The Faded Map: The Lost Kingdoms of Scotland (34 page)

Monasteries had begun to multiply in the late seventh and early eighth centuries but Bede did not approve. Here is a passage from a letter to his old pupil at Jarrow, Bishop Egbert of York:

Others even more disgracefully, since they are laymen with no experience or love of life under a rule, give money to kings and buy for themselves, under the pretext of building monasteries, estates in which they freely indulge their lust: they have these ascribed to them in hereditary right by royal charters which are confirmed by the written assent of bishops, abbots and secular magnates as though they were truly worthy of God. Having thus usurped for themselves small or large estates, free from both human and divine service, they serve in reality only their own desires as laymen in charge of monks. Moreover they do not assemble real monks there, but rather wanderers who have been expelled from genuine monasteries for the sin of disobedience, or whoever they may have enticed out of them, or any of their own followers whom they can persuade to receive the tonsure and promise monastic obedience to themselves. They thus fill the ‘monasteries’ they have built with groups of these deformed people and – a very ugly and unprecedented spectacle – the very same men are now occupied with wives and procreating children and now rise from their beds and accomplish assiduously whatever needs to be done inside the monastic precincts. Moreover they obtain with similar audacity places for their wives, as they say, to build ‘monasteries’: as these are laywomen they
authorise themselves to be rulers of the handmaids of Christ. To all these people the popular proverb applies: ‘Wasps can indeed make honeycomb, but they fill it with poison, not honey.’

Bede’s rant may have been justified but the habit of treating monasteries like family possessions was neither new nor did it prevent them from being exemplary. The sanctity and piety of Iona and its monks are rarely questioned but ten out of its first twelve abbots were relatives of St Columba. The monastery at Whitby, scene of the famous synod, was also a family concern in its early years. The root of Bede’s anger was the use and abuse of monastic status for advantage and exploitation. Religious houses and those who ran them enjoyed exemption from military service and were entitled to a share of war booty, including conquered territory. Sometimes monasteries and their property were divided between the heirs of a founder and even converted back into secular estates over time.

What underpinned monastic privilege and attracted those who subverted it was something simple and easy to underestimate in this secular age – it was absolute belief. Early Christians believed that good deeds, generous gifts, prayer and devotion (even that done by proxies) in various combinations could be accumulated in sufficient quantity to guarantee entry into Heaven. With that firmly in mind, secular rulers moved to protect monasteries and their pious monks and some even believed that the name and form of monasticism, if not its spiritual substance, was sufficient to store up credit for the afterlife.

After 25 January 1990, it turned out that even more ancient beliefs were stirring amongst the modern population of Britain. A tremendous storm blew down a very old yew tree in the churchyard at Selborne in Hampshire. It had been made enduringly famous by the parish minister, the Reverend Gilbert White, when he published
The Natural History of Selborne
in 1789. Reckoning the tree to be at least as old as the ancient church, White wrote that ‘it may be deemed an antiquity’. When the yew fell in
the winter of 1990, the news produced an extraordinary reaction. Almost immediately thousands of people descended on Selborne, some of them to mourn the venerable tree’s passing, most to beg or steal a piece of the wood. It seemed that the yew’s death had drawn upon a well of old beliefs, that an ancient power was at work, a phenomenon which both appalled and astonished the watching villagers.

Often the heartwood of very old yews dies and the trees become hollow, and therefore impossible to date by counting the rings. The outer edges survive and growth continues through a ring of root systems. Girth is used to estimate age and when it crashed to the ground the Selborne yew measured 26 feet around. It seems that White had underestimated and his beloved tree was not coeval with the church but about 2,000 years old. When archaeologists examined the upended root systems, they found the remains of many skeletons. Since 1200 and probably long before, people had been buried hard up against the sides of the tree. As it slowly grew over their graves, its roots curled around the skeletons often moving them some way from their original resting place.

