Vanished Kingdoms

by Norman Davies

  In the tenth century, a resurgent Wessex came to the fore in southern Britain. Within twenty years of King Alfred’s death in 899 it was showing signs not only of reducing the Danes and Vikings to submission but also of creating a united ‘Kingdom of all-Britain’. Athelstan (r. 924–39), Alfred’s grandson, succeeded to the Kingdom of Mercia as well as to Wessex, and in 927 he launched a lightning northern campaign, destroying the Viking Kingdom of York, overrunning Northumbria as far as the Forth, and obliging Constantine II, king of Scots, to sue for peace. A meeting of five kings at Eamont Bridge in Cumbria acknowledged Athelstan’s overlordship. Apart from Athelstan and Constantine, the participants included the king of ‘West Wales’, the ‘king of Bamburgh’ and Ywain map Dynfwal of Strathclyde, otherwise ‘Owen of Cumbria’. The act of homage to Athelstan signalled more than the advance of Anglo-Saxon power from the Tyne to the Forth; it marked the first step in a long campaign by the English kings to claim hegemony over their northern neighbours.

  Nonetheless, the humbling of Viking York and Northumbria allowed the Strathclyders to move into part of the resultant vacuum, and to recover many of the historic territories of the ‘Old North’. In subsequent decades, they reached southwards into the former lands of Rheged and deep into the Pennines. Acting as a sub-state of ‘Alba’, they pushed the frontier with England back beyond the zone where the Borders would eventually settle. A boundary stone on the summit of Stainmore, variously known as Rere Cross, Rear Cross or Rey Cross – halfway between Penrith and Barnard Castle – probably marks the limit of Alban and Strathclyde rule. A cluster of Cumbrian parish churches dedicated to St Mungo/Kentigern, notably at Dearham near Cockermouth, attests to persistent Clydeside influences. In this era, the customs and language of the Brythonic elements of the population, not least the Cumbric sheep-counters, would have been strengthened, though the established dominance of the Anglian and Norse elements was not displaced. The great majority of Lake District place names, for example, like Bassenthwaite, Langdale or Scafell, are self-evidently Norse in origin, while only a minority, like Derwent, ‘Oak Valley’, or Helvellyn, ‘Yellow Moor’, are Brythonic. Dunmail Raise on the road between Keswick and Grasmere, where in future times a cairn would mark the boundary between Cumberland and Westmorland, was named after one of the three sub-kings of Strathclyde of that name. In the early tenth century, the Dunmail cairn could have been a southern counterpart to Rere Cross on Stainmore.

  Respite, however, was short. In 937, one of the most crucial, but frequently neglected battles in the history of the Isles was fought at Brunanburh, an unspecified location somewhere on Merseyside.65 The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle breaks into verse for this entry. The poem, known as The Battle of Brunanburh, was translated by Alfred, Lord Tennyson:

  Athelstan King,

  Lord among Earls,

  Bracelet-bestower and

  Baron of Barons,

  He with his brother

  Edmund Atheling,

  Gaining a lifelong

  Glory in battle,

  Slew with the sword-edge

  There by Brunanburh,

  Brake the shield-wall,

  Hew’d the lindenwood,

  Hack’d the battleshield…

  At Brunanburh, Athelstan of Wessex, titular ‘King of All-Britain’ faced a coalition of Welsh, Scots and Norse kings who were evidently alarmed by the surge of southern English power and who had brought their troops into Athelstan’s territory. The king of Strathclyde, probably Ywain map Dynfwal, was among them. This was the point at which, if the fortunes of battle had favoured them, the non-English forces could have clipped the wings of Wessex. England was no more inevitable than Scotland was, and different turns could have been taken at every step of the way. As it was, Athelstan triumphed, and the anti-English coalition was broken. The Anglo-Saxon chronicler (again translated by Tennyson) proclaimed an ultimate victory over the ‘Welsh’:

  Never had huger

  Slaughter of heroes

  Slain by the sword-edge –

  Such as old writers

  Have writ of in histories –

  Hapt in this isle, since

  Up from the East hither

  Saxon and Angle from

  Over the broad billow

  Broke into Britain with

  Haughty war-workers who

  Harried the Welshman, when

  Earls that were lured by the

  Hunger of glory gat

  Hold of the land.

