The Faded Map: The Lost Kingdoms of Scotland (39 page)

A year later, all of this pomp and circumstance was forgotten and the diplomacy of the amphitheatres lay in ruins. Olaf, king of the Dublin Vikings, had been campaigning and making conquests in Ireland. It may be that he had a claim on Northumbria and resented Athelstan’s takeover. At all events, an alliance was brokered with Constantine of Scotland and the king of Strathclyde. Doubtless both had tired of dancing attendance amongst the Roman ruins.

Vast armies were mustered. It was said that Olaf sailed with a huge fleet of 615 longships and they clashed in 937 at a place called Brunanburh. The name is lost but two locations have been advanced and each seems equally plausible. The Dublin fleet may have sailed due east and made landfall to fight at the Wirral, on the northern borders of Athelstan’s kingdom of Mercia. Or they may have struck north-east to the head of the Solway and met the southern army at Burnswark, the old prehistoric hill fort and the site of Roman siege camps. Toponymic evidence leans towards a great battle at Burnswark but, wherever it took place, Brunanburh was an emphatic victory for Athelstan and the English. Its importance lay not in its immediate effects but rather in the battle lines drawn. On one side stood the Celtic nations of the north and west with their Viking allies while on the other were the ranks of an Anglo-Saxon army. The Welsh bards saw Brunanburh as a disaster, the last realistic hope of driving the Sais back into the sea and the turning historical moment when Celtic Britain was divided. Perhaps it was.

The Battle of Brunanburh

By the tenth century,
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
was becoming poetical, something of a welcome departure from its customary terseness. Here is the text of a beautifully written piece of alliterative verse about the great battle:

Here King Athelstan, leader of warriors,

Ring-giver of men, and also his brother,

The aetheling, Edmund, struck life-long glory

In strife round Brunanburh, clove the shield-wall,

Hacked the war-lime, with hammers’ leavings,

Edward’s offspring, as was natural to them

By ancestry, that in frequent conflict

They defend land, treasures and homes

Against every foe. The antagonists succumbed,

The nation of Scots and sea-men

Fell doomed. The field darkened

With soldiers’ blood, after the morning-time

The sun, that glorious star,

Bright candle of God, the Lord Eternal,

Glided over the depths, until the noble creature

Sank to rest. There lay many a soldier

Of the Men of the North, shot over shield,

Taken by spears; likewise Scottish also

Sated, weary of war. All day long

The West Saxons with elite cavalry

Pressed in the tracks of the hateful nation,

With mill-sharp blades severely hacked from behind

Those who fled battle. The Mercians refused

Hard hand-play to none of the heroes

Who with Olaf, over the mingling of waves,

Doomed in fight, sought out land

In the bosom of a ship. Five young

Kings lay on the battle-field,

Put to sleep by swords; likewise also seven

Of Olaf’s jarls, countless of the raiding-army

Of Seamen and Scots. There the ruler of

Northmen, compelled by necessity,

Was put to flight, to ship’s prow,

With a small troop. The boat

Was pushed afloat; the king withdrew,

Saved life, over the fallow flood.

There also likewise, the aged Constantine

Came north to his kith by flight.

The hoary man of war had no cause to exult

In the clash of blades, he was shorn of his kinsmen,

Deprived of friends, on the meeting-place of peoples,

Cut off in strife, and left his son

On the place of slaughter, mangled by wounds,

Young in battle. The grey-haired warrior,

Old crafty one, had no cause to boast

In that clash of blades – no more had Olaf

Cause to laugh, with the remnants of their raiding-army,

That they were better in works of war

On the battle-field, in the conflict of standards,

The meeting of spears, the mixing of weapons,

The encounter of men, when they played

Against Edward’s sons on the field of slaughter.

The Northmen, bloody survivors of darts,

Disgraced in spirit, departed on Ding’s Mere,

In nailed boats over deep water,

To seek out Dublin and their own land again.

Likewise the brothers both together,

King and aetheling, exultant in war,

Sought kith, the land of Wessex.

They left behind to divide the corpses,

To enjoy the carrion, the dusky-coated,

Horny-beaked black raven,

And the grey-coated eagle, white-rumped,

Greedy war-hawk, and the wolf,

Grey beast in the forest. Never yet in this island

Was there a greater slaughter

Of people felled by the sword’s edges,

Before this, as books tell us,

Old authorities, since Angles and Saxons

Came here from the east,

Sought out Britain over the broad ocean,

Warriors eager for fame, proud war-smiths,

Overcame the Welsh, seized the country.

