The Faded Map: The Lost Kingdoms of Scotland (17 page)

Gildas is untypically clear in this passage, stating that not only were the Ambrosians a noble family, Romano-British rather than native (in implied contrast with the Vortigern) but also that they ‘had worn the purple’. This may mean a connection to Magnus Maximus or Constantine III, both usurper-emperors with British origins, or, more likely, that Gildas intended to convey that
Ambrosius Aurelianus was one of the old senatorial class or perhaps even someone with the inherited rank of military tribune. Formally both were entitled to wear the
toga praetexta
, a toga with a broad purple border.

‘[W]ith the Lord acceding’, Ambrosius defeated the Saxons, wrote Gildas, and this is unequivocal evidence that the general was a Christian. Moreover, it suggests that he came from the more urbanised south. In the fourth and fifth centuries, Christianity in Britain tended to flourish in the towns (the term
pagan
is from the Latin
paganus
, ‘a country person’, and is also the origin of ‘peasant’) and there is a persuasive argument for locating Ambrosius around Amesbury in Wiltshire. The place-name seems to be derived from the family name and it may have been close to the power base from which attacks were launched against the Saxons in the east.

Gildas concludes with a passing observation that, after the success of Ambrosius’ campaigns, hostilities with the Saxons
ebbed and flowed with neither side gaining a decisive advantage. ‘[O]ur citizens’ won battles and sometimes ‘the enemies conquered’. With the beginnings of a sense of there being a common front in the war for England, a new word came into currency.
Combrogi
meant ‘fellow countrymen’ or, more precisely, ‘those who share a common border’. The Saxons began to recognise the term and talked of the
cumber
, ‘the native British’. It survives in many place-names spread all over the map, from Camberwell in south London to Cumberbatch in Cheshire. The most obvious relic is Cumbria and its predecessor, Cumberland.

Brittany and Amesbury

Place names often record no more than description or location – Newtown, Ford, Rockcliffe, Castletown and so on – but sometimes they remember people. Roman emperors were fond of naming cities after themselves, perhaps the most famous example being Constantinople, and it may be that more obscure figures in Dark Ages Britain are commemorated in this way. In his magisterial
The Age of Arthur,
John Morris traced a pattern of place-names in the south-east of England which may relate to the native general of the fifth century, Ambrosius Aurelianus. So-called ‘Ambros’ names only occur there – Amesbury, Amberley and Ambrosden. More certain is a clutch of names across the Channel in Brittany. By the 540s and 550s, a series of migrations from Britain had led to the establishment of Little Britain or Brittany in the former Roman district of Armorica. The Breton language is related to Cornish (although some scholars now believe it preserves remnants of Gaulish as well) and Welsh and a scatter of place-names, such as Bretteville or Briteville, reaches as far east as Normandy.

Gradually
combrogi
also mutated into the Welsh word for Wales, Cymru, and Cymry for the Welsh. Its first surviving appearance is in a praise poem to a seventh-century Welsh king, Cadwallon, and it is spelled as Kymry. Although the word slowly became dominant in common speech, the poets clung for centuries to the past when they sang of Brython for Wales and Brythoniaid for the Welsh. But in reality the greater part of Britain was to be conquered by the Saxons and England would become Lloegr, ‘the Lost Lands’.

If, indeed, the wars of Ambrosius Aurelianus concluded with the sort of stalemate suggested by Gildas, then life in the west of Britain will have carried on relatively undisturbed. Archaeologists have found evidence of long-distance trade – Mediterranean pottery dating to the fifth and sixth centuries in North Wales, Ireland and the south-western and western coasts of Scotland. Many of these pots and their precious contents were probably delivered by ships operating out of the Biscay and Brittany ports and, in the
Life of St Columba
, describing the second half of the sixth century, the community of monks on Iona waited for ‘Gaulish ships arriving from the provinces of the Gauls’. All sorts of goods were traded on what were almost certainly regular visits – wine for communion and colours for illuminated manuscripts from as far away as Syria and even India.

