In order that the glorious progress of reconquest was properly recorded for a grateful posterity and the needs of present politics, Justinian’s ministers had sent the historian, Procopius, with the expeditionary forces. In 536 the dashing general, Belisarius, sailed west to North Africa and defeated the Vandal kingdom but, as Carthage and other cities were retaken, the skies began to darken and the sun was dimmed. All eyes were raised to the Heavens and men were terrified, wondering if the end of days was at hand. Procopius wrote, ‘During this year a most dread portent took place. For the sun gave forth its light without brightness . . . and it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear.’
A catastrophic event on the other side of the world was the cause. What happened in 536 was recently confirmed by an expedition led by the geologist, Harald Sigurdsson and recorded by Ken Wohletz of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the USA. On the seabed between the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra, Sigurdsson’s bathyspheres discovered a huge caldera with deposits which could be reliably radiocarbon-dated to the sixth century. This volcanic depression was vast, measuring an astonishing 40–60 kilometres across, and it lay near the point where the island of Krakatoa famously blew itself apart in 1883. What happened in 536 was of a different order of magnitude – so devastating that it might have severed Java from Sumatra and created the Sunda Straits.
Computer modelling has postulated worldwide effects on every continent which lasted for at least two years. When the eruption broke through and boiling magma was met by inrushing seawater, a huge volume of vapour rocketed into the sky. The plume may have been 50 kilometres high. Mixed with vaporised seawater were huge volumes of superfine volcanic dust and as it rose through the stratosphere, great ice clouds were formed. As much as 100 cubic kilometres of ash and ice crystals then began to dissipate as the stratospheric winds created by the eruption began to blow and a significant cloud layer quickly darkened over the northern and southern hemispheres. This reflected much of the sun’s light and warmth back into space, allowing very little to penetrate.
Chroniclers in every part of the world had seen nothing like it and, where records survive, they speak of cataclysm, of incomprehension and of what the scientists at Los Alamos have reckoned to have been the most sudden and severe cooling of the climate in the last two millennia. Snow fell in August in China, there was a ‘dense, dry fog’ over the desert countries of the Middle East and a severe drought in Peru. As the vast volcanic clouds cast over the skies above Britain and Ireland, the Annals of Ulster recorded ‘a failure of bread’ in 536 and the monks at Innisfallen, near Killarney, wrote that the famine lasted from 536 to 539. The Dark Ages were beginning. And there was worse to come.
Imperial Constantinople was a vast city – the largest in the western world by far and home to more than half a million people. Like Old Rome, New Rome was also in a state of political ferment. Emperors could be made and unmade by the mob or, more correctly in Constantinople, by two rival mobs. Politics had polarised around the Hippodrome, the huge stadium which stood in the centre of the city, adjacent to the Imperial Palace. Opposing factions, known simply as the Blues and the Greens, gathered there to support their chariot-racing teams and also to give vent to their opinions. Wise emperors courted the Hippodrome crowds and hoped to bask in a form of politics by public acclamation. It was with this in mind that Justinian married the amazing Theodora, a dancer and daughter of one of the managers of the Green faction. She was streetwise and shameless and she understood the collective mind of the mob. According to Procopius, who clearly sniffed at such a scandalous marriage, Theodora once performed what amounted to an open-air striptease in front of the vast and delighted crowds at the Hippodrome. He also insisted that she once complained that ‘God had not endowed her with more orifices to give more pleasure to more people at the same time’. Apparently Theodora was able and intelligent and one of the most successful empresses in history.
Apart from striptease and a supply of salacious gossip, what sustained the politics of the mob in Constantinople was Egyptian grain. The city imported many shiploads each year to dole out to the mob and to feed its more respectable citizens. But the corn loaded into the holds on the quays of Alexandria was often infested with rats and, in 541, the rats themselves were infested with deadly fleas.
That autumn bubonic plague sailed into the harbours of the Golden Horn and, in such a densely packed mass of people, it spread like wildfire. At its terrible peak, the pandemic killed around 5,000 people a day. The city authorities could not cope and corpses were piled high in the forums and the streets. Scholars conservatively estimate a population loss in Europe of between 50–60 per cent. After the bewildering drama of volcanic winter in 536 and 537, it was a second devastation and the ambitions of Justinian to reclaim the western empire were stopped dead in their tracks as his soldiers died and the tax revenues needed to pay them dried up all across the stricken empire.
