The Faded Map: The Lost Kingdoms of Scotland (32 page)

The year 685 turned out to be fateful. Here is Bede again:

Cuthbert set off to Carlisle to speak to the Queen [Eormenburh] who had arranged to stay at her sister’s convent to await the outcome of the war. The day after his arrival the citizens conducted him around the city walls to see a remarkable Roman fountain that was built into them. He was suddenly disturbed in spirit. He leaned heavily on his staff, turned his face dolefully to the wall, then straightening himself up and looking up into the sky, he sighed deeply and said almost in a whisper, ‘Perhaps at this moment the battle is being decided.’

And it was. Far to the north, King Ecgfrith had ridden to Dunnichen, near Forfar. It was a punitive expedition, intended to bring the Pictish king Bridei back into the Northumbrian empire – compel him into subjection. But Cuthbert, the hermit turned strategist, had advised against the war and his fears prompted a fit of dire prophecy against the city wall at Carlisle.

Bridei followed the strategy of his ancient Caledonian ancestors when they retreated in front of Agricola’s legions in
AD
83 but he was a great deal more successful when the inevitable battle came.

[King Ecgfrith] rashly led an army to ravage the province of the Picts. The enemy pretended to retreat, and lured the king into narrow mountain passes, where he was killed with the greater part of his forces on the 20
^th
of May in his 40
^th
year and the 15
^th
of his reign.

Despite Bede’s scathing assessment, the expedition did show both the reach and power of the Northumbrians but not their
tactical acuity. Historians have argued over the location of the battle and it seems very likely that it took place near Dunnichen. The English name was Nechtansmere, cognate with Dun Nechtan, or the modern Dunnichen. In Old Welsh, Ecgfrith and his war bands were slaughtered at Linn Garan, ‘the Heron Lake’. At the supposed battle site, old maps show a moss or shallow lake – the sort of place where herons wade and fish. And it seems that, like the rout at the Winwaed, one army was trapped between the enemy and the water.

Only three miles away stands the remarkable Aberlemno Stone, the sculptural record of this signal conflict. Even though the carvings were made at least a century later, memories of the great Pictish victory at the Heron Lake will not have dimmed. And it is beyond credibility that the patron who paid the sculptor will have had the stone erected in the wrong place. In any event, defeat at Dunnichen marked an abrupt end to Northumbrian suzerainty in the north And it also prompted Cuthbert to advise his Queen to take urgent action and leave Carlisle in case her husband’s death sparked a palace coup. Here is more from Bede:

Tomorrow being Sunday you cannot travel. Monday morning at daybreak leave in your chariot for the Royal City [Bamburgh]. Enter quickly for perhaps the king has been slain. Tomorrow I have been invited to a neighbouring monastery to dedicate the chapel but as soon as the dedication is over I shall follow you.

It is known that Cuthbert and Queen Eormenburh travelled on the Stanegate, the Roman road to the south of Hadrian’s Wall. By the time they had gained the safety of the fortress at Bamburgh, news may have arrived from the north that the king was dead and his army destroyed. In any case, it may have been Cuthbert who steadied the dynastic ship. Ecgfrith’s brother Aldfrith had entered the monastery at Iona as a scholar rather than a monk and had travelled extensively in Ireland and the west – as far from Ecgfrith as possible for Northumbrian kings could be ruthless about the elimination of potential rivals. Cuthbert
may have sent word recalling Aldfrith and, when the wandering scholar arrived at Bamburgh, he certainly enjoyed the Bishop of Lindisfarne’s support in the crucial early stages of his reign.

Ecgfrith’s defeat marked the end of Northumbrian domination in the north. Bede again:

Henceforward the hopes and strengths of the English realm began to waver and slip backward ever lower. The Picts recovered their own lands that had been occupied by the English, while the Irish living in Britain and a proportion of the Britons themselves regained their freedom, which they have now preserved for about 46 years. Many of the English were at this time killed, enslaved or forced to flee from Pictish territory. Among them, the most reverend man of God Trumwine, who had been appointed their bishop, withdrew with his people from the monastery of Abercurnig [Abercorn], which was situated in English territory but stood close to the firth that divides the lands of the English from those of the Picts.

