The great slaughter at Badon signalled the successful end of Arthur’s long campaign all over Britain. For fifty years afterwards neither Angles, Saxons, nor Picts moved against the P-Celts. There was peace, but also consolidation. Half of what became England had been lost, from a diagonal between Hull in the north and Southampton on the south coast. But Arthur had achieved something unique in western Europe. Only in Britannia had the barbarians been stopped. Over the rest of the Western Roman Empire the Goths, Visigoths, Franks, Vandals, Alemanni and the others had poured their hordes of warriors without check or hindrance. In 500 southern Scotland, Wales and west and north of England were all that remained of the empire.
Arthur failed, but he also defined the nations of Britain and in doing so set the dynamic of our polity, the tensions and character of who we are, formed by where we are. To the north, Arthur’s victories allowed Scotland to remain a nation for another thousand years, long enough for its memory to be strong and to allow its rise again in the next millennium. To the west, Wales formed itself behind Offa of Mercia’s Dyke and resisted the English for 700 years, long enough to remember its beautiful language to help us understand Britain as it was before the Romans came. The Irish fared worst, furthest from English power but most cruelly subjugated, starved, cleared off the land and still bleeding through ancient wounds.
After Arthur’s death in AD 517, his immediate achievements were quickly forgotten as history was busily written by the winners. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reaches far enough back to note Arthur or his battles but, concerned overwhelmingly with events south of the Humber, it is silent and in any case not anxious to note defeats. Until Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote his Historia in 1138 Arthur was remembered only in Welsh and much of that the sort of florid stuff that yields little but the music of the words.
Only his name lived. Only the landscape remembered him. For he was a hero to the little people who walked their unnoticed lives in the valleys and over the hills of all of Britain. Despite their military mastery and inexorable success, the Anglo-Saxons did not supplant the P-Celtic-speaking peoples of England, Scotland or Wales. They could not. And these ordinary farmers and labourers remembered their last hero, liked to imagine that he had ridden his cavalry nearby. Hills, rock formations, lochs, cliffs, mounds even buildings got the name of Arthur. There are more than two thousand places all over Britain that have some, mostly imaginary, association with him. It is an extraordinary survival for a figure whose existence is only whispered at in historical record.
And yet that record is very telling; it holds a secret inside it which will be patent presently. First the evidence should be drawn quickly together. Nennius listed twelve battles. Eight of them were fought in or on the borders of present-day Scotland; four in Manau against the Picts, two in the greater Tweed basin and a further two in the hills around it. The mysterious Tribruit may be on the way to York, the city of the Legion, while Bassus may have similarly preceded the victory at Badon.
What this shows is an overwhelming bias to actions in the north, and when that is added to all the other evidence, there is little question that it locates Arthur’s base in the south of Scotland, probably in the Tweed basin.
But where?
12
THE HORSE FORT
In the wintertime when the leaves are off the trees and the sun slants low, there is a view of ancient landscape that ties together all the strands of this story. It is a beautiful view and when the weather is warm enough to linger, old men sit on the benches provided by a thoughtful town council, puff their pipes and look out over the past. They sit on Calchvyndd, the chalky height of Catrawt and the Gododdin, translated into Scots as Chalkheugh Terrace in the little town of Kelso, also rendered from the original Old Welsh name. The greyish white of the chalk bank is gone now, planted with rhododendrons and buttressed by high retaining walls. The old men look across the broad River Tweed to a place they call the Fairgreen, and sometimes Friar’s Haugh. Dotted here and there with hardwood trees, it is a wide sweeping meadow where cows and sheep pasture without the need for fences. This is because the Fairgreen is bounded by two rivers: the Tweed arcs south from the west until it meets the Teviot which itself turns south and then west to the Junction Pool. Perhaps 400 acres, the ground is never ploughed and hay very rarely taken. It is what horsemen call old turf, best for racing and when twice a year the point-to-point meetings are held, it is a rare day when the going is heavy.