Western Britain and Ireland were the northernmost tangent of the Mediterranean trading system but the plague took some time to reach their shores. In 549, the Ulster annalists wrote of a ‘mortalitas magna’, literally a ‘great death’, that was stalking the land. Seven aristocrats, probably sub-kings, died and across the Irish Sea in Wales more devastation was reported. The Annales Cambriae noted that the Great Death had carried off Maelgwn, King of Gwynedd.
Ireland, Wales and the south-west were almost certainly ravaged by bubonic plague. The trading enclaves at Tintagel and Cadbury-Congresbury by the Severn Estuary appear to have been deserted in the second half of the sixth century and the surviving Roman town at Wroxeter shrank and ceased to hold markets. Records of the terrible aftermath have perished – except in one unexpected quarter. The powerful image of the Wasteland finds its way into early medieval stories such as the Mabinogion and the Arthurian romances. They tell of an empty landscape, of farmers lying dead in the fields where they fell and of how ‘no animal, no smoke, no fire, no man, no dwelling’ could be seen for miles.
It is likely that the scourges of famine and plague weakened the native kingdoms of the west of Britain but impossible to know how relatively badly the Saxons and Angles of the east and the Celtic kindreds of the north were affected. It seems that the Saxon settlements of the south had little to do with their neighbours and enemies and perhaps the contagion did not spread everywhere. But what seems certain is a decisive shift in the military balance in Britain.
There is evidence to suggest that the extreme weather of 536 and 537 caused sea levels to rise worldwide. Eighty years before then, rising tides had forced those who lived on the low-lying coasts of Frisia, Angeln and Saxony to abandon their villages, to take to their ships and seek a home in England. It may be that a second wave of emigration across the North Sea was forced by the effects of the massive eruptions in the Sunda Straits.
If the British kingdoms were badly weakened and vulnerable to attack at the same time as more Germanic settlers were arriving, then a momentum would have built. In any event, a Saxon army triumphed at Deorham, modern Dyrrham in south Gloucestershire, near Bath. They had penetrated a long way west, effectively ending Gildas’ period of ‘our present security’, having taken over territory in the Thames Valley. Three native kings were killed at Deorham and, soon afterwards, the Roman towns of Cirencester, Gloucester and Bath fell to the Saxons and their rich farming hinterland of large villa-estates fell with them. It was a turning point. The Saxons had reached the Severn Sea. Some time later, around 610, a holy man known as Beuno was walking on what is now the Welsh bank of the River Severn when he heard a voice carrying over the water from the opposite side. It looked as though a man was calling his dogs but the saint did not understand what he was saying. At that moment Beuno knew that the hated Sais had conquered the south. ‘Listen,’ he said to a companion, ‘I hear the Heathens coming.’
* * *
Wansdyke
Southern England is criss-crossed by a complex pattern of ancient boun
daries and almost all are ditch-and-bank earthworks. In Hampshire, an impressive ditch encloses an area of sixteen square miles, most of it lush farmland. There are shorter boundaries in Berkshire and Oxfordshire but the most spectacular was the Wansdyke. Named by the invading Saxons after their god, Woden, the frontier runs from Maes Knoll in Somerset eastwards for fifty miles to the Savernake Forest near Marlborough in Wiltshire. It was undoubtedly intended to mark a political divide between the retreating Britons of the kingdom of Dumnonia and the Saxon victors of the Battle of Dyrrham in 577. The Wansdyke seems to have been revetted with wooden beams or stone. Patrolled in places, it had clear crossing points. There is recent evidence to suggest that it extended westwards from Maes Knoll to the Severn shore. The Easter Wansdyke is, surprisingly, better preserved and in places still very impressive, the bank rising to four metres in height. Even though it was breached by Saxon incursions in the seventh century, the line of the Wansdyke divides modern southern England from the Celtic West Country.