Ideas also travelled in the Gaulish ships and some seem to have found landfall in Galloway. With his community at Marmoutier, near Tours in Gaul, St Martin is often seen as the
founder of western monasticism. He was revered and influential in the early church and the survival of a fascinating group of inscribed stones in south-western Scotland strongly suggests the long reach of his teachings. At Kirkmadrine (a metathesis for Kirkmartin), two bishops were remembered on one memorial. Viventius and Mavorius appear to have led a congregation of some substance in the Rhinns of Galloway, the most westerly peninsula. It is thought that the Kirkmadrine stones date to 500 but even earlier is the inscription to a man called Latinus found at Whithorn. It listed three generations of his family, presumably all Christians, and close by the remains of an early cemetery have been found.

The most famous name associated with early Christianity in Galloway belongs to Ninian. First mentioned by Bede, he is said to have converted the southern Picts and was a saintly bishop of the British. His church was built in stone, ‘in the Roman manner,
Ad Candidam Casam
’, at the White House. In the later seventh century, it became known as Whithorn when the Angles took power in Galloway. Scholars periodically dispute the existence of Ninian but there can be little doubt that Christianity first entered the north through Galloway and moved over the watershed hills to the Borders and the Forth and Clyde Valley. As it declined and shrivelled, the city of Carlisle and its church appear to have had less and less influence.

In his monastic life, St Martin’s inspiration was a group of Near Eastern ascetics known as the Desert Fathers. To escape persecution in the towns and cities and to find a more solitary, undistracted and contemplative life, they sought out remote, even harsh, places in the deserts of the interior. Lacking seas of inhospitable sand to surround and isolate a community of monks in Western Europe, St Martin substituted the wildwood of central Gaul. Deep in the forests at Marmoutier he and his brothers could shut out the temporal world and seek communion with God. When Martin’s ideas travelled north, the wastes of the sea replaced the tangle of the woods but the name the Gaels gave to these remote, windswept places remembered their eastern
origins. These remote communities were called
diseartan
, ‘deserts’, and the town of Dysart on the coast of Fife is derived from the memory of the ascetics of Syria and Palestine.

Saints

It was not until the eleventh century that the papacy took control of the making of saints. Before Urban II insisted that only the pope could confer sainthood, it had been a matter for local prelates and local tradition. In the early church, martyrdom automatically made the victim a saint but, after the fourth century, the definition became more elastic. When the quality of ‘heroic virtue’ was observed in monks and priests and occasionally in the laity, that could, in itself, be a qualification. The notion behind this was best illustrated by ascetics – those who willingly suffered all manner of privation for their faith. Their holy suffering was seen as analogous to the torture and often appalling deaths of real martyrs and, after a suitable period of what was known as ‘bloodless martyrdom’, they could become saints. In the Middle Ages, the Congregation for the Causes of Saints was formalised and a centralised bureaucracy was set up in Rome. Cases were tried as in a court of law with the Postulator arguing the case for conferring sainthood and the Devil’s Advocate taking up the case against.

The island of Iona is perhaps the most famous
diseart
and sources talk of a community which did much together under the guidance of their abbots but whose members lived alone in cells built of stone and turf. The word monk, from the Greek
monos
meaning ‘single’, originally described a solitary person.

One of the most remote
diseartan
is on the island of Canna. Sgor nam Ban-Naomhan, ‘the Skerry of the Holy Women’, was home to a convent of nuns, probably founded in the seventh century. Their
diseart
is cut off from the main island by a steep escarpment and was only easily accessible by sea and then only in fine weather.

Behind a drystone walled enclosure was a group of small buildings, almost certainly monastic cells. Some huddled against the enclosure wall seeking shelter from the Atlantic winds.
Others, perhaps eight in all, were arranged around a well-house and a building where saddle querns (for grinding corn) have been found. These holy women must have suffered in the hard and unrelenting winters, the wind-driven rain finding its way into their bare cells, and they were genuine ascetics anxious to know their God through extraordinary privation. It is not clear how they survived or for how long or where the corn for their querns came from. Perhaps they depended on the kindness of the islanders or Canna or on an aristocratic patron or on the gifts of visitors.