The ground rises to a height in the centre of the haughland, a good place for the racegoers to watch the horses complete the circuit of jumps. The only place where the crowd is unsighted is to the west, where the ground dips down near the Selkirk to Kelso road. It is the narrow neck of the haugh where the two rivers almost meet and are separated by only 200 yards. And also by a long oblong mound rising to more than a hundred feet. The old men sitting on Chalkheugh Terrace can make out some massive remnants of masonry on its summit, particularly on the Teviot side where a wall runs almost continuous. Covered in trees now it can be difficult to visualize what stood there many centuries ago. Local people call it simply the Old Castle and because the road cuts between it and the haughland, few realize that these two places were one. And more, that they were important places central to Scotland’s early history.
The Old Castle was Roxburgh Castle, built and expanded by the MacMalcolm kings of the twelfth century and on the mound where the racegoers stand there was a medieval city with four churches, a school, five mintmasters and the busiest export market in Scotland.¹⁴⁷ This was Roxburgh, and now no trace whatever remains, nor any ability to find some because no archaeology is permitted by the landowner, no aerial surveys have been taken. It exists only in the ancient documents collected and copied by the monks of Kelso Abbey whose whose ruins stand across the river.¹⁴⁸ It has been forgotten or ignored by generations of historians, perhaps because there is nothing to see and no opportunity to dig. Roxburgh lives on in an old county name, an aristocratic tide and several traditions. St James’ Fair was held there at least since 1113 and probably long before, but when the city disappeared, local people still held the fair until it was discontinued before the Second World War. This is why the old men with longer memories still call it the Fairgreen.
Even though the place lives on in names and words, the substance of Roxburgh has been entirely forgotten. It is truly a lost city. All its voices are silent now, its stories lost in the grass where sheep graze and where twice a year horses thunder between the hurdles.
Kelso, the Abbey and Roxburgh Castle
And yet it was a place of determinant importance to the whole history of Britain. It was the place where Arthur came back to, where he held his own power, where he kept safe his precious cavalry horses, where he drew the lines of communication together, where he sat in his castle hall feasting with his loyal warriors. It was, to use a mythic term, his Camelot.
Now this is a claim of some scale and a tale that will need to be told carefully. This is best done backwards. Beginning at the end I want to look briefly at traditions that are still, if barely, remembered now and then piece together the past from the decay of the old city, back to its medieval zenith and then using toponymy, Gododdin sources, military logic and the dictates of animal husbandry, I will show that in the 490s Arthur was Lord of Calchvyndd, the great Guledig of the P-Celtic kingdoms of the south of Scotland, the scourge of the Picts and the man who stopped the Angles and Saxons at Glein, Bremenium and Badon. From Roxburgh he and his Gosgordd rode out to fight to keep Scotland Scottish, Wales Welsh and parts of England Celtic.
Like ripples that persist long after the splash, the name and fame of Roxburgh has endured far beyond the substance. King David I MacMalcolm created the office of Sheriff of Roxburgh early in the twelfth century. It may have existed before but the first documents bearing the witness of Gospatrick, Sheriff, date from 1113, 1128 and 1147 and had the royal seal attached in the castle ‘apud Rokesburgum’.¹⁴⁹ The same office persists today. The name also sur
vived the local authority reorganization of 1974 and within Borders Region there is still Roxburgh District following the same boundaries set in the early modern period after medieval custom and practice. Even though the city has entirely disappeared the name of Roxburgh remains in frequent currency.
There is another general observation possible here. In 1113 when David MacMalcolm was not yet king, he chose to found a community of French monks from Tiron in his Forest of Selkirk. In the first charter it is clear that he saw Roxburgh as his capital place; he held what later observers called the most powerful stronghold between Forth and Tyne; the town was sufficiently wealthy and busy to give forty shillings a year, a seventh part of the fishings, a seventh part of the produce of its mills, all the churches, all the schools and a substantial holding of town lands to the new abbey.¹⁵⁰
David’s titles included the English earldoms of Huntingdon and Northampton, but much more significantly he was also Earl of Annandale and Galloway, Prince of Cumbria and Earl of Teviotdale and Upper Tweeddale. Using the political geography of an earlier age he ruled the lands of Rheged, Selgovae and southern Gododdin.