* * *
In the north, there was less drama and less clarity. Three sources do, however, signal an important political shift. Bede noted that, in the year 547, ‘Ida began to reign, from whom the Northumbrian royal family trace their origin’. His version accords with the slightly longer and more informative entry in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the year 547: ‘In this year Ida, from whom originally sprang the royal race of the Northumbrians, succeeded to the kingdom and reigned twelve years. He built Bamburgh, which was first enclosed by a stockade and thereafter by a rampart.’
And finally, in the Historia Brittonum, an important detail is added: ‘Ida, the son of Eoppa, possessed countries north of the Humbrian Sea and reigned twelve years, and he joined Din Guairoy to Bernicia.’
The emergence of Ida and his dynasty of Northumbrian kings is of great significance for the history of southern Scotland. Din Guairoy is the Old Welsh name for what is now the mighty fortress of Bamburgh Castle. A singular but broad rocky outcrop on the otherwise flat and sandy coast of Northumberland, it was naturally defensible and a place of strength long before Ida looked out from its ramparts. Below them lies a gently sloping beach that is perfect for hauling up boats beyond the high tide line and, from their stockade, lookouts had wide views up and down the coast. The rock had made an imposing dun for native potentates before the middle of the sixth century.
Din Guairoy is not the only Celtic name in the passages above. Bernicia or Bernaccia or Berneich is a wholly Old Welsh place-name and the wording used in the entry in the Historia Brittonum probably reflects a now dimly understood political reality. Some scholars believe that Bamburgh was originally a base for Anglian pirates and that, before Ida made himself a king, it had expanded to the landward areas as immigrants arrived from Angeln or from other parts of eastern Britain. It looks very much as though an Anglian military elite seized power in the native British kingdom of Bernaccia and established themselves as kings. Perhaps as few as scores of warriors were involved. But that is not to say that a native aristocracy was entirely effaced. In fact, the subsequent tremendous success of the Northumbrians and their hegemony over all Britain in the seventh century probably owed much to the involvement of British warriors and a political accommodation which left the new united kingdom of Bernicia relatively undamaged by war.
Archaeology supports this sense of takeover by a small group. In the 1950s and early ’60s, Brian Hope Taylor dug the fascinating royal site of Yeavering as well as elsewhere in Northumberland and could find little trace of Ida and his immediate descendants. He made a comment which dated him and the Anglians as well: ‘One au-pair girl would have made and broken in a week all the Anglo-Saxon pottery in Bernicia before and during the reign of Edwin [616 to 633].’
The name of Bernicia offers some sense of its location – and of its relevance here. The root of berneich means something like ‘the gap people’ or, more loosely, ‘the people of the valley’. The area of the lower Tweed Basin is sometimes still called ‘The Merse’ and it may be an echo of Berneich. In Scots, a merse was a fertile area of ground to be found between hills, in this case the Lammermuirs to the north and the Cheviots to the south. The modern Anglo-Scottish border can seriously distort our view but the merse of Tweed includes much fertile farmland now lying in England. To join Din Guairoy or Bamburgh to such a rich area made a powerful kingdom and the name of Bernicia soon reached southwards.
Place names are important indicators of language survival. Rarely securely datable, they nevertheless usefully show processes rather than events and the survival of Old Welsh in the kingdom of Bernicia and its successors tends to support the notion of a British population under Anglian leadership. In his magisterial Celtic Place Names of Scotland, W.J. Watson counted forty-two native names on the map of modern Berwickshire and fifty-two in Roxburghshire.
If Bernicia should properly be seen as a unique Celtic-Anglian fusion, then the ambitions of its later kings can be interpreted as harking back to another past. Rome still cast a mighty shadow, and in the energetic and charismatic dynasty founded by Ida and imperial ambition quickly began to smoulder. But before that could ever catch fire, the native kingdoms of north Britain had to be confronted. They were powerful and none more so than Rheged and its greatest king, and his heir, the Son of Prophecy.
