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Bards needed audiences and most sources set the recitals of eulogies, epics and elegies at a feast. In the circles of rushlight and firelight and the dark shadows beyond, the imaginations of the listeners took flight. Bards could conjure armies, the din of battle, the war cries and screams of dying men, the gore and the glory. War-gear, horses and tack and all the rituals around the teulu and its heroes were celebrated and its gorgeous detail dwelt upon.
When Aneirin had composed the horrors of Catraeth into the first version of Y Gododdin, he told a tale of heroism and shattering defeat, a series of baleful death songs for the fallen. Led by Yrfai map Golistan, Lord of Edinburgh, the host clattered out of the fortress on the Castle Rock. Northern allies had mustered – warriors from the kingdom of Rhydderch Hael in Strathclyde (Ystrad Clud) and from Aeron to the west. Unlikely comrades-in-arms for Y Bedydd, heathen Picts had ridden from ‘beyond Bannauc’, the Bannock Burn. This is the earliest explicit reference to the barrier of Flanders Moss and its function as a boundary between kindreds. Other Picts came to Edinburgh from beyond Merin Iudeu, the Firth of Forth.
After reaching the fortress at Calchvynydd and joining with the war band of Catraut, the growing host rode south, almost certainly down Dere Street. Men sent by the kings of Elmet and Gwynedd met Lord Yrfai and they massed near Cataractonium, the Roman fort which watched over the crossing of the rapids, the cataracts of the River Swale, by Dere Street. As at York and Carlisle, the Roman buildings may have survived more or less intact and Catraeth stood at a pivotal strategic position. Astride Dere Street, the fort also lay near the junction with the Roman road which led west over Stainmore and on to the lands of the Carvetii and Carlisle. Some Gododdin allies, perhaps the war bands of Strathclyde, may have travelled it and joined the host just before the battle. Catraeth was now threatened or possibly even occupied by the war bands of Deira and Bernicia. It was a takeover which would consolidate the Anglian gains east of the Pennines.
Often portrayed in black and white, as a straightforward battle between Celtic Britain and its Germanic invaders, Catraeth was in fact more complex. The Lord of the Celtic host was an Angle. Yrfai map Golistan is a version of ‘the Son of Wulfstan’, not an aristocrat but a professional soldier. His name betrays his origins. And in the Germanic army, especially if many Bernicians had ridden to Catraeth, there would have been native warriors.
Aneirin’s great death song was not an account of the battle, how it ebbed and flowed, what the tactics were, the weapons used and the causes of defeat and victory. His purpose was to tell a tale of tragedy and glory, of valour and sacrifice, and to make a lament for the fall of the Gododdin and their allies. But amongst the adjectives and the metaphors, there are hints of what really took place near the old Roman fort in the summer of AD 600.
When Aneirin counted 300 in the host of the Gododdin king, it likely that he saw only the horsemen, the cavalry warriors. They stood in the front rank, the place of honour, circling their skittish ponies, checking their gear and their tack, eying the Anglian army opposite. They were almost certainly all noblemen or leading members of the war bands of underkings, like Catraut of Calchvynydd, or allied kings, like Rhydderch Hael of Strathclyde and the kings of Elmet and Gwynedd. Standards will have fluttered in the breeze – except for the red dragon of Gwynedd, their devices and totems are all now lost to history. And, as Christians, the Baptised may have also brought relics or icons onto the battlefield, just as Arthur was said to have ridden with the image of the Virgin on his shield at the battle at Guinnion.
Behind the squadron of great men stood their retainers, infantry war bands of varying size, men who owed their lords military service. And while they will have had some training for battle, most were not professional soldiers, not men whose deeds will have prompted verses from a royal bard. They were farmers who carried spears and shields and wore whatever protection they had inherited from their fathers or had been given. Amongst the less experienced the stink of fear will have been pervasive. Before that day few will have stood anxiously in the ranks and waited for battle, some will have been little more than boys and others will have soiled themselves or vomited.