This is a key passage to any clear understanding of the impact of the defeat at Dunnichen and the subsequent history of Northumbria. And, as he often does, Bede summed up the situation succinctly when he observed that, after 685, the new king Aldfrith ‘ably restored the shattered fortune of the kingdom, though within smaller boundaries’.

Bede’s support and obvious approval are scarcely surprising. As a scholar-monk Aldfrith was a royal version of the historian himself and Bede awarded him the superlative of
vir doctissimus
, ‘a most learned man’. Others were also enthusiastic. The great European ecclesiastic, Alcuin of York, tutor to Charlemagne and one of the leading figures of the Carolingian Renaissance, called Aldfrith
rex et simul magister
, ‘both a king and a teacher’. And it was true.

Having been educated in exile in the Celtic west, most notably under the pious and learned Abbot of Iona, Adomnan, Aldfrith was also known by the Gaelic name of Flann Fina mac Ossu. It
says something of his parentage and means, approximately, ‘a Prince, son of Fina, son of Oswiu’. Fina was an Irish princess and her lineage might well have been welcoming to the exiled Northumbrian prince. Taught to speak and write fluently in
Gaelic (there being little difference between Irish and Scots dialects in the seventh century), Aldfrith produced a collection of aphorisms which often hint at his Celtic heritage. Echoing the contemporary development of a soul-friend, a confessor, the king wrote:

The Strasbourg Oaths

When the Deiran cleric, Alcuin of York, went to become head of a new academy of scholars at the court of Charlemagne, he became centrally involved in a fundamental language shift in Europe. Not only did Alcuin invent the difference between upper and lower case letters, he also produced a standard form of the pronunciation of Latin for all of the vast Carolingian Empire. This meant that different dialects were not used and that a distinction between Latin and what came to be called ‘vulgar speech’ developed. French, Italian and Spanish date the beginnings of their independent development from Alcuin’s reforms. A moment in this fascinating process was caught in 842 when two of Charlemagne’s grandsons had publicly to swear to support each other in front of their supporters. Charles the Bald spoke a very Latinised version of Early French whereas Ludwig the German and his men spoke Early German. Each man needed a crib sheet and they have survived. Here is Ludwig’s and what he read out in Early French. Versions in Latin and English follow:

Pro Deo amur et pro Christian poblo et nostro commun salvament, d’ist di in avant, in quant Deus savir et podir me dunant, si salvarai eo cist meon fradre Karlo et in ajudha et in cadhuna coas, si cum om per dreit son fradra salvar dift . . .

Pro Dei amore et pro christiano populo et nostro communi salvamento, de hoc die in posterum, in quanto Deus sapientiam et potentiam mihi donabit, sic servabo ego hunc meum fratrem Carolum et in adiumento et in re quaque, ut quis iure suum fratrem servare debet . . .

For God’s love and the Christian people and our common salvation, from this day forward, insofar as God gives me knowledge and power, I shall so keep this my brother Charles both in aid and in every thing as when a man in right his brother should keep . . .

The great scholar, Aldhelm of Malmesbury (an Irish foundation) carried on a correspondence with Aldfrith and sent him the
Epistola ad Acircium
, a treatise on numerology, specifically the power of the number seven. The depth of the king’s curiosity and learning is demonstrated in a remarkable exchange. In return for an estate of eight farms, Aldfrith was given a book on cosmology by Abbot Ceolfrith of Bede’s monastery at Monkwearmouth – Jarrow. No doubt Aldfrith gained spiritually but the story comes from a near-contemporary source and the substance may well be accurate.

