The Faded Map: The Lost Kingdoms of Scotland (35 page)

In the measurement of the life of men and women,
De Temporum Ratione
was also influential. The number four seemed to hypnotise Bede as he listed the four ages of man, the four seasons and the four cardinal compass directions. He undertook a scientific programme of observation of the tides, working out the seasonal median level between low and high tides. Since Jarrow Slake, a huge tidal mudflat near the mouth of the River Tyne, lapped at the foot of the monastery precincts, Bede may not have had to exert himself greatly. And even though he did not publish any measurement of daylight, the division of it into four tides on the Bewcastle sundial is likely to have derived from the monk’s researches. Accessible to everyone, including the illiterate, these divisions are likely to have had some general meaning beyond the academic.

Down the length of one of the faces of the Bewcastle Cross is a series of relief sculptures. At the top is St John the Evangelist, the writer of the fourth gospel. Depictions of biblical figures were usually not portraits (although there were descriptions of Jesus in circulation, these were all apocryphal) and they are usually identified by attributes. St John is holding an eagle, a symbol of the soaring heights he rose to when writing his gospel – and, incidentally, the reason many church lecterns are modelled on the great bird and its outspread wings.

Below John, Jesus treads on the beasts. This obscure motif is from Psalm 91 and it links the Bewcastle Cross (and the cross at Ruthwell which carries a similar sculpture) once again to Bede and Jarrow. He wrote a commentary on Psalm 91 and made much of the passage where Christ trampled the snake, the lion,
the dragon and the basilisk. Symbolising the triumph over Satan, this image seems to have been powerful and popular with early Christian missionaries as they moved to convert pagans. Psalm 91 was sung at the monastic service of compline, the prayers at the end of the day. It sent monks into the fearful dark of the night, to the period of the long silence, to contemplation, to temptation and it fortified them with Christ’s example.

At the foot of the cross is a carving of a mysterious figure, a man resembling a falconer with a bird on his gloved hand. It may be another illustration of St John but the rationale for showing the gospel writer twice and with the same attribute is hard to fathom. Above the falconer there is an inscription carved at a height where it can be easily read:

THISSIG BEACN THUN SETTON HWAETRED WAETHGAR ALWFWOLTHU AFT ALCFRITH EAN KYNIING EAC OSWIUING + GEBID HEU SINNA SAWHULA

(This slender pillar Hwaetred, Waethgar and Alwfwolthu set up in memory of Alcfrith, a king and a son of Oswiuing. Pray for them, their sins, their souls.)

Translation is not difficult because the early English inscription contains clear ancestors of modern words:
thissig
for ‘this’,
beacn
for ‘beacon’ or ‘pillar’,
thun
for ‘thin’ or ‘slender’,
setton
for ‘set up’,
aft
for ‘after’,
ean
for ‘one’,
kyniing
for ‘king’,
sinna
for ‘sin’ and
sawhula
for ‘soul’. What is mysterious – and striking – is the script used for these words.

Runes were clearly thought to be more intelligible than the Roman alphabet to the people who lived around Bewcastle. The letters were also much easier to carve, being straight chisel strokes rather than the rounded sort needed for the uncials used in the Lindisfarne Gospels. Based on an order of Roman letters that differs from that of the conventional Latin alphabet, the oldest form of the runic alphabet is known as ‘futhark’ because it was derived from the sounds represented by the first six letters of
a Scandinavian-Germanic version of it – /f/ (
), /u/ (
), /th/ (
), /a/ (
), /r/ (
) and /k/ (
). The letters were thought to be intrinsically magical and that belief is echoed in the phrase ‘reading the runes’. In
Germania
, the companion volume to his
Agricola
, Tacitus described how this was done:

They break off a branch from a fruit tree and slice it into strips; they distinguish these by certain runes and throw them, as fortune will have it, onto a white cloth. Then the priest . . . or family father . . . after praying to the gods . . . picks up three of them, one at a time, and reads their meaning from the runes carved on them.

Twenty-five miles due west from Bewcastle, at Ruthwell, the other great Anglian high cross is also inscribed with runes. Around the vine scrolls on one face of the shaft there are fragments of a remarkable poem, probably the earliest work in English to be preserved. The full text is kept in Italy in a manuscript known as
The Vercelli Book
. Known as
The Dream of the Rood
, the narrative is told by the cross upon which Christ was crucified and, after thirteen centuries, its power is undimmed:

The shafts of the Bewcastle and Ruthwell crosses were carved as each lay on the ground supported by bearer beams. When it had been completed, the shaft was winched upright and slotted into a base socket cut from a large and heavy piece of stone.
Often all that survives of high crosses are these immovable sockets. Usually the cross-piece was made separately and fitted onto the top of the shaft with a tenon joint. Ruthwell’s cross was cast down and broken by religious reformers in the middle of the seventeenth century. Left out in the churchyard under the ancient yews for almost 200 years, the pieces were collected by Henry Duncan, a local antiquary (and, incidentally, inventor of the savings bank) and the cross was re-erected in the small church. These two monuments are great treasures – the best-preserved examples of Anglo-Saxon high crosses in Britain and a testament to the vigour of Bernician Christianity.

Bernician politics of the eighth century made for a less impressive spectacle. After the death of Aldfrith in 705, civil war appears to have broken out. A series of kings came and went but the power, or at least the appearance of power, of the Northumbrian military machine protected their feuding kingdom
from incursion from either the Pictish north or Mercian south. In fact, expansion westward continued beyond Ruthwell and Bernician bishops came to govern the old see of Whithorn. Their names were odd – Peohthelm means ‘Leader of the Picts’ and Peohtwine, ‘Friend of the Picts’. Galloway is some way south of Pictland but perhaps the hill peoples spoke a dialect of Old Welsh which sounded Pictish to a Bernician ear or perhaps they were merely pagans.

Caedmon

Bede told the story of Caedmon, a shepherd who tended the flocks of the monastery at Whitby. In a dream, he composed a hymn to God, embellishing it upon waking. When taken to the Abbess Hilda, he was allowed to learn from the scholars and musicians and appears himself to have taken holy orders. Caedmon is a native name but he may have been bilingual in Old Welsh and Early English. Along with
The Dream of the Rood,
the hymn is one of the very earliest examples of English poetry to survive:

Hail now the holder of Heaven’s realm,

That architect’s might, his mind’s many ways,

Lord forever and Father of glory,

Ultimate crafter of all wonders,

Holy-maker who hoisted the heavens

To roof the heads of the human race,

And fashioned land for the legs of man,