The religious importance of the site is equally ancient. During the Roman period, Bewcastle was known as Fanum Cocidi, ‘the Shrine of Cocidius’ – Cocidius being a Celtic war god. His cult probably predated the arrival of the legions and it seems to have been enthusiastically adopted by them. The Latin fanum meant ‘a shrine’ or ‘a sanctuary’ and, in a Celtic context, this may well have been a grove of trees inside a sacred precinct rather than the temples visualised by the Roman pope. They are gone now but at least two ancient yews grew around Bewcastle Church (younger trees have replaced them by the churchyard wall) and the site appears to have been marked off at some point in a long history by ditching and a bank. This may be Roman but archaeology has yet to investigate. The shrine of Cocidius was well known in the second century AD and a place which attracted worshippers. Such sanctuaries usually had definition of some sort – a way of recognising what was holy ground and what was not.
When the tide of Northumbrian Christianity began to rise and wash westward, Bewcastle became an important focus. As Pope Gregory advised, it was ‘an accustomed resort’. And at such a famously sacred place, Anglian churchmen chose to make a spectacular gesture. A magnificent stone cross was erected, probably towards the end of the seventh century. It tells a fascinating story about early beliefs and society in the Northumbrian west.
In the era of Christian conversion, churches, where they existed at all, were mostly modest structures. Small, built from wood and dark inside, they were not the soaring cathedrals of later times, nor did they have spires that reached heavenwards and could be seen and heard for many miles as their bells pealed. When a stone church was built, it was a matter for comment, as at Jarrow and Whithorn. The word of God was heard out of doors in the early centuries of Christianity and, at Bewcastle, a great preaching cross was raised amongst the sacred yew trees.
Like churches, most early crosses are likely to have been wooden but these have left little trace. Stone crosses were more impressive and enduring but, looking up at their grey dignity, it is easy to forget that most were brightly painted. The scenes and decorations carved on the four faces of the shaft and on the cross-piece were picked out in vivid colour, no doubt renewed each year after the winter rains and before major festivals. The high crosses were intended as both a focus and a text. Worshippers, summoned by word of mouth or the tinkle of a handbell, gathered around the base and listened to a priest tell stories from the Bible, speak about the lives of the saints or use the symbol of the cross itself to explain the Christian message. Since many who listened could not read, the painted saints and scenes were an attractive illustration, probably something pointed to during a service.
Although its cross-piece is missing, the Bewcastle Cross is impressive, the shaft standing 4.4 metres high. Almost square, the four faces of the shaft must have been carved in situ, probably by masons sent from Bede’s monastery at Jarrow or the sister house at Monkwearmouth. On three sides the sculptors have incised intricate decorative patterns known as ‘inhabited vine scrolls’. Stems and foliage are woven together and support a series of animals such as birds and others more difficult to identify. Elsewhere there are patterns of interlace and dicing very reminiscent of the carpet pages of the Lindisfarne Gospels.
The oldest sundial to survive in Britain can be seen on the Bewcastle Cross. It shows the day quartered into four tides. Derived from the Early English tid, meaning ‘time’, the word survives in the slightly quaint usage of Christmastide or Eastertide. Because they had few reliable means of measuring it, apart from the sun and the moon, the people of the seventh and eighth centuries (and long after that) are thought to have had little interest in time and the mechanics of its passage. But Bede was fascinated. His De Temporum Ratione (On the Reckoning of Time), is a scientific masterpiece and has been enormously influential. In 664, the Synod of Whitby was much concerned with the correct dating of the feast of Easter and, to avoid dispute, Easter Tables projected the precise dates far into the future. Bede listed them up until 1063. He also compiled a chronology of world history and, to make it intelligible, he adopted the AD system. It was invented by Dionysius Exiguus or ‘Little Dennis’, a monk from the Black Sea coast living in Rome, and, through his widely disseminated writings, Bede helped make it standard throughout Europe.
