The Faded Map: The Lost Kingdoms of Scotland (28 page)

As often in the story of Dark Ages Scotland, place-names offer flickers of light and that of Old Melrose is illuminating. In Bede’s writings, the spelling of Mailros makes the derivation clearer. The second element
ros
is a Gaelic word and it means ‘a promontory’ or ‘peninsula’, a straightforward description of the tongue of land almost encircled by the River Tweed. The first part of the name is harder to understand. In imitation of Christ’s crown of thorns, monks had themselves tonsured, that is, the crown of their heads shaved to leave only a fringe of hair. Aidan’s followers had also been tonsured but in a different way. Known as the
ceudgelt
, this Irish style was thought to have druidic origins and, not only had it signified a holy man for many centuries before the coming of Christianity, it was perhaps more dramatic than what was known as the Roman tonsure. Hair was shaved back from the front of the scalp to a line from ear to ear and left to grow long at the back. In any event, the Gaelic word
maol
came to signify someone who was not only bald but a shaved or shorn monk or more precisely ‘the holy man’s servant’. This last is a reference to Columba and it survives in the popular Scottish Christian name of Malcolm. As
maol-chaluim
, it originally meant ‘a servant of Calum or Columba’ – in other words, ‘a monk’.

What all of this shows is how a place-name can carry a great deal of historical freight and that Melrose means ‘the Promontory of the Monks’ – specifically, monks from Iona. When King
David I refounded the monastery in the twelfth century, he had both the church and the name removed to the site of a village called Fordel two miles upriver. Part of the reason was Old Melrose’s long association with one of Britain’s greatest saints whose cult centre lay beyond the king of Scotland’s control. But all these concerns lay far in the future.

When Aidan’s missionaries began work at Old Melrose, their first task was probably the marking-off of the sacred precinct. The vallum across the neck of the promontory is one of the few features of the monastery still detectable. Against its banks monks may have built their cells and, like them, the church will have been built out of wood. Similar structures from the same period which have been excavated had an A-frame at each gable and stanchions and beams on the long sides to tie them together. The walls would have been made from clay daubed on to woven screens or hurdles or planking driven into the ground. Kings and high lords feasted and slept in wooden halls of the same shape and scale and, when Bede wrote that Benedict Biscop had had the church at Monkwearmouth built in ‘the Roman manner’, he meant that, very unusually, it had been made with dressed stone. Perhaps such stone was robbed out of the nearby Roman fort at Trimontium but no trace of it remains on the site of the old monastery.

Old Melrose was small and its buildings rudimentary, and its comforts were few. In fact discomfort was something the monks actively sought. In a rare flash of genuine colour and character, Bede tells the story of Brother Drythelm:

This man was given a more secluded dwelling in the monastery, so that he could devote himself more freely to the service of his Maker in unbroken prayer. And since this place stands on the bank of a river, he often used to enter it for severe bodily penance, and plunge repeatedly beneath the water while he recited psalms and prayers for as long as he could endure it, standing motionless with the water up to his loins and sometimes to his neck. When he returned to shore, he never removed his
dripping, chilly garments, but let them warm and dry on his body. And in winter, when the half-broken cakes of ice were swirling around him which he had broken to make a place to stand and dip himself in the water, those who saw him used to say, ‘Brother Drythelm (for that was his name), it is wonderful how you can manage to bear such bitter cold’. To which he, being a man of simple disposition and self-restraint, would reply simply: ‘I have known it colder’. And when they said: ‘It is extraordinary that you are willing to practise such severe discipline’, he used to answer: ‘I have seen greater suffering.’ So until the day of his summons from this life he tamed his aged body by daily fasting, inspired by an insatiable longing for the blessings of Heaven, and by his words and his life he helped many people to salvation.

Such lives of constant prayer and extreme privation seem extraordinary now, even faintly ridiculous, but, by enduring severe hypothermia, like Drythelm, monks hoped to induce euphoric, trance-like states as they edged ever closer to death. It was as though they stood in the ante-chamber of Heaven,
within touching distance of glory, almost on the point of meeting their Maker. These episodes were very dangerous and groups of monks almost certainly kept vigil (literally vigilant, on the lookout for signs of danger) with their brothers as they underwent extraordinary suffering in search of purity and a greater knowledge of God. Those watching will have been ready to end these trances before they went too far.