  The consequences of Brunanburh – what the English were to call the ‘Great Battle’ – were not immediately apparent. Indeed, Athelstan’s early death inspired a temporary recovery of his enemies, and his heirs were required to fight hard to confirm his conquests. In 944–5, for example, Athelstan’s half-brother and successor, Edmund the Elder, invaded the extended Kingdom of Strathclyde, defeated its sub-king, Dynfwal III – whom the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle calls ‘Dunmail’ – and, as part of a general settlement, insisted that Strathclyde be formally subordinated to Alba. The Alban Scots were being told to keep a tighter rein on their dependants. The sovereign life of the former ‘Kingdom of the Rock’ was reaching its term.

  A solitary sentence in the Welsh Brut y Tywysogion is worthy of note. After listing the death of Bishop Emerys of St Davids in 944, it records, entirely without comment: ‘Ystrat Clut adiffeithóyt y gan y Saeson’ (‘Ystrat Clut was devastated by the Saxons’). This must have been at least the fourth time that ‘The Rock’ had been devastated, and the perpetrators can only have been the troops or allies of Edmund the Elder. But it was the first occasion that the Welsh dropped the traditional Brythonic name of Alt Clud, replacing it by Ystrad Clut, or ‘Vale of Clyde’ – a simple calque of the Gaelic name. The Brythonic/Cumbric character of the kingdom was slipping; Gaelicized Alban ‘Strathclyde’ was emerging, and the Welsh were aware of it.66 The Britons of the Old North were not even mentioned.

  In the next generation, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports, six reguli or ‘subject kings’ were required to row the barge of Edmund’s successor, Edgar, along the River Dee in a ritual, Viking-style act of subordination, elsewhere called the ‘Submission of Chester’. One of the later Dynfwals participated as a rower, thereby giving him a certain standing. The symbolism would not have been lost on contemporaries. Strathclyde had benefited from a temporary geographical expansion, and its political status, though diminished, was not inconsiderable. The age of independence was past. But the former Alt Clud was not yet an integral province of Alba. The descendants of Ceredig kept their separate identity, and by using old British names they clearly remained conscious of their ancestry, but their separate activities were limited. When they went to war, they and their men invariably fought alongside their Alban superiors.67

  In the eleventh century the Britishness of Strathclyde continued to fade, even though it benefited to some extent from the new preoccupations that took centre stage both in England and in Alba. All parts of the Isles were shaken by the terminal convulsions of the Viking Age. In England, the Anglo-Saxon monarchy was overthrown by Cnut Sweynsson the Great (r. 1018–35), who briefly raised the prospect of an Anglo-Scandinavian empire. In 1066 two separate hostile expeditions landed in England. The first, led by Harald Sigurdsson ‘Hardrada’, sailed from Norway to the mouth of the Tyne in September and was destroyed at the Battle of Stamford Bridge. The second, led by Duke William of Normandy, the grandson of Frenchified Vikings, crossed the Channel in October and after the Battle of Hastings seized the English throne. In the years after 1066, when England was turned into a Norman colony, much of the Conqueror’s time was spent in the ‘Harrying of the North’, in subduing Northumbria and invading Scotland. The Anglo-Scottish settlement in the Treaty of Abernethy (1072) included an act of homage which further strengthened the English argument that Scotland was by now a legal fief of England.

  Northern Britain in this era was assuming the shape and character which would be recognizable throughout the Middle Ages. Though Orkney and Shetland, Su
therland and the Western Isles remained in Norse hands, the great bulk of territory was united under one ruler. Furthermore, the kings of Alba progressively adopted the title of rex Scottorum or ‘king of the Scots’, thereby cementing the concept of ‘Scotland’; their conquest of northern Northumbria, which followed the capture of Edinburgh in 1020, engendered a further shift in self-identity. The absorption of the Lallans-speaking Lowlands, whose aristocracy now possessed strong English and Norman connections, challenged the previous dominance of the Gaeltacht.