The Sgor nam Ban-Naomha never lost its atmosphere of sanctity. Pilgrims seeking cures were brought into the ruins of the ancient enclosure as late as the nineteenth century. Companions laid the sick and the crippled on stone beds known as
leaba crabhach
, ‘sacred couches’. It was an enduring belief which brought the pilgrims down the dangerously steep path through the scree. The prayers and exemplary lives of generations of the holy women had drawn God nearer to the drystone walls of the Sgor and imbued its very ground with a powerful sanctity. By simply being there, in contact with its stones and soil, the pilgrims could summon the help of the Almighty to ease or even cure the suffering of the infirm. More than that, the soil itself in such a place was thought to have the power to cleanse bodies of earthly sins. In the Middle Ages many wealthy noblemen gave generous gifts to Scottish abbeys and churches in exchange for the right to be buried inside the precincts and often as close to the high altar as possible.

In their remote and rainswept
diseartan
the early monks and nuns of the north of Britain brought a different Christianity into being. It stood in high contrast with the ministries of the bishops and priest of the cities and towns of the south who engaged with the world and all its sins and temptations. But it would be misleading to think of two versions of Christianity moving in different doctrinal directions. Their approaches to God and their sense of a Christian life were very different but not their fundamental beliefs.

St Gildas

The author of
On the Ruin of Britain
has a more rounded historical personality than virtually any other figure of the fifth and sixth centuries. Ordained in the church, he composed a monastic rule and was also the subject of an early biography. ‘
The Life of Gildas’
was written in the ninth century by a monk based in Brittany at a place called Rhuys. It tells of Gildas’ birth in Alt Clut, Dumbarton Rock on the Clyde, the kingdom which later became Strathclyde. He was sent to the monastery of Llan Illtud Fawr in Wales and later to Ireland. After his studies were complete, Gildas came back to Strathclyde and the Old North where he preached and converted pagans. Towards the end of his life, he came to Brittany and settled on the island of Rhuys where he lived as a hermit. Later he founded the monastery which eventually produced his biography. Gildas’ story shows a Celtic west where there was routine movement over considerable distances and, with the exception of his short stay in Ireland, movement between communities speaking dialects of Old Welsh. Breton was probably introduced into the north-western corner of France by migration from Cornwall after the Saxon invasions.

Much of Gildas’ holy rage arose from what he saw as a badly managed contest between Christian British kings and pagan Saxon invaders. If only the native dynasties would cease their squabbling and sinfulness, then the hosts of the Lord could unite and drive the heathens into the sea. The early gains made by the Saxons in the east appear to have been consolidated and a truce was holding at the time Gildas wrote. He spoke of ‘our present security’ but nowhere does he explain how the peace was won. The sole clue is a reference to a final battle:

After this, sometimes our countrymen, sometimes the enemy, won the field . . . until the year of the siege of Badon Hill, when took place the last almost, though not the least slaughter of our cruel foes, which was (I am sure) forty four years and one month after the landing of the Saxons, and also the time of my own nativity.

Scholarship conventionally dates the composition of
On the Ruin of Britain
to the 540s and sets the year of Gildas’ birth as 516 – the year, therefore, of the siege of Badon Hill. Who fought this action, gained this mighty victory which stemmed the westward rush of the Saxon tide and created ‘our present security’? As usual Gildas does not say but Nennius’
History of the Britons
offers an explanation, details of a victorious campaign and the name of perhaps the most famous warrior in British history:

Then it was, that the magnanimous Arthur, with all the kings and military forces of Britain, fought against the Saxons. And though there were many more noble than himself, yet he was twelve times chosen their commander, and was as often conqueror. The first battle in which he was engaged, was at the mouth of the River Gleni, the second, third, fourth and fifth, were on another river, by the Britons called Duglas, in the region of Linnuis. The sixth on the River Bassas. The seventh in the Wood of Celidon, which the Britons call Cat Coit Celidon. The eighth was near Guinnion Castle, where Arthur bore the image of the Holy Virgin, the mother of God, upon his shield, and through the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the Holy Mary, put the Saxons to flight, and pursued them the whole day with great slaughter. The ninth was at the City of the Legion, which is called Cair Lion. The tenth was on the banks of the River Tribruit. The eleventh was on the mountain Bregion, which we call Cat Bregion. The twelfth was a most severe contest, when Arthur penetrated to the Hill of Badon. In this engagement, nine hundred and forty fell by his hand alone, no one but the Lord affording him assistance. In all these engagements the Britons were successful. For no strength can avail against the will of the Almighty.