These early burials inside the precincts of old churchyards and close to their yew trees continue a very long tradition. In Celtic languages and tree lore they occupy a talismanic place. Because they can live for millennia in sheltered places, are densely evergreen and always lustrous and every part of them protectively poisonous, yews have long been bathed in the light of sanctity. The name is a direct survival from Old Welsh
ywen
or
pren ywen
for ‘yew tree’. It is also known in both Gaelic and Welsh as ‘the Everlasting One’ and ‘the Tree of Life’. It was believed that the sinuous and immensely strong roots and branches took a unique grip on the earth and the air, closing around the bodies of the recently dead and drawing out their essence, their ‘dream-soul’, and expelling it into the sky through their ever-living branches.

Most prehistoric yews are unlikely to have been planted by the hand of man. The gods placed them on earth and Celtic priests or Druids were attracted to groves of trees, particularly oaks, but
also yews. Columba’s island of Iona’s name comes from a sacred pre-Christian association – it means ‘Yew Island’. Britain’s oldest yew stands at Fortingall in Perthshire. Measured at 52 feet in girth in 1769, now thought to be 3,500 years old, the tree has now lost its heartwood entirely (mainly due to people hacking off pieces) and it looks like a circular copse of smaller trees. But it still lives and casts its ancient shade.

Mourners on their way to burials at Fortingall kirkyard used to pass through the circle of the old tree and the pall-bearers would often stop for a moment in its centre. These glimmers of pre-Christian ritual are given substance by the tree’s location. Nearby stands a grim monument. Carn na Marbh means ‘the Mound of the Dead’ and it is a prehistoric earthwork re-used after the scourge of the Black Death in the second half of the fourteenth century. There is an inscription:

Here lie the victims of the Great Plague of the 14th century, taken here on a sledge drawn by a white horse led by an old woman.

The mound had more associations with the past. Until 1924 it was used as a prehistoric fire hill, a place where bonfires were lit at the turning points of the year. On Samhuinn Eve, now known as Halloween, the whole community climbed the hill, formed a circle around the fire and clasped each other’s hands. Then they danced round it, first
deiseal
or ‘sunwise’ and then
tuathal
or ‘against the sun’ (what used to be called ‘widdershins’). When the embers had died down, young men leaped through the fire in an echo of purification rituals. Around Carn na Marbh other mounds rise and there are several standing stones. Place names and archaeology are suggestive of a sacred landscape of the first millennium
BC
which looks as though it had the old yew as its centre.

Fortingall’s tree is famous – not least for the spurious legend that Pontius Pilate was born in its shade – but it is not unique. All over Britain there are churchyards with ancient yews which
predate their churches. Many of those which stand on low eminences also show traces of prehistoric earthworks. What all of this points to is continuity. When Christian missionaries arrived in an area they often chose to preach in places which were already sacred. Bede was unblushing about this practice. In his
Ecclesiastical History
, he repeated the advice of Pope Gregory in a letter to British churchmen dated around 600:

[We] have come to the conclusion that the temples of the idols among that people [the English] should on no account be destroyed. The idols are to be destroyed, but the temples themselves are to be aspersed with holy water, altars set up in them, and relics deposited there . . . In this way, we hope that the people, seeing that their temples are not destroyed, may abandon their error and, flocking more readily to their accustomed resorts, may come to know and adore the true God. And since they have a custom of sacrificing many oxen to demons, let some other solemnity be substituted in its place . . . On such occasions they might well construct shelters of boughs for themselves around the churches that were once temples, and celebrate the solemnity with devout feasting.

Fortingall derives from
forterkil
which means ‘the church at the fort’, a reference to the prehistoric stronghold near at hand. Far to the south, another place-name based on a different sort of fort became important in the story of Bernicia. Bewcastle is from Bothecaestor, the Roman fort where shepherds had shielings, most likely lean-to huts, against the crumbling walls. Now isolated in the high moorland of the western Cheviot ranges, Bewcastle had both a strategic and spiritual importance 2,000 years ago. When the Emperor Hadrian ordained a mighty wall to divide Britannia, his more canny commanders advised a screen of outpost forts to the north. At that time, Bewcastle did not lie in the middle of nowhere but astride a cattle and stock droving route from the Border valleys to Cumbria. In the eleventh century, a medieval castle was built out of the stones of the Roman fort and in the
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries an English garrison was stationed at Bewcastle to discourage Border reiving.