Pictish symbol stones of the seventh century offer some sense of how the armies at Catraeth formed up and faced each other. Albeit stylised in design (and needing to be crammed into the limited sculptural surface of a stone), Sueno’s Stone. And the famous depiction of the battle at Dunnichen in 685 set up at Aberlemno show cavalrymen leading ranks of infantry. If each of Aneirin’s 300 brought a modest average of ten men to Catraeth, the host led by Lord Yrfai will have numbered close to 3,000. Not a huge army in modern reckoning but undoubtedly vast for the times.
Taken together, the epic of The Gododdin and the Aberlemno Stone offer some sense of what happened when ‘the Baptised’, Y Bedydd, fought ‘the Heathens’, Y Gent. Like those immortalised in the Great Cattle Raid of Cooley and other ancient Celtic sources, loud and taunting challenges to single combat may have been issued, perhaps even agreed beforehand. Champions may have ridden out to fight in no-man’s-land, urged on and cheered or jeered by those standing in the ranks. Or perhaps the rituals harked back to a heroic age, to Calgacus and Mons Graupius. At the beginning of one stanza, The Gododdin poem sang of ‘a champion in a war chariot’. The outcome of single combat could be important and decisive for morale. Victory for King Robert the Bruce over the English knight, Sir Henry de Bohun, certainly put heart and belief into the smaller Scottish army at Bannockburn in 1314.
Noise was also important. Roman commentators often noted the blaring of war horns, the screaming and taunting, men working themselves into what the Irish epics called the ‘ragefit’ and the rattle of spears against shields made by Celtic opponents. Like single combat, it was another tradition which endured. While the Zulu impis clashed their weapons as they ran in on Rorke’s Drift in 1879, the defending soldiers are said to have sung hymns.
Once a crescendo of noise was reached at Catraeth and the war horn sounded a signal note, it is likely that the cavalry charged. This was not the thundering, earth-shaking gallop of heavily armoured medieval knights on their huge destriers but a charge of light cavalry. Riding small ponies, without much in the way of body armour, and wedged into saddles with high pommels and cantles but no stirrups attached, warriors carried a lance, a sword and a small, round parrying shield. Because they could not brace themselves by pushing their feet forward in stirrups, it is unlikely that riders couched their lances like a medieval knight. If they had and had managed to make a solid contact with an enemy, they would probably have been pitched backwards out of the saddle and injured. Lances are more likely to have been used for thrusting, throwing and delivering backward blows in passing. At the foot of the Aberlemno Stone a Pictish cavalryman takes back his arm and prepares to jab his lance at the Anglian riding towards him. The Pict’s shield is held high in front of his head and upper body (the pony’s head and neck protected him below the chest) as he attempts to deflect the lance about to be thrown by his enemy. In the melee and ruck of battle, the nimbleness and balance of cavalry ponies will often have made the difference between life and death.
Lances usually splintered and it was important to be able to unsheathe a sword quickly. Experienced men greased their scabbards to avoid jamming and to make them faster on the draw. At the top of the Aberlemno Stone, a victorious Pictish cavalryman raises his sword and rides down a fleeing Angle who has thrown away his weapons and shield.
Once the opening cavalry engagement had run its course and if it had not been decisive, foot soldiers formed what Aneirin called ‘a alder palisade’, a shield wall. Made from wood fitted around a metal handgrip, a boss, shields were often made from alder. It was tough – and magical. In the ancient Irish tree language known as Ogham, alder symbolised resistance. When a rank of foot soldiers were ordered to make a shield wall, they locked their shields together in an overlapping pattern with the edge of one man’s touching the boss of the soldier’s nex
t to him. ‘Rim to Boss’ was the call. Standing sideways on, braced and with a spear in his right hand bristling out from the alder palisade, well-drilled men could make a tight and formidable formation.
