yet there is no other reference to him in ‘The Gododdin’ and no attempt to elaborate or puff the mention of him and that is made. It is a natural and unfussy use of a name which by 600 had become a byword for valour among the Men of the North. Everyone knew who Arthur was and there was no need to explain or qualify.
In the Book of Taliesin there are other praise poems which paint general pictures of martial glory but which, unlike ‘The Gododdin’ do not relate to any historical event. In Kanu y Meirch or ‘The Poem of the Horses’, Gwawrddur’s mount is compared to ‘Arthur’s horse, boldly bestowing pain’ and in a later stanza Taliesin admires a grey mare ‘Llamrei, full valuable, wide nostrilled and powerful’.⁶² In medieval Arthurian romance Llamrei was Arthur’s charger. But these verses are only useful in understanding something of the tone of P-Celtic warrior culture; they do not offer much sense of how these people thought about the world, or, if Arthur ws one of them, much idea of the sort of man he was.
Better to come at this from another direction. Another poem attributed to Taliesin opens a different way of thinking. ‘Kat Goddeu’ was ‘The Battle of the Trees’, a shape-shifting poem concerning armies of trees, their hierarchy, their characteristics and their prowess. It is a mystical work, much of whose meaning is lost to us, but in its recital of tree lore and magic it opens a door to the ancient world of Glamoury, the forgotten Celtic Green World. The modern word ‘glamour’ meaning simply ‘charm, allure, attractiveness, beauty’ was originally much more interesting. It comes from an old Scots word which was certainly in use in the Borders as late as the 1960s when my grandmother used ‘glammer’ to mean a spell or the power to enchant. More, she used ‘glamoury’ (perhaps Scots orthographers would spell it ‘glamourie’ but I never saw the word written down) to mean magic in general, but neither in a good or bad sense. Perhaps that neutrality was what allowed ‘glamour’ to come to be attached in a positive way to beautiful women and their charms.
At all events the ancient meaning remembered in my grandmother’s usage was, more or less, natural magic or the magic of the natural world. More than the deeds of warriors and the clatter of battle, the Glamoury tells much about how the P-Celts dealt with the world they found around them every day.
But before I take a path into the Great Wood, it is important constantly to remember to walk on the right side of New Age daftness and quaint tradition and pin the picture of the Gododdin to facts, events and sensible comparison.
The poem’s title ‘Kat Goddeu’ is a clear link with the Gododdin themselves. Goddeu also occurs in the poem as a proper noun – ‘The Wood’ or more likely ‘The Great Wood’. Accepting at least that Taliesin was the bard of the King of Edinburgh, of the man who was chief of the northern Gododdin in 600, then it is reasonable to see ‘The Great Wood’ as co-terminus with ‘Coed Celyddon’ the vast forest of southern Scotland where Merlin took refuge after the disastrous battle at Arthuret in 573. Which in turn allows Goddeu to enter Gododdin and produce a more pulled-out meaning of ‘The Men of the Great Wood’.
As far as it goes that definition is interesting but not detailed enough to add colour. What was the Great Wood like? How did Arthur and his kinsmen and women think about their world?
Before describing such remnants of the world of the Glamoury that can still be seen, some simple bits of physical evidence. Pollen archaeologists and dendrochronologists reckon that 1,500 years ago mean seasonal temperatures may have been as much as four to six degrees warmer. Not necessarily sunnier, but warmer. This sort of weather allowed vegetation of all sorts, but particularly trees, to seed more successfully and to grow and thrive in places now too inhospitable. Hardwoods thrived at altitudes up to 2,000 feet and in a density virtually unknown to us now, after many centuries of felling, clearing and cultivation.⁶³ The point is a simple one. The Great Wood was a phenomenon of natural power. Although large areas had been cleared or were no more than scrubland, parts of it were dark and hard to penetrate. It could
reproduce itself without the intervention of people in any part of its life process. Tall trees were literally monumental to the Celts, the biggest living organisms in the world whose top canopies reached for their sky gods and whose roots penetrated deep into the earth and the Otherworld. It is not an overstatement to compare the Glamoury with the way in which nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europeans reacted to the jungles of Central Africa and South America. Fantastic beasts, lost cities and civilizations, apemen, the sense of the jungle’s power, the danger and mystery of it, the heart of darkness. There was something of all of that in the way that the Celts thought about the Great Wood, the Goddeu.
It was beneficent as well as dangerous. Bears, wolves and wild boar are all gone now but the Celts knew them, feared them and respected them. The Welsh translation of Arthur can be read as ‘Bear Man’. But the Celts used the woods widely as a source of hunted meat, of fruit and berries, of vegetables and, crucially, as their materia medica — something whose history is not lost and which will open a store of ancient knowledge when I come to deal with it presently.
As ever place-names remember the Great Wood and sometimes allow a sense of its edges. Dalkeith, just south of Edinburgh, is P-Celtic Dol Coedd or ‘Field by the Wood’. Nearby is Penicuik or Pen y Cog, the ‘Hill of the Cuckoo’. Then to the east Pencaitland or Pen Coed Lann, this time ‘At the top of the field enclosed by the wood’.⁶⁴ There are many more but these three give some sense of the northern limits of the wood.
Individual trees also conferred names to places and in particular it is cheering to see that the Glamoury of the oak tree was strong enough to ensure that the Celtic root planted in England survived. Darroch is the Q-Celtic word for oak and Derwen the P-Celtic. They share dar as a common root and it is in Dartford in Kent, Dartmoor and Dartmouth in Devon, Darwen in Lancashire and less surprisingly in Derwentwater in Celtic Cumbria.
Arthur and the Lost Kingdoms Page 13