David was raised at the court of the Norman King of England Henry I and thoroughly schooled in that culture. When he came to southern Scotland to rule over the vast sweep of territory, he immediately sought out its military and economic hub, the place he would make his power base. Roxburgh was already pre-eminent when the young earl decided to make it more so by extending the castle and striking Scotland’s first coinage there.
The point is a simple one. Roxburgh was the most important place between the Lammermuirs and the Tyne, between western Galloway and the Berwickshire coast. Over the rest of Britain the old Roman centres tended to retain their pre-eminence: London, York, Chester and so on. But in southern Scotland and northern England, Trimontium decayed and Carlisle stagnated, while Roxburgh began to develop towards its early medieval zenith.
More detailed are local memories of the place. St James’ Fair was the Christianized version of Lughnasa, held at the beginning of August. It was the culmination of the stock-rearing year with sheep and cattle sales and much else. And even though the city and the church of St James had both perished by the seventeenth century the ewes still lambed and farmers met in August on the Fairgreen to do business, just as they had done in the ditched enclosures at Eildon Hill North a millennium before.¹⁵¹ When Trimontium fell into disrepair and became too difficult to maintain, the economic activity that surrounded it migrated downriver to Roxburgh, and when the sky gods of the P-Celts were replaced by the gospels, the great cattle fairs came to the haughland between Teviot and Tweed.
Medieval Roxburgh and its castle
There are still people alive today who remember St James’ Fair in the 1930s. By then it had become little more than an excuse for a picnic by the river with puppet shows, hoopla and other entertainments, although ancient memories were stirred when the provost of the royal burgh of Jedburgh came to cry the fair by ringing a handbell. He had to do it in the absence of an official from the old city and because nearby Kelso is not a royal burgh, and the handbell stood for the now silent church bells of Roxburgh. The only living remnant of the old fair was a continuing trade in horses and ponies carried on by the Muggers, or the Gypsies. The serious agricultural business had moved across the Teviot to the new Border Union Showground where purpose-built stands, pens, and ladies and gentlemen’s toilets had been provided. Many hands are shaken, deals done, machinery bought and prizes won at the Border Union Show. It may seem a world away from the time when herdsmen drove their cattle through the fire at Eildon Hill, but it is still held at Lughnasa.
And the horse tradition seems indelible. Not only are they bought, sold and competed at the show but on the old Fairgreen, around the site of Roxburgh, they race twice a year. This is not a coincidence confined to this place. At Glein and Bremenium where Arthur chose killing grounds that were good for horses, there are still equestrian events held. Horse trials twice a year at Yeavering and annually between Rochester and Otterburn near an old ford over the River Rede. Doubtless these things have more to do with geography than history, or indeed folk memory, but to see horses gallop in places where Arthur charged his Gosgordd is an evocative sight.
More personal and therefore more pointed for me is a ceremony in which I took part when I was a young man. Each of the Border towns holds a Common Riding or a festival each year. Some are very ancient while others were created or revived only fifty or so years ago. Kelso holds its prosaically named Civic Week in mid July, elects a principal called the Kelso Laddie and then celebrates itself in a clutch of largely invented events over the space of a week. No one cares that the traditions are young, the purpose of the thing is to have fun and to understand something of the identity of the place, something of its history.
Hidden inside the calendar of mass rideouts, fancy-dress parades and torchlight processions is something very ancient, an unconscious link with Kelso’s Celtic past. In 1986 I was asked if I would take part as one of the principals in the annual Whipmen’s Ride. It was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the revival of the event and I was to be the Orator, the maker of a witty speech to the assembled company. I was honoured to be asked to do this; it was one of the most emotional days of my life. I had right- and left-hand men each with ten-foot horsewhips. As I paused for breath in my witty speech, both would crack their whips in the air and roar ‘God Speed the Plough!’ My audience paid attention. But that is to get somewhat ahead of things. In order to show how the Whipmen’s Ride works in this story I shall recite brief details of the simple ceremonial and show its links to the lives of people who walked the same ground 1,500 years before.