Emerging into the historical half-light towards the end of the sixth century, Rheged no doubt waxed and waned. Kingdoms were defined by the effective reach of powerful rulers and the web of loyalties and obligations they and their war bands could sustain. It may be that at its zenith Rheged stretched as far west in Galloway as was possible, all the way to Dunragit, formerly Dun-Rheged, near modern Stranraer, and hinging on Carlisle, down as far south as Rochdale. It was known as Recedham in the Domesday Book. Other sources hail a Rheged king as Lord of Catterick and perhaps for a time his power penetrated the Pennines, the spine of northern England. The name of the kingdom itself probably meant something unhelpful like ‘the Kingdom’.
The earliest dated event to take place in sixth-century Rheged is listed in the Annales Cambriae for the year 573. It appears in sections of the annals which scholars believe are fragments of a lost North British Chronicle compiled in the eighth century. They noted a battle at a place called Armetrid, while later references (and there are many) in epic Welsh poetry use the variant of Arderydd. All agree that it was fought near Carlisle, just outside the village once known as Arthuret and now called Longtown. It stands on a bluff of high ground on the eastern bank of the Esk. There the river is broad and fast flowing but it runs over a flat bed of rock and was an ancient fording place, the lowest on the Esk. Travellers and armies moving north or south used it for between Arthuret and the outfall of the river into the Solway stretched the treacherous wastes of the great Solway Moss. Those who did not want to risk the tides and wade any of the three fords across the firth crossed at Arthuret or Arderydd.
Battles were often fought at fording places, where roads converged, where it was convenient. In the summer of 573, two armies faced each other on an area of undulating fields south of the modern village. Overlooked by the parish church and what may have been a place sacred to pagans – there is an ancient holy well nearby – the war bands of Gwenddolau ap Ceidio and his allies mustered. Almost certainly King of Carlisle, Gwenddolau, was a pagan – in all senses, a country and not a city dweller – and not far from the battlefield stood his glowering fortress. Near Carwinley, the modern rendition of Caer Gwenddolau, is a spectacular mound, raised high on a river cliff above the Esk. Known as Liddell Strength, it became a motte-and-bailey castle in the early medieval period, first on record in 1174. But the massive earthwork, much eroded into the river far below, whispers of much earlier origins.
* * *
Armes Prydein Fawr
Composed in the ninth or tenth century, ‘The Prophecy of Great Britain’ recalls the extent of the lands of the Old Welsh-speakers, from the Clyde to Brittany, and predicts that the Saxons will be driven into the sea. Alli
ed to the Vikings, the Cymry will rule in London once more. Here are some extracts:
From Alt Clut will come reckless men
To drive the Saxons out of Prydein;
From Brittany a mighty army
Warlike warriors who spare not their foes.
On every side Saxons will fall,
Their day ended, their stolen lands foresworn.
Death, brought hither on warriors’ blades,
Will pay for the thieving courtiers.
May a hedge be their only haven,
May the sea be their counsel,
And may blood be their companion.
Cynan and Cadwaladr, leaders of the war band,
Will be praised forever, praise be theirs.
Powerful lords, prudent in council,
Crushing the Saxons in the sight of God . . .
From Manau to Brittany our lands will stretch;
From Dyfed to Thanet will be ours,
From the Wall to Gweryd, right to the sea
Our sway over Rheged,
The Saxons won’t return.
* * *
When Gwenddolau and his warriors rode to the fords at Arderydd, they will have passed by the ruins of former glory. Less than a mile to the south of Liddell Strength stood the Roman fort at Netherby. Known as Castra Exploratorum, ‘the Fort of the Scouts’, it was built at the same time as Hadrian’s Wall, in the period after 122. The early garrisons were large. Manned by a cohort of part-mounted Spaniards a thousand strong, the garrisons’ role along the troubled frontier of the times was as a base forward of the great wall which collected intelligence and could send out sorties in some strength. After the death of Septimius Severus at York in 212, the fort’s function was probably scaled back to scouting and the monitoring of any significant movement of native war bands and that required many fewer men. But the Castra Exploratorum was a substantial stamp of Roman power. Many units from all across the empire passed through its gates and dedications to both Celtic and Germanic war gods on soldiers’ thanksgiving altars have been unearthed. There was a small civilian settlement beyond the walls.
The Faded Map: The Lost Kingdoms of Scotland Page 14