The Faded Map: The Lost Kingdoms of Scotland

by Alistair Moffat

  With the death of Owain, the Son of Prophecy, the Celtic kingdom of Rheged seemed to fade into the shadows of history. After the 590s, little is heard of the once-mighty dynasty of Urien and his famous son. But, in 642, a remarkable echo and an extraordinary name appear in the records. In a ninth-century compilation, the Liber Vitae, kept in Durham Cathedral, a Rheged princess called Rieinmelth is noted as the wife of King Oswiu of Bernicia. This Book of Life lists a series of other names which strongly suggest that it is a copy of a document written in Bernicia in the seventh century, perhaps in the scriptorium at Lindisfarne. Rieinmelth’s name means the ‘Queen of Lightning’.

  * * *

  Mercian Gold

  ‘Spirits of yesteryear, take me where the coins appear.’ Every time he fired up his metal detector, Terry Herbert uttered this his ritual prayer. In August 2009, it was answered and in spectacular fashion. While Terry was quartering a field near his house in Hammerwich, near Lichfield in Staffordshire, he came across a huge Anglo-Saxon hoard of gold – the largest ever found. There were more than 1,500 pieces, ranging from beautifully worked buttons to sword fittings and war gear of all sorts. In all, the Hammerwich hoard weighed in at a staggering five kilos of gold. Archaeologists have provisionally dated the pieces to the early decades of the powerful Mercian kingdom, some time between 675 and 725. Lichfield was an important royal centre but Gareth Williams of the British Museum does not believe that the hoard necessarily belonged to King Aethelbald or any of his predecessors. He sees the pieces as being the property of an aristocratic war band – perhaps the proceeds of successful warfare – and, more than that, the scale and value of the hoard strongly suggest a vast divide between a warrior elite who had fabulous wealth and the rest of society, farmers, bonded workers and slaves, who had nothing and were merely subsisting. It is a dazzling find and, on a most basic level, shows that Dark Ages potentates had tremendous resources.

  * * *

  She was a direct descendant of Urien, the granddaughter of Owain, and it seems that her marriage to Oswiu was a strategic dynastic union. And it also means that Rheged remained distinct and important until the 640s but the doings of its lords and princes went unnoticed in surviving chronicles. In any event, the great Celtic kingdom of the west began to disintegrate. In the Life of St Wilfrid of Ripon, it was recorded that Oswiu had been active on the western side of the Pennines, probably taking control of the fertile farmlands of Southern Rheged.

  Settlers with Anglian names were also beginning to establish themselves around the neck of the Solway Firth. In what was Northern Rheged, a great monastery was built at Hoddom. Like Old Melrose it was sited in a loop of a river, the Annan, and there was almost certainly an earlier native foundation. The nearby place-name offers a tantalising hint. About a mile to the east lies the village of Ecclefechan. The name means ‘the Little Church’ – probably so called because of ‘the Great Church’ at Hoddom.

  There exists a tradition that Oswiu endowed Hoddom in memory of Rieinmelth and it seems that the Queen of Lightning may have died young, perhaps in childbirth as so many women did. But, as ever, there were other royal motives. Hoddom was said to have been linked with St Kentigern, the child of the princess from Traprain Law. Conventionally associated with Strathclyde, whose dominion would later reach southwards as far as Cumbria, and appointed as the founding Bishop of Glasgow, he was, by the middle of the seventh century, a figure of great prestige amongst the Old Welsh-speaking population. By endowing Hoddom in memory of a native princess and adopting a native saint, his cult and a location closely associated with him and thereby elevating the importance of the monastery in the loop of the river, the Bernician kings were legitimising their political takeover of Rheged.

  There was another, less direct, reason for Oswiu and his successors to include figures like Kentigern. The old saint had links with the Roman past – the genealogies connected him and his sponsors with the likes of Coel Hen, the last duke of the Britains – and, at one time, southern Scotland, Strathclyde, Manau and Gododdin had briefly been part of the Empire in the days of Agricola, Severus and the shadowy province of Valentia. If Oswiu claimed to be Imperator Totius Britanniae, the blessing of Kentigern added substance.