In the measurement of the life of men and women, De Temporum Ratione was also influential. The number four seemed to hypnotise Bede as he listed the four ages of man, the four seasons and the four cardinal compass directions. He undertook a scientific programme of observation of the tides, working out the seasonal median level between low and high tides. Since Jarrow Slake, a huge tidal mudflat near the mouth of the River Tyne, lapped at the foot of the monastery precincts, Bede may not have had to exert himself greatly. And even though he did not publish any measurement of daylight, the division of it into four tides on the Bewcastle sundial is likely to have derived from the monk’s researches. Accessible to everyone, including the illiterate, these divisions are likely to have had some general meaning beyond the academic.
Down the length of one of the faces of the Bewcastle Cross is a series of relief sculptures. At the top is St John the Evangelist, the writer of the fourth gospel. Depictions of biblical figures were usually not portraits (although there were descriptions of Jesus in circulation, these were all apocryphal) and they are usually identified by attributes. St John is holding an eagle, a symbol of the soaring heights he rose to when writing his gospel – and, incidentally, the reason many church lecterns are modelled on the great bird and its outspread wings.
Below John, Jesus treads on the beasts. This obscure motif is from Psalm 91 and it links the Bewcastle Cross (and the cross at Ruthwell which carries a similar sculpture) once again to Bede and Jarrow. He wrote a commentary on Psalm 91 and made much of the passage where Christ trampled the snake, the lion, the dragon and the basilisk. Symbolising the triumph over Satan, this image seems to have been powerful and popular with early Christian missionaries as they moved to convert pagans. Psalm 91 was sung at the monastic service of compline, the prayers at the end of the day. It sent monks into the fearful dark of the night, to the period of the long silence, to contemplation, to temptation and it fortified them with Christ’s example.
At the foot of the cross is a carving of a mysterious figure, a man resembling a falconer with a bird on his gloved hand. It may be another illustration of St John but the rationale for showing the gospel writer twice and with the same attribute is hard to fathom. Above the falconer there is an inscription carved at a height where it can be easily read:
THISSIG BEACN THUN SETTON HWAETRED WAETHGAR ALWFWOLTHU AFT ALCFRITH EAN KYNIING EAC OSWIUING + GEBID HEU SINNA SAWHULA
(This slender pillar Hwaetred, Waethgar and Alwfwolthu set up in memory of Alcfrith, a king and a son of Oswiuing. Pray for them, their sins, their souls.)
Translation is not difficult because the early English inscription contains clear ancestors of modern words: thissig for ‘this’, beacn for ‘beacon’ or ‘pillar’, thun for ‘thin’ or ‘slender’, setton for ‘set up’, aft for ‘after’, ean for ‘one’, kyniing for ‘king’, sinna for ‘sin’ and sawhula for ‘soul’. What is mysterious – and striking – is the script used for these words.
Runes were clearly thought to be more intelligible than the Roman alphabet to the people who lived around Bewcastle. The letters were also much easier to carve, being straight chisel strokes rather than the rounded sort needed for the uncials used in the Lindisfarne Gospels. Based on an order of Roman letters that differs from that of the conventional Latin alphabet, the oldest form of the runic alphabet is known as ‘futhark’ because it was derived from the sounds represented by the first six letters of a Scandinavian-Germanic version of it – /f/ (), /u/ (), /th/ (), /a/ (), /r/ () and /k/ (). The letters were thought to be intrinsically magical and that belief is echoed in the phrase ‘reading the runes’. In Germania, the companion volume to his Agricola, Tacitus described how this was done:
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nbsp; They break off a branch from a fruit tree and slice it into strips; they distinguish these by certain runes and throw them, as fortune will have it, onto a white cloth. Then the priest . . . or family father . . . after praying to the gods . . . picks up three of them, one at a time, and reads their meaning from the runes carved on them.
