The Faded Map: The Lost Kingdoms of Scotland (25 page)

A central concept of the
Leges
was blood-price. Called
cro
in Gaelic and
galanas
in Old Welsh, it consisted of a table of precise amounts to be paid in cattle as restitution for the killing of a man. From kings to slaves, the tariffs were tabulated with great clarity but it cannot have been as tidy as it seems. The notion of
galanas
developed for sensible reasons – as an attempt to avoid bloodshed and feud – but, no matter how many cattle were offered, some men will still have thirsted for and taken vengeance.

Women were heavily discounted in the tables of blood-price and generally reckoned as worth half of a man of equivalent social status. For the price of one king, two queens could be murdered. But, even if they were cheaper, women were not without legal rights. Perhaps harking back to the uncertain customs of a pre-Christian past, marriage was seen more as a contract than an absolute sacrament. If a husband was not faithful and constant or was unreasonably severe, even cruel, divorce was permitted and the injured wife could expect to be legally compensated in any settlement.

The Welsh Alphabet

Celtic languages do not sit easily in the mouths of monoglot English speakers and pronunciation is made even more difficult by a different alphabet. All those consonant clusters can be alarming and Welsh crossword puzzles have larger boxes so that dd or ch letters can be accommodated. Most letters of the alphabet are similar to English but there is no k, q or z in Welsh and y is a vowel. Here is a list of the letters not used or heard in English:

There are significant differences in usage between South and North Wales and all sorts of accents are used – the grave, acute and diaeresis are the most common. Both Welsh and Gaelic are very beautiful to listen to, especially in poetry and song, and their rhythms are designed to be remembered.

Amongst the
taeogion
, there were more everyday obligations and those owed to kings were detailed. A food rent known as
cylch
was due to the royal war band, presumably when it rode into the
maenor
or was somewhere nearby. By their nature, food rents were seasonal and had to be collected and consumed on a
peripatetic basis. Until modern times and the advent of easier transport and refrigeration, royal courts were in the habit of eating and drinking their way around the countryside, like a swarm of Well-Born locusts.

Hunting appears to have become a royal passion in the Dark Ages. When kings wished to chase the deer and other game,
taeogion
were obliged to feed their pack of hunting dogs, carve paths through the forest (this sounds as though it might be a reference to beating out game rather than finding a way through a primeval and long gone wildwood) and to house members of the royal party. To the Well-Born, the farmsteads of the
taeogion
were bound to render a food rent known as
gwestfa
, a portion of which could, in turn, be handed on to the ever-hungry royal household.

The
Leges inter Brettos et Scottos
was not a unique apparatus. In the late seventh century, the law codes of King Ine of Wessex made exceptional provision for the Old Welsh-speaking communities in the south of England. What is surprising about the Scottish
Leges
is their longevity. Up to the tenth century and on into the medieval period, long after the Celts of England had all but vanished from the historical record, there persisted a need for the recognition of native British legal status.

The differences between the Anglo-Saxon settlers and the native Celts were of course also cultural. In what is now eastern and southern England, the conversion of the Germanic peoples happened very gradually, only beginning with the papal mission of St Augustine to Kent in 597, more than 150 years after the first arrivals, what historians used to call the
Adventus Saxonum
. Elsewhere in the post-Roman west, it was very different. The process of conversion was completed very rapidly indeed. Only fifteen years after the fall of the last Roman ruler of the province of Gaul, King Clovis effected the mass entry of the Frankish nation into the church of Christ. But, over much of Britannia, the Baptised natives faced the armies of the Heathen invaders for many generations, long enough for deep enmities and divisions to solidify. This fault line was also emphasised by power politics and it may explain why the emerging dialects of English
borrowed only a tiny dusting of vocabulary from the Celtic language of near neighbours. These were people who had developed an ancient, accurate way of describing the detail of a climate, a landscape and its flora and fauna. Colonists often gratefully adopt native terms for things foreign to their experience but, in Britannia, this simply did not happen. The reasons are almost impossible to fathom but perhaps the fact of a long-lasting religious divide offers a partial explanation.

What is certain is that a northern dialect of English was established in the south-eastern quadrant of Dark Ages Scotland and it gradually became the language of the Lowlands. Old Welsh
shrank back into the hills and high valleys and, although it lingered for many centuries, the English of the low country and its fertile farms and fields was without doubt the language of the future. And the political and cultural phenomenon of Bernicia was the catalyst which forced most Scots to adopt it.

What Happened to Welsh?