While in exile in the Atlantic west, it seems that the future king had been a pupil of Adomnan of Iona, whose diplomacy was to produce another book for the royal library. In 688 the abbot travelled to Northumbria, to Jarrow, where Bede was a young monk. He came to plead for the release of captives taken in war in the north in the time of King Ecgfrith. Aldfrith agreed and was rewarded with a copy of Adomnan’s
De Locis Sanctis
(
On the Holy Places
), a gazetteer of places of pilgrimage in the Near East (the abbot was not discouraged by the fact that he had never visited any of them). It was becoming an expensive library. Aldfrith himself may have added to it for one of his surviving groups of
aphorisms might serve as a commentary on his aspirations as – according to one scholar – his status as a philosopher-king:

However banal or everyday these saying might sound to a modern ear, they are the words of a very early king who ruled in Scotland and northern England and they do offer some sense of how he and his contemporaries thought. Aldfrith’s literacy and learning may have dazzled fellow intellectuals like Bede and Alcuin but these talents will have meant nothing to rival claimants to his throne. And the transition after the sudden death of Ecgfrith appears to have been bloodless or at least no reports of conflict have survived. Aldfrith probably had the support of the Scottish and Irish Celtic kings, especially if he had agreed to renounce the aims of Ecgfrith’s disastrous expedition in the north.

The kingdom of Northumbria seemed to settle within accepted boundaries, and despite Bede’s barb about retreat and retrenchment, these still compassed a vast area of Britain, at least a quarter of the landmass, much of it fertile farmland. The Firth of Forth and the Lothian coastline were as far north as Aldfrith’s writ ran while, to the west, the old realm of Rheged, from Dumfriesshire to Galloway, was falling under Northumbrian control. Greater Bernicia also included Carlisle, much of lowland Cumbria, and the Lancashire Plain down to the Mersey. In the east all of the Lothians, the Tweed Basin, Northumberland and Durham down to the Tees, and most of modern Yorkshire were
part of Aldfrith’s powerful kingdom. This period of stabilisation may well be underlined by the excavation and refurbishment of long boundary ditches which can still be clearly seen. Between Doncaster and Sheffield, in the Don Valley, the Roman Rig Ditch almost certainly divided Northumbria from Mercia. Its line was carried on westwards over the high moors, where the modern A628 now runs, and is picked up on the outskirts of Greater Manchester by a six-mile-long earthwork known as Nico Ditch. It still marks the boundary between Stockport and Manchester.

While Aldfrith’s undoubted but unreported political skills pacified his kingdom, his intellectual interests appear to have set a fertile ground for the flowering of what historians have called ‘Northumbria’s Golden Age’. For almost a century after the new king’s accession, great art was made in the monasteries of the north and the first masterpieces began with the death of a saint.

Bede’s account of Cuthbert’s last days is both moving and very atmospheric – and, as far as it is possible to tell, it is also accurate. Unusually the scrupulous historian made use of the testimony of a witness and introduced it verbatim into his text. Herefrith was Abbot of Lindisfarne at the time he was writing and, while much of Bede’s irritation at interference in his
Life of Cuthbert
may have stemmed from the criticisms made by those monks who cared for the saint at his death, there can be no doubting their devotion and piety.

Sensing that he would not be long for the world, Cuthbert resigned his bishopric and retreated to his beloved hermitage on Inner Farne. Its cliffs rise out of the turbulent tide rips of the North Sea. One of a scattered archipelago, the island lies closest to the shore, directly visible from the royal fortress at Bamburgh. On stormy nights, as the waves lashed the black rocks of Inner Farne, the kings of Northumbria could look out eastwards over the sea and marvel at the faith and fortitude of their holy men and their willing suffering in search of perfect communion with God. Perhaps a guttering candle could be made out through the
darkness. At the risk of introducing a sour note of cynicism, it may be that part of the attraction of Inner Farne was its visibility from the principal seats of the kings of Northumbria, faithful patrons of Holy Mother Church.