Mortification of the Flesh

The phrase means, literally, ‘putting the flesh to death’. In Christian teaching, it is an idea which appears early, with references in the gospels and from St Paul – ‘Put to death what is earthly in you: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire and covetousness,’ he said. And the way to achieve purity was to deny the body comfort, most commonly food. Fasting became part of most monastic rules. The repeated and deliberate inflicting of pain and discomfort was also practised early and Drythelm’s immersion in the freezing River Tweed was mild compared to some examples. St Dominic Loricatus was said to have given himself 300,000 lashes. Self-flagellation also became common and sometimes it was done publicly. Others, such as St Thomas More and St Ignatius Loyola wore hair shirts and heavy chains. It all seems extreme to us now – holiness measured in blood and pain – and there were certainly those who suffered in order to induce trance-like states of religious ecstasy.

What manner of men were willing to submit themselves to a life of such severity? It appears that many were aristocrats, wellborn people of varying degrees. St Columba was perhaps the best connected – a prince of the royal house of the Cenel Conaill, the rulers of lands in north-west Ireland. When he left in 563 to found a monastery, he took twelve companions with him. A conscious imitation of Christ and his Apostles, it was also a group which included at least two aristocratic relatives – his cousin, Baithene, and his uncle, Ernan. Like them, Columba could trace his lineage from the semi-legendary Irish king, Niall of the Nine Hostages (one for each of the sub-kingdoms he had dominion over) and most of the abbots who ruled in the seventh and into the eighth centuries at Iona were descended from the same line. St Aidan came from the same part of Ireland and, when he came to Bernicia at the request of King Oswald, he may well have brought relatives with him.

Although they seem like family affairs, the early Celtic monasteries were also cosmopolitan and certainly quickly grew famous. Amongst the founding community at Iona after 563, there was a British monk (that is, a man who came from one of the Old Welsh-speaking kingdoms of southern Scotland), a Pictish monk and two Englishmen, Pilu and Genereus. It is important, in this secular age, not to underestimate the magnetic power of saintliness and a place made ever more sacred by the lives and prayers of the holy men who lived there. And islands like Iona and Lindisfarne added to a sense of spirituality, of otherworldliness.

When Aidan founded Old Melrose around 635, his monks will have needed a sponsor to sustain them as they set up the new community. Since King Oswald invited them, it is likely that they
enjoyed royal patronage from the outset. But like Iona and Lindisfarne, Old Melrose will have aimed at self-sufficiency. Aristocrats some of them may have been but they needed to do all sorts of menial jobs for the community to thrive and not require the constant intervention of those not in holy orders. At Iona, there were blacksmiths, woodworkers and a gardener and, at harvest time, the abbot toiled with his brothers in the fields.

Almost all trace of Columba’s monastery at Iona has disappeared except for the vallum and the free-standing stone crosses. They were originally painted in vivid colours and used not only as a focus for worship but also for biblical instruction. Raised in the early eighth century, the beautiful Anglian cross at Ruthwell in Dumfriesshire has four scenes from the gospels and, carved in runic script, a vivid poem about the crucifixion. No remains of the monastery’s crosses have yet been found at Old Melrose but the five discovered at Jedburgh may not all have been placed inside the vallum. These new foundations quickly became a magnet for pilgrims and sometimes crosses were erected as waymarkers and signs that a sacred area was being approached. Around the ancient church at Coldingham on the Berwickshire coast, place-names – at Applincross, Whitecross and Cairncross – remember this habit.

Once pilgrims and more exalted visitors arrived at the gateway through the vallum, their ardent wish was simply to enter the monastery and walk where holy men and saints had walked. Shrines could be visited and touched while praying hard but, by the late seventh century, a fascinating belief had developed. Kings in Scotland began to request burial inside the precinct of the monastery at Iona and other aristocrats followed suit. More specifically, they believed that their impure bodies would be cleansed by burial in the sacred soil and thereby dramatically improve their chances of reaching Heaven. Kings may have had more on their conscience than most and, until the early medieval period, many were buried on Iona. And all significant monasteries, including Old Melrose, will have taken the sinful and wellconnected laity into their cemeteries.