The Aberlemno Stone shows a shield wall in some detail. Attacked by an Anglian cavalryman, three ranks stand in close order in classic Roman fashion. If they did indeed follow the practice of the legions in battle, as seems likely – given how their kings aspired to Romanitas in so many other ways – the armies of Dark Ages Britain will have stood to in first and second ranks equipped with javelins. On a signal from a war-horn – and carnyxes have a similarly penetrative note to bagpipes – both ranks will have launched a volley of javelins against enemy cavalry or charging foot soldiers. And then the front rank, the hastati in Latin, would draw their swords and engage. This appears to be the moment captured by the sculptor of the Aberlemno Stone. A cavalryman lies dead, impaled by a javelin, and the man in the front rank has his sword drawn and raised to strike.
In a variant on Roman tactics, the man behind him in the second rank holds ready a heavy war spear with both hands. He pushes its tip past his comrade but angles it below his shield and sword arm so as not to impede. In a shield wall, experienced men sometimes swung low and hacked at unprotected enemy legs to bring down a man and it appears that the second ranker at Aberlemno is attempting to counter that tactic. Behind him, in the third rank, stands a warrior with his spear held upright – one of the triarii, a reserve ready to plug gaps in the front line or rush forward if wide breaches opened in the enemy formation and commanders judged it could be splintered decisively.
When opposing ranks of infantry smashed into each other, momentum was everything. If the men in the leading line of a shield wall could get on the front foot, begin to pump their legs and push hard, shoved on by their comrades behind, then there could be a rapid outcome. When men were forced backwards over rough, tussocky ground, it only took one or two to trip or be beaten down before gaps opened. Men who fell were as good as dead. As the front rank of their enemies trampled over the top of them, the second rank hacked at and butchered men wriggling on the ground, trying to get up before blows rained down on them. Most did not die quickly. Early swords and axes quickly grew blunt on a battlefield and most who went down were bludgeoned into unconsciousness or bled to death. An infantry battle of this era could be little more than a savage, gory scrummage and, when formations broke, rout usually followed. And it seems that at Catraeth, there was the sort of wholesale slaughter associated with the headlong pursuit of a shattered army. In a moment of poignancy, pining for a heroic past and remembering the valour of a great leader, Aneirin sang:
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.
The Aberlemno ranks may have been a self-conscious imitation of Roman models and if warriors did indeed fight in this way in the centuries after the fall of the empire in the west, then some drill will have been needed. Well-organised farmer armies were not always a disordered rabble depending for success on one tactic – the furious charge.
The Gododdin host at Catreath fought for honour, for the extravagant praise of Aneirin in the mead hall and the fame it would bring and for the extraordinary reputation of the sort that clung to the figure of Arthur – by the year 600, his name was a byword for bravery. But they also fought for riches and, while in the Dark Ages gold, treasure and war gear were valued, real riches meant land. After the rout by the River Swale, the Angle kings knew that the great prize of the fertile fields of the realm of the Gododdin lay defenceless. And they moved quickly to seize them.
Dated 10 July 1910 in the right-hand corner, a fascinating photograph records almost fifteen centuries of continuity on a Borders hillside. Under the high summer sun, more than a hundred sit amongst the bracken, the men wearing straw boaters, the ladies under wide-brimmed hats or white umbrellas and two schoolboys in the foreground staring uncertainly at the photographer. At the centre of the scene is a small white, conical tent shading a minister of the church. The tenth of July 1910 was a Sunday and he appears to be preaching an open-air sermon next to a tall Celtic cross. But this is not a field conventicle, the sort of service sometimes held in southern Scotland to commemorate the Covenanters of the seventeenth century. Instead the minister and his hillside flock remember an ancient Christian saint from the fourth century.
The Celtic cross is new, raised in 1873, but it marks the place once known as ‘the sanctuary of St Gordian’. Martyred in Rome in 362 during the murderous reign of the Emperor Julian the Apostate, Gordianus was a magistrate who was so moved by the faith of the saintly priest, Januarius, that he himself converted. Brutally tortured and finally beheaded, Gordianus was buried with another martyr of the time, St Epimachus, and quickly forgotten – except in the Manor Valley, near modern Peebles.