The religious importance of the site is equally ancient. During the Roman period, Bewcastle was known as Fanum Cocidi, ‘the Shrine of Cocidius’ – Cocidius being a Celtic war god. His cult probably predated the arrival of the legions and it seems to have been enthusiastically adopted by them. The Latin
fanum
meant ‘a shrine’ or ‘a sanctuary’ and, in a Celtic context, this may well have been a grove of trees inside a sacred precinct rather than the temples visualised by the Roman pope. They are gone now but at least two ancient yews grew around Bewcastle Church (younger trees have replaced them by the churchyard wall) and the site appears to have been marked off at some point in a long history by ditching and a bank. This may be Roman but archaeology has yet to investigate. The shrine of Cocidius was well known in the second century
AD
and a place which attracted worshippers. Such sanctuaries usually had definition of some sort – a way of recognising what was holy ground and what was not.

When the tide of Northumbrian Christianity began to rise and wash westward, Bewcastle became an important focus. As Pope Gregory advised, it was ‘an accustomed resort’. And at such a famously sacred place, Anglian churchmen chose to make a spectacular gesture. A magnificent stone cross was erected, probably towards the end of the seventh century. It tells a fascinating story about early beliefs and society in the Northumbrian west.

In the era of Christian conversion, churches, where they existed at all, were mostly modest structures. Small, built from wood and dark inside, they were not the soaring cathedrals of later times, nor did they have spires that reached heavenwards and could be seen and heard for many miles as their bells pealed. When a stone church was built, it was a matter for comment, as at Jarrow and Whithorn. The word of God was heard out of doors in the early centuries of Christianity and, at Bewcastle, a great preaching cross was raised amongst the sacred yew trees.

Like churches, most early crosses are likely to have been
wooden but these have left little trace. Stone crosses were more impressive and enduring but, looking up at their grey dignity, it is easy to forget that most were brightly painted. The scenes and decorations carved on the four faces of the shaft and on the cross-piece were picked out in vivid colour, no doubt renewed each year after the winter rains and before major festivals. The high crosses were intended as both a focus and a text. Worshippers, summoned by word of mouth or the tinkle of a handbell, gathered around the base and listened to a priest tell stories from the Bible, speak about the lives of the saints or use the symbol of the cross itself to explain the Christian message. Since many who listened could not read, the painted saints and scenes were an attractive illustration, probably something pointed to during a service.

Although its cross-piece is missing, the Bewcastle Cross is impressive, the shaft standing 4.4 metres high. Almost square, the four faces of the shaft must have been carved in situ, probably by masons sent from Bede’s monastery at Jarrow or the sister house at Monkwearmouth. On three sides the sculptors have incised intricate decorative patterns known as ‘inhabited vine scrolls’. Stems and foliage are woven together and support a series of animals such as birds and others more difficult to identify. Elsewhere there are patterns of interlace and dicing very reminiscent of the carpet pages of the Lindisfarne Gospels.

The oldest sundial to survive in Britain can be seen on the Bewcastle Cross. It shows the day quartered into four tides. Derived from the Early English
tid
, meaning ‘time’, the word survives in the slightly quaint usage of Christmastide or Eastertide. Because they had few reliable means of measuring it, apart from the sun and the moon, the people of the seventh and eighth centuries (and long after that) are thought to have had little interest in time and the mechanics of its passage. But Bede was fascinated. His
De Temporum Ratione
(
On the Reckoning of Time
), is a scientific masterpiece and has been enormously influential. In 664, the Synod of Whitby was much concerned with the correct
dating of the feast of Easter and, to avoid dispute, Easter Tables projected the precise dates far into the future. Bede listed them up until 1063. He also compiled a chronology of world history and, to make it intelligible, he adopted the
AD
system. It was invented by Dionysius Exiguus or ‘Little Dennis’, a monk from the Black Sea coast living in Rome, and, through his widely disseminated writings, Bede helped make it standard throughout Europe.