More than most, Christianity is a religion of the Word. Through both testaments, believers hold that God speaks and bibles and gospels are therefore in themselves sacred objects. And one of the most impressive legacies of the early Christians in Britain and Ireland, what is known as the Age of the Saints, is the great corpus of illuminated manuscripts. The Lindisfarne Gospels is one of the most glorious. Commissioned by Bishop Eadfrith at the beginning of the eighth century, it was a sumptuous and expensive undertaking. Some of the work may have been done at Old Melrose and tradition holds that materials for the binding and the covers came from the banks of the Tweed.

When Aidan founded the monastery around the year 635, the opulence of the Lindisfarne Gospels lay in the future. More immediate political concerns occupied the mind of Melrose’s patron, King Oswald. With the catastrophic defeat of the Gododdin at Catterick in 603, it appears that their lands quickly fell under Anglian control. The seizure of much of the Tweed Basin, what might be seen as Greater Bernicia, probably allowed Oswald to extract tribute from the native lords in the Lothians. But the decisive event was not long in coming. For the year 638, the Annals of Ulster record the siege of Etin, more conventionally Dun Eidyn, now Edinburgh.

With the fall of the great stronghold on the Castle Rock, the Lothians saw an influx of English-speaking lords and settlers. Place names mark their progress, especially in East Lothian. Those which contain the elements
ingas
,
ingaham, ingatun
or
ing
are reckoned by toponymists to be early and there is a clutch of them along the banks of the River Tyne, a pattern which strongly suggests arrival by sea. Tyninghame means simply ‘the settlement of the people by the Tyne’. Nearby was the lost name of Lyneryngham, what East Linton used to be called. It incorporates an Old Welsh word,
linn
, for a pool. And Whittinghame recalls the name of one the leaders of the early Anglian colonists. It was ‘the settlement of the people of Hwita’. Another magnate left his name in Haddington, the old county town. He was Hoedda. There are many other, possibly later, English elements
in East Lothian place-names such as
ham
in Morham, Auldhame and Oldhamstocks and
botl
, meaning ‘a hall’, in Bolton and Eldbotle, a medieval settlement now deserted.

What is also striking is how quickly the newly converted Anglian settlers acquired their own saint. Now largely forgotten, the cult of St Baldred or Bealdhere was once popular and his feast day on 6 March was celebrated widely. Now, only place-names hint at his old renown – near the mouth of the Tyne is a rock formation known as St Baldred’s Cradle, off North Berwick is an outcrop called St Baldred’s Boat and at Auldhame Farm, reputed to have been the holy man’s birthplace, there is a St Baldred’s Well. At some point in the seventh century, he is said to have founded communities of monks at Tyninghame, Preston Kirk (where there is another St Baldred’s Well) and at Auldhame. When the Vikings began to raid the eastern coasts of Britain in the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries, Baldred’s church was reported as a target. It must have been wealthy to attract such unwelcome attention. But the life and work of Baldred himself (even the date of his death, sometimes given as late as 756) lack substance and much of his story may have been safely ignored as myth-history or, at best, a series of whiskery traditions – until a remarkable archaeological find came to light.

In May 2005, a dig at Auldhame Farm uncovered the remains of a very old church. Small, with rounded corners and several other telltale signs of great antiquity, the building may have dated as early as the seventh century – according to tradition, precisely the period of Baldred’s ministry. And around the founds of the church lay a cemetery with more than two hundred grave sites.

The finds at Auldhame not only appear to confirm Baldred’s birthplace, they also occur in the midst of the small group of other place-names which remember him. One of these is very intriguing. From the old church at Auldhame, it is possible to look directly out to sea and the looming mass of the Bass Rock. Perched on the outcrop are the medieval ruins of St Baldred’s Chapel – was this the site of a
diseart
, a Celtic hermitage like that on Skellig Michael which rises dramatically out of the Atlantic off the Irish coast? A
saint with an English name founding a
diseart
? There may well be more layers to Baldred’s story than first appear.