  Nonetheless, the House of macAlpin continued to control the monarchy of Alba/Scotland for most of the century. In 1031 Malcolm I and his associates submitted to Cnut when he came north for the purpose, and no conflict ensued. The one interval in the macAlpins’ hold on the throne began in 1040, when Donnchad I (Duncan) was killed by MacBethad mac Findlaich (r. 1040–57), lord of Moray, known to contemporaries as the Ri Deircc or ‘Red King’ and to readers of Shakespeare as Macbeth. Almost all historians of the period insist that Shakespeare’s play makes for great drama but for poor history.68 No contemporary account describes him as a tyrant. He ruled right up to the eve of the Norman Conquest, and gave shelter to exiles from England. He was the last king of Alba to preside over a Gaelic-speaking court. He was killed by the forces of Malcolm III Canmore (r. 1058–93), son of the murdered Donnchad.

  Such was the setting for the final span of Strathclyde’s political history. The kingdom stretched deep into the zone contested between Scotland and England, and its affairs inevitably became entangled with Anglo-Scottish rivalry. At one time, it was assumed that Eogan II, otherwise known as Owain the Blind (d. 1018), was the last of his line. His presence at the Battle of Carham in 1016 or 1018 near Durham between the Scots and English is well attested. But his death there is not. In fact, the sub-monarchs of Strathclyde and their state still had decades in front of them. There are strong indications that Donnchad had ruled over Strathclyde as a royal appanage before acceding to the Alban throne; and there is little doubt that the English targeted Strathclyde during the last years of Macbeth’s reign. In 1054 Siward, the mighty earl of Northumbria, who had come to Britain in Cnut’s time, led a large fleet and a huge army northwards, provoking a bloody field of slaughter at the unlocated Battle of the Seven Sleepers. Macbeth was put to flight, and Siward’s son killed. More to the point, according to an English chronicler, Siward ‘made Mael Coluim, prince of the Cumbrians, a king’.69 In the Scottish tradition, this prince has usually been identified as Macbeth’s enemy, Malcolm Canmore; but it seems more likely that he was a Cumbrian/Strathclyder of the same name who was reinstated by Siward in the land of his forebears.70 If this was the case, eleventh-century Strathclyde was oscillating between alternating phases of Scottish and English suzerainty.

  One thing is certain: the Gaelic pressures on the Britishness of Strathclyde and on the Cumbrian language were augmented by parallel pressures from England. The steady Gaelicization which had been proceeding since the Viking destruction of ‘The Rock’ in 870/871, was now competing with Anglicization. The linguistic shifts have not been well documented, but would have proceeded at different speeds in different districts and in different milieux. From Rhun map Arthgal (who had a Gaelic wife) onwards, the sub-kings of Strathclyde would probably have been bilingual, with the Gaelic steadily pushing the Brythonic into the background. Thanks to the English invasion of 1054, they would have been turning increasingly to Lallans after the mid-century, just as Macbeth’s court was. The sub-kings’ Brythonic subjects would have accepted linguistic change less rapidly. The first of them to succumb would probably have lived in the northerly districts adjacent to Argyll, where the influx of Gaelic would have been strongest, or in the few tiny urban and ecclesiastical centres, like Glasgow. Since Church appointments were influenced by ruling circles, and education was controlled by the Church, the small educated class would have followed the fashions of the court. The farmers and pastoralists of the countryside would have been much more resistant. Centuries could have passed before the old idioms finally gave way.

  In the twelfth century the passing of the dominance of the Brythonic tongue did not bring about any instant demise of the Strathclyders’ sense of identity. Strathclyde would long remember its origins, and its people would long be marked by distinctive customs, by distinctive laws and no doubt by a distinctive accent. There can be little doubt, for example, that Brythonic identity endured into the era when Scotland’s Highland clans were forming. Several clan names are manifestly Brythonic in origin, and a number of clan genealogies boast Brythonic ancestry. The clearest example is that of Clan Galbraith, whose Gaelic name means ‘Foreign Briton’ and whose ancestral fortress was built on the island of Inchgalbraith in Loch Lomond. The Galbraiths trace their origins to Gilchrist Breatnach, ‘Gilchrist the Briton’, who married a daughter of the earl of Lennox in the late twelfth century. Their emblem, a boar’s head, is the same as that of the late kings of Strathclyde. The Colquhouns of Luss, the Kincaids, the MacArthurs and the Clan Lennox all have similar connections with the territory where Gaels and Britons once overlapped.71