In any case, there was no seismic change in the political landscape after 937. Athelstan died two years later and was succeeded by capable kings. Olaf briefly became king of Northumbria and raided into East Lothian where he died in 941. Some said it was in vengeance for his desecration of the shrine of St Baldred. Northumbria was reduced to the status of an earldom by King Eadred of Wessex in 954 although its boundaries were still extensive in the east, stretching to the Lammermuirs and probably beyond.

Strathclyde continued to act independently and to control Cumbria. There is a persistent tradition that Dunmail, ‘the last king of Cumbria’ (commemorated in a retail park near Workington), fought a battle at Dunmail Raise in 945. A large cairn marks the site on the pass between Thirlmere and Grasmere and it was also a meeting place on the old county boundary between Cumberland and Westmoreland. Dunmail was probably Dyfnwal III of Strathclyde and his opponents are reputed to have been on different sides at Brunanburh. The likelihood is that the earls of Northumbria were pushing westwards with the encouragement of their overlords in the south.

Whatever the reality behind the mists on Dunmail Raise, Strathclyde was aggressive elsewhere in the tenth century. King Amdarch attacked and killed Constantine’s successor, Culen, and his brother Eochaid somewhere near Abington at the headwaters of the Clyde.
The Chronicle of the Kings of Scotland
states that Amdarch acted ‘for the sake of his daughter’. Perhaps she had been raped.

By 973, Kenneth II, King of Scots, had persuaded Edgar of England to cede part of northern Bernicia to him and the territory to the north of the Lammermuirs became part of an expanding Scotland – but not until another elaborate ceremony of submission had taken place. This time it was marine as well as Roman. Here is an extract from the Melrose Chronicle:

In the year 973, Edgar the peaceful king of the English was at last consecrated king of the whole island, with the greatest honour and glory, in the city of Bath . . .

Some time afterwards, after sailing around northern Britain with a huge fleet, he landed at the city of Chester; and eight underkings met him, as he commended them, and swore that they would stand by him as his vassals, both on land and on sea: namely Kenneth, king of Scots; Malcolm, king of the Cumbrians; Maccus, king of very many islands; and another five: – Dufnal, Sigfrith, Higuel, Jacob, Iuchil.

With these one day he entered a boat, and, placing them at the oars, he himself took the rudder’s helm, and skilfully steered along the course of the River Dee, and sailed from the palace to the monastery of St John the Baptist, the whole crowd of earls and nobles accompanying him in similar craft. And after praying there, he returned to the palace with the same pomp: and as he entered it he is related to have said to the nobles that then only could any of his successors boast that he was king of England, when he obtained the display of such honours, with so many kings submitting to him.

At Caddonlea, a few hundred yards south of the modern village of Clovenfords, which lies to the west of Galashiels, there is a wide and level area of haughland divided by the Caddon Water. A thousand years ago, a great army mustered on its banks. From the north, down Gala Water, rode the war bands of Malcolm II, the successor of Kenneth who had rowed Edgar, and down the Tweed from the west came the host of King Owain of Strathclyde. The humiliations of Chester would soon be banished to history.

In their tents on Caddonlea the kings and their captains planned a campaign – a war in the east against Bernicia, now a province of the English kings. As plans were laid, news of the arrival of the great host crackled like wildfire down the Tweed, undoubtedly reaching the ears of the Bernician Earl Uhtred. Probably without waiting for a full muster, the Bernicians hurried north from Bamburgh, anxious to keep the Scots and the Strathclyde Welsh out of their rich farming hinterland.

As reports ricocheted east and west, Malcolm and Owain put
on their war gear, struck camp at Caddonlea and moved downriver. They probably crossed the banks and ditches of the Catrail near the Rink fortress and marched into Bernicia when they forded the Tweed below Abbotsford.

Carham is a sleepy hamlet that lies only a few hundred yards beyond another frontier – the modern border between England and Scotland. There, on the banks of the Tweed, the armies clashed. The Bernician spearmen were cut to pieces but it seems that King Owain of Strathclyde was amongst the dead. In the wake of victory, Malcolm II gained all the territory north of the river. Carham did not establish the line of the modern frontier – there were still lands between the Tweed and the Cheviots in Bernician hands – but it did hasten the end of the old kingdom won by Aethelfrith four hundred years before.

Owain was not the last king of Strathclyde. His line lingered for another two generations. By the 1070s, however, the kings of the Scots were at last in control. Here is the entry from the
History of the Kings of England
: ‘For at that time Cumberland was under the dominion of King Malcolm, not through just possession, but through violent subjugation.’

By 1070, Scotland was not yet a complete kingdom. The Norse earls of Orkney were powerful, there were aristocrats in Galloway with royal pretensions and Moray had recently made a king in the figure of Macbeth. But, after Malcolm Canmore’s violent subjugation of Strathclyde, the old frontiers began to fade and the kingdoms they defined retreated into the shadows to be almost forgotten.