Perhaps the most intractable of all the mysteries swirling around the history of the Dark Ages concerns language. Around the year 400, the fading Roman province of Britannia had a population of between three and four million. It appears that most of them, the overwhelming majority who lived in the countryside, spoke dialects of Old Welsh but could probably get by in Latin when they visited markets in towns or had any dealings with the army or the provincial government. In the next 150 years, the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and other Germanic peoples came, conquered and settled. And, despite holding on to its Celtic language throughout the Roman occupation (unlike France or Spain where languages based on Latin developed), most of Britannia quickly became English-speaking. Why? The new settlers cannot have been very numerous – small groups of men in small boats, perhaps as few as 50,000 and no more than 200,000, tiny percentage of the existing Celtic population. What happened? Did all of the natives flee to the west or die of the plague or fall at the hands of the invaders? Surely not? Bernicia may offer a hint of an answer. Where political and military fusion took place, cultural fusion followed and, amongst the different dialects of Old Welsh, Early English became a lingua franca. Or perhaps the answer is even simpler. Colonised populations often have to adopt the language of the colonisers whether they are Romans on Hadrian’s Wall or the tiny number of soldiers and managers employed by the East India Company to govern a vast subcontinent. Where a spear or a gun pointed, words followed.

S
UMMER WAS THE
battle season. War was best waged when the grass grew and could feed grazing cavalry ponies, when the weather was better and when men could sleep out around their campfires without a winter chill numbing their bones after the embers had ceased to glow. And, on long summer days when the light died only slowly in the west, armies could advance great distances quickly, appearing as if from nowhere, surprising their unprepared enemies with sheer speed. Farmers could fight in the summer. Between the times of sowing and harvest, they could take up their spears and join the retinue of their lords, the well-armed, horse-riding Well-born. Politics brought armies to the summer battlefields of Dark Ages Scotland. When rival kings contested control of territory or settled a disputed succession, they rode out with their war bands and those who owed military service followed. The chroniclers relate that the green grass of June, July and August was often spattered with gore.

Raiding was another matter. Certainly summer soldiers plundered but, for a society which counted its wealth and measured its prestige in livestock, especially cattle, winter was the time to saddle ponies and set out on raiding expeditions. Even though rain, wind, snow and mud will have dampened much of the excitement and discouraged extravagant displays of prowess, winter was better because the cows, sheep and other beasts were more readily available. The ancient rhythms of transhumance
took the flocks and herds up into the high pastures from April to October and they scattered widely over the unfenced moorland. It was only when herdsmen brought their animals down off the hills at the end of autumn to the inbye fields of their farms and settlements that they were corralled in one place – and could be stolen.

As the summer days of 603 shortened, one of the greatest kings of the west was planning a raiding party. The rock of Dunadd rises almost sheer out of the Moine Mhor, the flat, sodden wastes of the Great Moss. On the banks of the meandering River Add, which flows into the Atlantic at Crinan, at the northern end of the Kintyre Peninsula, the citadel of Dunadd was one of the principal seats of the kings of Dalriada – and surely their most impressive stronghold.

Now Dunadd is a windswept, bare outcrop. But at the summit there are traces of departed grandeur. Cut into a flat stone is the shape of a footprint. Often puddled with rain, it once had a powerful, venerable and central importance in the inauguration of kings. Perhaps symbolising royal control of the land, it was where a king probably stood when he took an investiture oath. Nearby is a rock-cut basin for libations, a carving of a boar which was perhaps an animal totem for the prehistoric peoples who lived around Dunadd and an inscription in the magical treelanguage known as Ogham. When a new king stood on the footprint rock, he looked out at a deeply sacred landscape, a place where men had communed with their gods for millennia. At nearby Kilmartin there lies a series of burial monuments and standing stones which still dominate. Mysterious rock carvings can be found in the hills around these valleys, marking the margins of a sacred landscape and the remains of henges and an earthwork known as a
cursus
will have been even more obvious in the early seventh century. Those who watched the ceremonies will have understood that the kings of Dalriada were part of traditions which stretched back beyond mere memory, to a time of gods and heroes.

Into the Christian era, the links between sacred and temporal
power emerged in the historical record. Writing only fifty years after the reign of Aedan macGabrain, Adomnan compiled a hagiography of St Columba. Almost without exception the cults of popular early saints were established by biographies which listed their miracles, prophesies and the important details of their exemplary lives. Later canonised himself, Adomnan was the ninth abbot of Iona after Columba and his claims for ‘the praiseworthy man’ will have greatly enhanced the prestige of his monastery.

One of the most striking assertions in the
Life of St Columba
is that Aedan was consecrated as King of Dalriada by the saint. In a ceremony of anointing and blessing, probably modelled on biblical accounts of the priest, Samuel, and kings David and Solomon of Israel, the early church appears to have insisted upon, or at least aspired to, a central role in the power politics of the day. Almost two centuries before Charlemagne was surprised to be crowned Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III as he rose from praying at Christmas Mass in 800 in Rome, Adomnan wrote of a similar ritual in Dalriada. It may be that Aedan regarded the ceremony with the same scepticism as Charlemagne but he may also have valued the additional buttress of ecclesiastical – and sacred – support for his authority.