In the early evening of the Friday of Civic Week the old curfew bell is rung to remind householders that they should put out their fires. Then horsemen and their followers on foot gather in Kelso Square where they elect ‘My Lord Whipman’ and give the Whipman’s Flag into the keeping of the Kelso Laddie. Then a poem is recited. It has a title that no one understands, ‘The Taddie Aus’. Here is the first verse.
Alack! Ah alack for the auld Taddie Aus.
We think o’ them oft’ as the May blossoms blaws.
But they come nae again wi’ the spring o’ the year.
To busk up oor toon in a gala day steer.¹⁵²
This ritual and the poem tell an interesting story. At the Celtic festival of Beltane on 1 May domestic fires were put out before herdsmen drove their beasts up to the high pasture and to the summer shielings. But before they left they celebrated. Beltane was a sun and fire festival signifying the return of summer. And just as at Tarbolton (Tor-Beltane) where the young herds built an altar, the Kelso Whipmen elected a master of ceremonies who would officiate at the ceremony and adjudicate at the games and amusements that were to follow.
The poem’s meaning is clear in one aspect. The Whipmen’s Ride took place not in July but at the beginning of May. The town’s records remember the Whipmen’s Society in existence as early as 1650 but since most burgh records began about that time and traditions were things not much recorded, it is very likely that its history stretched much further back.
The ‘auld Taddie Aus’ is clearly a reference to the Whipmen, but what does it mean? Part of the ancient ritual of Beltane involved extinguishing the old fires of winter and lighting a new one, a ‘need-fire’.¹⁵³ This was used also as a purification and on Eildon Hill North the P-Celtic herdsmen drove their frightened beasts between two fires. At the end of the night the herds scooped up embers from the ashes or lit torches to take with them to light the new summer fires in the shielings. That is what ‘Taddie Aus’ means. Literally it is ‘the Ash Daddies’ or the men with the ashes from the Beltane fires.¹⁵⁴ Sometimes they would streak their faces, using the grey and black like warpaint.
After the ceremony in Kelso Square the cavalcade rides across to the site of the city of Roxburgh where they gather at the foot of an ancient wych elm. Nothing to do with witches (
wych means ‘pliant’) it was a tree that the Celts incorporated into Word Ogham, an offshoot of Tree Ogham, and which had a powerful by-meaning associated with the strength and health of cattle and sheep. Over time these complex links decayed and the tree simply came to symbolize good luck for cows, sheep and horses. The original wych elm at Roxburgh was reputedly massive, measuring thirty feet in girth, and furniture and tools were made from its wood while it lived. In the era of the Gododdin, the Men of the Trees, such an elm would have been famous. At its site the Kelso Laddie cuts a sod from the old turf. This is another remnant of Beltane. The young men at Tarbolton did exactly the same thing when they built their altar to Bel, the Celtic sun god.
After the Orator has made his witty speech, horse races follow: ponies, trotting horses and great snorting thoroughbreds all compete in a series of classes. In the time of the old Whipmen’s Society, there were also displays of horsemanship, much betting and, interestingly, both then and now, no so-called aids were allowed in the races, no whips, crops or spurs. And the prizes were worth having: riding and cart saddles.
All of the latter part of the ceremony is very reminiscent of the early horsemen’s societies, their all-male membership, the secrecy and the lore of it all. The Whipmen existed as a sort of proto-trade union attempting to better their working conditions as the drivers of plough horses, carters and general farm servants, and that must have entailed confidentiality and exclusion.
But that was later. What is remarkable is the power of unconscious folk memory; the rituals of Celtic Beltane combined with powerful traditions of horse-knowledge and horsemanship. All of them taking place exactly where Arthur based his cavalry and four times a year remembered with his warriors the quarter days at Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasa and Samhuinn. When we ride to the Fairgreen on the Friday evening led by My Lord Whipman, we ride with ghosts beside us.
Arthur and the Lost Kingdoms Page 23