  After the victory on the Winwaed and the establishment of his British hegemony, Oswiu received a rare approving notice from Bede:

  King Oswy gave thanks to God for his victory and dedicated his daughter, Aelffled, who was scarcely a year old, to his service in perpetual virginity. He also gave twelve small grants of land, where heavenly warfare was to take the place of earthly, and to provide for the needs of monks to make constant intercession for the perpetual peace of his nation. Six of these lay in the province of Deira, and six in Bernicia, each of ten hides in extent, making one hundred and twenty in all.

  It may be that, of the six estates in Bernicia, one was given to Hoddom, perhaps others to Old Melrose (such as Yetholmshire and the less identifiable shire of Melrose) and to Coldingham, a monastery on the Berwickshire coast associated with the king’s sister, Aebbe.

  Anglian penetration westwards is difficult to date and trace but a series of very early place-names in Dumfries and Galloway is suggestive. Beyond Hoddom and the Annan, it seems that colonisation (almost certainly following the eviction and displacement of native landowners) proceeded by sea. Many of the early place-names are close to the Solway shore – such as Southwick, Kirkcarswell, Twynholm, Penninghame and, most famously, a cluster around and including Kirkcudbright, ‘the Church of Cuthbert’. These settlements are distributed in groups and it seems that, in Galloway, native maenors were taken over and renamed as shires. Place names offer strong corroboration. To the west of Gatehouse of Fleet and the impressive castle at Cardoness, the Skyreburn flows into Wigtown Bay and the Solway. The derivation is from the Anglian scir-burne and it meant ‘the shire-stream’ – that is, the western boundary of a shire. Beyond the Skyreburn, the Cairnsmore Hills reach right down to the edge of the Solway coast. The land is good only for stock rearing and the place-names are predominantly Old Welsh – Carsluith, Minnigaff and Kirroughtree.

  Oswiu’s arm is unlikely to have reached as far west as the Skyreburn and the naming of Kirkcudbright must postdate the death of the saint by a suitable distance but the successors of the Imperator certainly saw Galloway as part of Greater Bernicia.

  Pressing matters closer to Oswiu’s home were much on the king’s mind. Christianity had come to Bernicia in at least two versions. Oswiu and his brother, Oswald, had been refugees at Iona and elsewhere in Dalriada during the reign of Edwin of Deira. When they themselves came to power, it seemed natural to invite Aidan and other priests from the west to convert their pagan countrymen but, in so doing, the Bernicians set up a conflict which Oswiu had to resolve.

  Queen Eanfled was a Deiran princess who had been forced into exile in Kent after the death of her father Edwin at Denisesburn in 631. There she was exposed to a version of Christianity which was more Roman in its nature, which looked to the papacy for leadership and doctrinal guidance and which, crucially, calculated the date of Easter differently from the Ionan clergy sponsored by her husband Oswiu. This was no small matter of domestic difficulty or a footnote to history. Eastertide was the central festival in the Christian calendar and all others were dated from it. In the royal household and in different parts of Oswiu’s kingdom, all feasts were therefore celebrated on different days, the whole year being out of kilter. Not only was this awkward, there was also a vital doctrinal matter involved. Early Christians believed that prayer was tremendously powerful and that it worked best when it was collective and simultaneous. At Easter, when God confronted Satan and his hellish army of fiends, believers could lend maximum support in the good fight when they all prayed together and worshipped at Mass on the same day. It was a quasi-military matter of numbers. The mathematical disparity between the Ionan and Roman traditions divided the forces of the Lord at the time of His greatest need. Something had to be done.

  Queen Eanfl
ed had gathered about her a band of pious supporters and one young aristocrat who had the gifts of oratory and argument and a command of the scriptures. When Oswiu convened a synod at Whitby in 664, Wilfrid would speak for the Queen’s party and put the case for allegiance to Rome and the papacy, while Bishop Colman of Lindisfarne would present the argument for Iona.