Twenty-five miles due west from Bewcastle, at Ruthwell, the other great Anglian high cross is also inscribed with runes. Around the vine scrolls on one face of the shaft there are fragments of a remarkable poem, probably the earliest work in English to be preserved. The full text is kept in Italy in a manuscript known as The Vercelli Book. Known as The Dream of the Rood, the narrative is told by the cross upon which Christ was crucified and, after thirteen centuries, its power is undimmed:
Almighty God stripped himself,
When he willed to mount the gallows,
Courageous before all men,
[I dared not] bend.
I [lifted up] a powerful king,
The Lord of Heaven I dared not tilt.
Men insulted both of us together;
I was drenched with blood poured from the man’s side.
The shafts of the Bewcastle and Ruthwell crosses were carved as each lay on the ground supported by bearer beams. When it had been completed, the shaft was winched upright and slotted into a base socket cut from a large and heavy piece of stone. Often all that survives of high crosses are these immovable sockets. Usually the cross-piece was made separately and fitted onto the top of the shaft with a tenon joint. Ruthwell’s cross was cast down and broken by religious reformers in the middle of the seventeenth century. Left out in the churchyard under the ancient yews for almost 200 years, the pieces were collected by Henry Duncan, a local antiquary (and, incidentally, inventor of the savings bank) and the cross was re-erected in the small church. These two monuments are great treasures – the best-preserved examples of Anglo-Saxon high crosses in Britain and a testament to the vigour of Bernician Christianity.
Bernician politics of the eighth century made for a less impressive spectacle. After the death of Aldfrith in 705, civil war appears to have broken out. A series of kings came and went but the power, or at least the appearance of power, of the Northumbrian military machine protected their feuding kingdom from incursion from either the Pictish north or Mercian south. In fact, expansion westward continued beyond Ruthwell and Bernician bishops came to govern the old see of Whithorn. Their names were odd – Peohthelm means ‘Leader of the Picts’ and Peohtwine, ‘Friend of the Picts’. Galloway is some way south of Pictland but perhaps the hill peoples spoke a dialect of Old Welsh which sounded Pictish to a Bernician ear or perhaps they were merely pagans.
* * *
Caedmon
Bede told the story of Caedmon, a shepherd who tended the flocks of the monastery at Whitby. In a dream, he composed a hymn to God, embellishing it upon waking. When taken to the Abbess Hilda, he was allowed to learn from the scholars and musicians and appears himself to have taken holy orders. Caedmon is a native name but he may have been bilingual in Old Welsh and Early English. Along with The Dream of the Rood, the hymn is one of the very earliest examples of English poetry to survive:
Hail now the holder of Heaven’s realm,
That architect’s might, his mind’s many ways,
Lord forever and Father of glory,
Ultimate crafter of all wonders,
Holy-maker who hoisted the heavens
To roof the heads of the human race,
And fashioned land for the legs of man,
Liege of the worldborn, Lord almighty.
* * *
By 759, Aethelwald Moll had made himself king of Northumbria. Not a descendant of Aethelfrith and probably a Deiran aristocrat and not a Bernician, he marched an army north to eliminate a rival claimant. In the heartland of Bernicia ‘a severe battle’, the Battle of Eildon, was fought by the River Tweed. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle added that the armies clashed at a place called Edwinscliff and that Oswin, possibly a Bernician rebel, was killed somewhere in the shadow of the Eildon Hills. Dere Street crosses the Tweed near the old Roman fort at Trimontium and there the ground descends steeply to the river on either bank. The precise location of Edwinscliff is no longer known but it is likely that Aethelwald Moll had fought a battle to deal with a Bernician uprising in the Tweed Valley.
Hardship followed the victory at the Eildon Hills. Chroniclers only occasionally comment on the weather – most are concerned with war, royal succession and events affecting the Church. But the winter of 763–764 was bitter with heavy snowfall and an intense cold which kept the snow on the ground long into the spring. Such forage as there was for animals will have run out and those that could scrape down to the lifeless grass will have found little to sustain themselves. The consequent slaughter of stock will have staved off starvation in the early months of the year but stored up problems for the immediate future. A late spring and the likely effects of a rapid snowmelt as temperatures at last climbed will have delayed sowing and perhaps washed away such seed as was planted. Famine gripped the land for at least a year and disease followed malnourishment.