In all probability the sanctuary of St Gordianus was established soon after his death, perhaps as early as the late fourth century, in the decades immediately before the fall of Britannia. Perhaps relics of this obscure Roman had somehow found their way to the Border hills. The stories of men like him could credibly have spread amongst communities of Christians while the empire still held and a garrison on Hadrian’s Wall was still in contact with Rome. What supports the notion of a very early church or sanctuary in the Manor Valley was the discovery of the Coninia Stone. Found in a large cairn in 1890 by Robert Anderson, the son of a shepherd at Kirkhope Farm, it was brought down the hillside and placed within the small enclosure where St Gordian’s cross had recently been erected. Confirmed as late fifth or early sixth century by the style of its lettering, the Coninia Stone also carried a precisely incised Christian cross. It is one of the earliest tombstones to be found in Scotland for a native, a woman and a member of a church, someone who revered St Gordian. Coninia reads like a Latin version of cynin, which in Old Welsh simply meant ‘little dog’ or ‘puppy’. The second line of the inscription, Etriria, was in all probability a local place-name, now lost.
What is very much alive is the reverence for St Gordian. The spiritual descendant of Coninia is Janet Stoddart. At the open-air service in July 1899, she was baptised and given Gordian as a middle name. It may be that the holy water was held in a stone receptacle mistakenly described as ‘an ancient font’. Almost certainly not that but a socket for a sculptured cross of the sort set up in many sacred places in Britain in the sixth and seventh centuries and beyond, it is another fragment of a fascinating story. The sanctuary of St Gordian was created and consecrated by an established Christian community, one aware of a much wider world and ready to venerate the memory of a Roman martyr of the fifth century. Perhaps it was the fact that Gordianus had been an imperial magistrate that added lustre to his now-forgotten name – Romanitas by association.
It was also an organised community and something of its nature and structure in southern Scotland in the Dark Ages can be glimpsed in the modern landscape. Manor is a rendition of the Old Welsh term maenor and it carries a specific meaning. Eighth-century sources supply a good deal of detail. In the margins of a devotional work called the Book of St Chad, compiled in Wales around 740, there is a clear description of a maenor, one which fits very precisely what can still be seen on the ground in the Manor Valley. While there survives nothing so detailed as the Book of St Chad in southern Scotland, several telling traces of a society organised along very similar lines can be found in the Yr Hen Ogledd, ‘The Old North’.
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Another Jerusalem
The growing power of the papacy certainly borrowed authority from Rome’s former imperial glories but it had, from the outset, a central role in
the origins of the Christian faith. Beyond the city walls and by the side of the Appian Way, the main road to the south, a warren of catacombs was rediscovered in the sixteenth century. Dating as early as the first century AD, these tunnels contained thousands of notches cut out of the rock where corpses were laid. For a long time, it was believed that the Second Coming was imminent and the dead would rise more easily from the catacombs. Next to the Church of the Catacomb of Basileo, Rome’s most famous Christian legend is believed to have taken place. As St Peter fled from persecution down the Appian Way, he met Christ on the road and asked the famous question ‘Domine, quo vadis?’ ‘I am going to Rome,’ Christ replied, ‘for a second crucifixion.’ Peter realised what he meant and turned back to the city to suffer his own martyrdom. Early Christians believed that Jerusalem, the site of Christ’s death and resurrection, was an earthly gateway to Heaven, where God was close at hand. Rome saw the appearance of Christ and the crucifixion of Peter and had a similarly magnetic attraction for the faithful.
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In essence a maenor was an estate run by an official known as a maer from the Latin maior, more colloquially ‘the superior’. The old title still survives in Scotland as the surname Mair and in England as the office of mayor. And in the later Dark Ages, there were mormaers in the north, a title for great magnates. Where this apparent administrative tidiness begins to blur is over the question of the source of that authority. By the tenth century, maers were probably sometimes royal officials who managed an estate belonging directly to a king and sometimes these men were themselves aristocrats, with traditional title to the land they controlled, or they were the agents of a particularly powerful aristocratic family. Perhaps even a prototype mormaer.
The Faded Map: The Lost Kingdoms of Scotland Page 17