  The teachings of Columba, said the bishop, were derived directly from the Apostle John and were therefore both ancient and correct. Wilfrid appealed to greater authority by contending that the Pope, as Bishop of Rome and the successor of St Peter, the rock upon whom the Church was founded, should be seen as paramount. Moreover, the Gospel of St Matthew recorded Jesus’ promise to Peter: ‘I will give you the keys of the kingdom of Heaven.’ This last appeared to be conclusive. Colman made no counter-argument and Oswiu ruled that the Roman calculation of the date of Easter be universally adopted.

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  Easter Tables

  Being a famously movable feast, Easter has been the subject of regular – and recent – controversy for almost 2,000 years. In 1923, the Eastern Orthodox Church called a conference in Istanbul to settle disagreements and, in 1997, the World Council of Churches met in Aleppo to decide the issue for once and for all – at least until the next time. Taking into account the latest astronomical data and the new sophistication, they decided to endorse the basic formula agreed by the Council of Nicaea in 318. Easter should fall on the first Sunday after the first full moon after or on the vernal equinox. To be absolutely unequivocal, the council set dates for Easter Sunday until 2020. Here they are:

  2011 – 24 April

  2012 – 8 April

  2013 – 31 March

  2014 – 20 April

  2015 – 5 April

  2016 – 27 March

  2017 – 16 April

  2018 – 1 April

  2019 – 21 April

  2020 – 12 April

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  While his domestic arrangements, to say nothing of his relationship with Queen Eanfled, will have improved, the Bernician king made his decision for political reasons. Romanitas, the idea of Roman-ness, mattered very much and, if Oswiu could draw closer to Rome as the focus of the Christian Church in the west, then his own pretensions to imperial prestige would be enhanced. In many ways, the Church was seen as the heir of the Empire. It spoke in Latin and ruled an empire of souls from the old imperial capital. For Oswiu, there was also the compelling imperative of political unity. In compiling his vast domain, which stretched in the east from the Forth to the Thames and was edging ever further westwards, the king knew that it was better to create a single, unified church. And so realpolitik defeated sentiment and, however sad Oswiu may have been to find against the religious traditions he grew up with, he did not hesitate.

  Ionan monks left Bernicia. Colman quit the bishopric of Lindisfarne and returned to Iona. From Ripon a young Cuthbert accompanied the expelled Abbot Eata back to Old Melrose and, despite anomalies and objections, it appears that Oswiu’s directive was widely adopted. It was eloquent testament to his power and reach.

  At the Synod of Whitby in 664, Oswiu may have had occasion to translate. Bilingual in Gaelic and Early English (and very possibly in Old Welsh too) as a result of his upbringing, the king would certainly have understood both Colman and Wilfrid even if they did not understand each other. However, what both priests did have in common was the language of the Church and of the emperors and the legions. With the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons and its royal sponsorship, Old English imported hundreds of Latin words. Many are still familiar – monk, priest, bishop, angel, disciple, Mass, relic, shrine and others which directly describe the workings and institutions of the Church. Just as importantly, the arrival of these words also enabled and encouraged greater subtlety of expression. Old English was generally clumsy with abstracts (although good on observation) and as the new language of Christianity developed so did the range of discourse. Sometimes as a direct translation, occasionally as interpretation, new words and phrases were coined. Judgement Day became Doomsday, Spiritus Sanctus became the Holy Ghost and feond or ‘fiend’ was a synonym for the Devil. Over time, a process of translation would produce a wider and richer vocabulary – for example, the Latin evangelium means, literally, ‘good news’. Old English rendered this as god-spell which became ‘gospel’.

  As the Northumbrian dialect spread over southern Scotland and all the way down the Humber and the Mersey, more welcome uniformity bound Oswiu’s empire together. How quickly or emphatically Old English displaced Old Welsh is difficult to know but as the colonised are forced to understand the language of the conqueror (from the Roman to the British and American empires), it is likely that English was spoken and understood as far north as the Tay by the end of the seventh century. And Northumbrian, the ancestor of Scots, must be counted as one of Scotland’s ancient tongues. And Oswiu must also rank as one of the greatest kings ever to rule in Scotland.