It may be that the brutal winter also had political consequences. A year later Aethelwald Moll was deposed and tonsured. That meant being forced to become a monk and retire from public life to the seclusion of a monastery. In the same Book of Life at Durham which records the brief reign of the Rheged princess, Rieinmelth, Aethelwald Moll is noted not as a king but an abbot.
In the shape of King Alchred, a direct descendant of Ida of Bamburgh, the Bernicians returned to power. There followed a series of short reigns of kings who were deposed and tonsured, exiled or murdered. Mercia and its long-lived rulers dominated southern Britain in the second half of the eighth century. Offa (757–796) was tremendously ambitious, wealthy and famous, with economic and diplomatic contacts in both the Muslim world and eastern Europe. In some of his charters, he appeared to arrogate to himself the title, Rex Anglorum, ‘King of the English’.
In 789, a minor event signalled that the world was about to change. Here is the entry in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle:
In this year King Beorhtric married Offa’s daughter Eadburh and in his days there came for the first time three ships of the Northmen (from Horthaland) and then the reeve rode to them and wished to force them to the king’s residence, for he did not know who they were; and they slew him. Those were the first ships of the Danish men which came to the land of the English.
Four years later the Northmen, seaborne war bands from Scandinavia (Horthaland is in western Norway) who became known as the Vikings, attacked Northumbria. The History of the Kings of Britain, a chronicle continued and edited by Symeon of Durham, recorded these shocking events:
In the same year the pagans from the north-eastern regions came with a naval force to Britain like stinging hornets and spread on all sides like dire wolves robbed, tore and slaughtered not only beasts of burden, sheep and oxen but even priests and deacons and companies of monks and nuns. And they came to the Church of Lindisfarne, laid everything waste with grievous plundering, trampled the holy places with polluted steps, dug up the altars and seized all the treasures of the holy church. They killed some of the brothers, took some away with them in fetters, many they drove out, naked and loaded with insults, some they drowned in the sea.
So began the era of the Vikings, the raiders described by terrified monks as ‘The Sons of Death’. Their attacks and invasions transformed British history but the story of that process in what was to become Scotland is fragmentary. If the chroniclers are to be trusted, there were very few raids in Galloway, even fewer on the eastern coasts of Scotland north of the Forth and only one major incident in the late ninth century north of the mouth of the Tweed when the nunnery at Coldingham was attacked and burned. Vikings seemed to have sailed to targets to the south.
While it seems that the early assaults on churches such as Lindisfarne were motivated by the availability of portable and valuable loot, th
ere were other attractions. Some raids were timed to take place at Christian festivals when Vikings could be sure that gold, silver and gem-studded treasures would be on display and not hidden away. But the traditional image of horn-helmeted (the headgear is the invention of the nineteenth century, no such items have ever been found) berserkers carrying bags of swag out of burning churches is at best incomplete. What consistently attracted Viking raids, long after the valuables had run out, was something much less dramatic, much less eye-catching for the chroniclers. Slaves were in great demand in the eighth and ninth centuries, especially in Moslem Europe and the east. With their superb longships and sea-craft, the Vikings had the unrivalled ability to abduct people and transport them quickly for sale to distant markets and customers. And many slave raids, savage though they were, will have gone unreported.
Irish sources are clear that feast days were chosen not so much for the gold plate (never unwelcome) but much more because of the ready availability of a large number of people gathered in one place, as potential slaves. Pilgrims came to churches from some distance on saints’ days, always held at the same time each year and therefore easily predictable, and these helpful concentrations of people made obvious targets for the Viking slave masters.
The Faded Map: The Lost Kingdoms of Scotland Page 26