  In 1113 David, the son of Malcolm Canmore and St Margaret (1045–93), who had strong English connections, was given the title of ‘prince of the Cumbrians’. The honour may have signified little more than a royal courtesy (like that of princes of Wales at the medieval English court) but it can also be taken as an indication that Strathclyde was still a discrete administrative unit, and that the kings of Scotland recognized its particularity. It was during David’s years as Cumbrian prince that he built his hunting castle at Cadzow (now Hamilton), and when the first of Glasgow’s permanent line of bishops was appointed the medieval bishops of Glasgow would habitually refer to their diocese as ‘Cumbria’.72 Twenty years later, after ascending the Scottish throne, King David brought Norman barons into Strathclyde, as part of the ‘Davidian Revolution’ and, as his late mother would have approved, adding one more layer of political and linguistic culture. Ever since the fall of ‘The Rock’ in 870/871, Govan and its stone-built old church had served as Strathclyde’s cultural and government centre. It had been the seat of the royal residence, and it was the site of large-scale production of Celtic crosses. But it now ceded prominence to Glasgow, where David I patronized the cult of St Mungo.

  Not far from Glasgow, the islands in the Firth of Clyde might plausibly be thought the most resistant strongholds of Brythonic culture. It would appear, however, that Gaelic had taken over and that Irish poets of the period were already talking of the Firth as part of their own world. In the famous Acallam na Senórach or ‘Old Men’s Colloquy’, a twelfth-century Gaelic poet imagined a meeting between St Patrick, the Briton who had converted Ireland, and Caílte, a disciple of ‘Fingal’, the most illustrious of Ireland’s legendary heroes. The meeting is entirely unhistorical; St Patrick belongs to post-Roman Britain, while Fingal is placed at a variety of points right up to the Viking Age. The latest of the Fingal legends finds him defending Glencoe against a Norse host that had sailed into Loch Leven, which would make him a contemporary to the Viking attack on Alt Clud. At all events, the two men are imagined to have exchanged views on a wide range of topics. In one sequence, St Patrick asks Caílte whether the hunting grounds are better on the Irish or the Scottish shore. The answer names an island within view of White Tower Crag:

  Arran blessed with stags, encircled by the sea,

  Island that fed hosts, where black spears turn crimson.

  Carefree deer on its peaks, branches of tender berries,

  Streams of icy water, dark oaks decked with mast,

  Greyhounds here and beagles, blackberries, fruit of sloe,

  Trees thick with blackthorns, deer spread about the oaks,

  Rocks with purple lichen, meadows rich with grass,

  A fine fortress of crags, the leaping of fawns and trout,

  Gentle meadows and plump swine, gardens pleasant beyond belief,

  Nuts on the bough of hazel, and longships sailing
by.

  Lovely in fair weather, trout beneath its banks,

  Gulls scream from the cliffs, Arran ever lovely.73

  When these enchanting evocations were composed, Alauna, Aloo, Alt Clud and the Cumbrian ‘Kingdom of Strathclyde’ were all dissolving into history.

  ‘The Rock’ itself drops out of sight. Dun Breteann, the ‘Fort of the Britons’, completely disappears from the historical record between 944 and the late Middle Ages. Archaeological evidence suggests that it was never totally abandoned, but it became, at best, a backwater. The active life of Strathclyde had moved elsewhere. Other ports serviced the river traffic. Ships sailed past without mooring. The city of Glasgow burgeoned further upstream; and across the river the Barony of Renfrew served as the base of a great Norman family, the fitzAlan-Stewarts, for whom a royal future beckoned.74

  Some estimates extend the terminal phase of the Cumbric language into the thirteenth century, that is, into the age of William Wallace, Robert the Bruce and Scotland’s struggle for independence. Thanks to his exploits in the wars against England, Wallace rose to be Scotland’s national hero. Yet his origins are extremely obscure, and historians have long contested the details of his birth and parentage. It is readily acknowledged that Wallace’s reputation is ‘legend-encrusted’75 and that ‘his early life is a mystery’.76 Nonetheless, one faction clings to his birthdate in 1272 and to his birth in the village of Elderslie near Paisley, where an imposing monument now stands.77 Another faction favours Kilmarnock’s Riccarton Castle in Ayrshire.78