  In 670, the Imperator died and was buried at Whitby. His son, Ecgfrith, appears to have succeeded without fuss or difficulty and the new king immediately signalled a continuity with his father’s policies. After the dedication of a new church at Ripon, Ecgfrith and his noblemen gave to Bishop Wilfrid ‘consecrated places in various districts which British clergy had deserted when fleeing from the hostile sword wielded by the hand of our own people’.

  In 671, Ecgfrith fought and won a battle against the Pictish kings somewhere in the north. It seems he was able to extend Northumbrian hegemony beyond the Forth for the first time. A year later, he rode south with his war bands to confront Wulfhere, son of Penda of Mercia and leader of ‘all the southern kingdoms’, and again Ecgfrith was victorious.

  Like his father and their historian, Bede, heavenly warfare was also on King Ecgfrith’s mind and there were few greater warriors for Christ than Cuthbert whose reputation for piety had been growing. When the see of Lindisfarne fell vacant in 685, the ascetic monk seemed the obvious choice but there was a problem. Bede takes up the story:

  Thus Cuthbert served God in solitude for many years in a hut surrounded by an embankment so high that he could see nothing but the heavens for which he longed so ardently. Then it came about that a great Synod was held under the presidency of Archbishop Theodore of blessed memory, and in the presence of King Ecgfrith. This assembled near the River Aln at a place called Twyford, or the Two Fords; and the whole company unanimously elected Cuthbert as bishop of the church of Lindisfarne. But although many messengers and letters were sent to him, nothing would induce him to abandon his hermitage. At length the king in person, accompanied by the most holy Bishop Trumwine and other devout and distinguished men, took boat to the island. There they were joined by many of the Lindisfarne brethren, and the whole company knelt before him and adjured him in God’s name and begged him with tears to consent, until they eventually drew him, also in tears, from his dearly loved retreat, and brought him to the Synod. Still profoundly reluctant, he at length bowed to the unanimous decision of the whole assembly, and was persuaded to assume the burden of episcopal dignity.

  There is an atmosphere of formula around this story – the ritual reluctance and protestations of unworthiness of newly elected popes is a modern echo but the substance of it is likely to have been authentic. At the time Bede was writing, there will have been people still living who witnessed the events he described.

  Cuthbert was Bishop of Lindisfarne for only two years but, as soon as he accepted office, he behaved like a prince of the church, a powerful figure at the centre of contemporary politics. The contents of his coffin offer a sense of the worldly bishop and the splendour of his office. In 1540 Cuthbert’s shrine in Durham cathedral was smashed by ruffians acting for King Henry VIII in the licensed land grab known as the dissolution of the monasteries. Relics were treated like rubbish and the gorgeous Lindisfarne Gospels removed to London (from where they have yet to return). The saint was hastily reburied in the cathedral precincts and, when antiquarians opened the grave
in 1827, they expected to find that Henry VIII’s men had robbed out everything of value. Instead they retrieved a beautiful pectoral cross made from gold and garnets, an ivory comb, a small travelling altar bound in silver and a copy of St John’s Gospel. Cuthbert may have been dragged in his hermit’s rags from the island of Inner Farne but, when he put on the episcopal cope, he looked the part.

  The year 685 turned out to be fateful. Here is Bede again:

  Cuthbert set off to Carlisle to speak to the Queen [Eormenburh] who had arranged to stay at her sister’s convent to await the outcome of the war. The day after his arrival the citizens conducted him around the city walls to see a remarkable Roman fountain that was built into them. He was suddenly disturbed in spirit. He leaned heavily on his staff, turned his face dolefully to the wall, then straightening himself up and looking up into the sky, he sighed deeply and said almost in a whisper, ‘Perhaps at this moment the battle is being decided.’

  And it was. Far to the north, King Ecgfrith had ridden to Dunnichen, near Forfar. It was a punitive expedition, intended to bring the Pictish king Bridei back into the Northumbrian empire – compel him into subjection. But Cuthbert, the hermit turned strategist, had advised against the war and his fears prompted a fit of dire prophecy against the city wall at Carlisle.