Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (10 page)

There is also a deep-seated problem of biased advocacy. The early history of the Isles
*
saw a tussle for survival between the Ancient Britons, the Irish Gaels, the Scots, the Picts and a collection of immigrant Germanic ‘Anglo-Saxons’. In modern times some of these parties have had enthusiastic fans. The English, who are now a dominant majority, have often taken the triumph of their forebears for granted, at least in popular history. They admire the imperialist Romans, and identify with the Anglo-Saxons, but despise the Celts. They venerate Bede, who was a Germanic Northumbrian and whom they call Venerable, and neglect his competitors. They dislike the Celtic sources, which they cannot read, routinely dismissing them as fanciful or unreliable. The Scots, whose ancestors ultimately triumphed in Scotland, can be equally self-centred. Nowadays, there are few people around to champion the cause of the ‘Old North’.

This term – which the Welsh call
Yr Hen Ogledd –
requires an explanation. The Ancient Britons, dozens of territorial tribes who had dominated the whole of Great Britain on the eve of the Roman conquest and gave the island its name, were gradually displaced or absorbed in post-Roman times, and their former dominance in all parts of the island has largely been forgotten. Their most visible descendants, known in English as the ‘Welsh’, that is, the ‘aliens’, now inhabit only one corner of their former homeland, in a remnant that the incoming English called ‘Wales’, the ‘Alien Land’.
*
Time was when things were different. After the passing of Roman Britannia and the influx of ‘Anglo-Saxons’, the Britons held out longest in three main regions. In one of them, modern Wales, they survived. In the other two, modern Cornwall and the ‘Old North’, they did not. Yet their presence there was very real, and lasted for centuries. The ‘Kingdom of the Rock’ was the longest-lived fragment of the Ancient Britons’ stronghold in northern Britain, the region that in due course would become Scotland.

Perhaps one should start, therefore, with an undisputed fact. The kingdom
did
exist. Its story is reflected in archaeological and linguistic evidence, in the chronicles of its neighbours, in king-lists and in references from poetry and legend; it existed for six or seven hundred years. Its original name and its exact boundaries are not known. But we do know with absolute certainty that it was there. Between the dusk of Roman Britannia and the dawn of England and Scotland, several Celtic kingdoms operated in northern Britain. The ‘Kingdom of the Rock’ was the last of them to succumb.

The Celts of the Isles were divided in Roman times – as they still are – into two distinctive linguistic groups. On the Green Isle,
Éire
, the Gaelic or Goidelic Celts spoke a tongue categorized by linguists as ‘Q-Celtic’. Their word for ‘son’ was
mac
. On the larger Isle of
Prydain
(Great Britain), the British Celts spoke Brythonic or ‘P-Celtic’. Their word for ‘son’ was
map
. To the uninitiated, the Goidelic and the Brythonic branches of Celtic look and sound dissimilar, but a good teacher can quickly elucidate the processes whereby common roots were transformed by successive sound changes. The characteristic word order of verb– subject–object remained unaltered, and morphological shifts often followed parallel patterns. Both Goidelic and Brythonic Celts adopted new systems of syllabic accentuation, for example; but while Goidelic chose to place the accent on the first syllable of a word, Brythonic went for stress on the penultimate syllable. Both language groups softened the consonants between vowels. Goidelic changed
t
to
th
, Brythonic to
d
, thus changing
ciatus
(battle) into
cath
(Irish) and
cad
(Welsh). The initial
w
-sound was replaced by
f
in Goidelic and
gw
in Brythonic, giving
fir
for ‘true’ in Irish and
gwir
in Welsh. English ears are not accustomed to these sounds. But since Goidelic/Gaelic and Brythonic ‘Old Welsh’ would in time compete to be heard on the Rock, their reverberations, however imperfectly understood, form an essential part of the background.
¹⁰

During the four centuries of Roman rule, the Romano-Britons living in the imperial province of Britannia were markedly less Latinized than their Celtic kinsfolk in Gaul or Iberia. Some of them would have been bilingual, speaking Latin for official purposes and Brythonic among themselves; others less so. When the Western Empire collapsed, they did not advance to a neo-Latin idiom parallel to French or Spanish. Instead, they largely reverted to a monolingual Brythonic, until meeting new linguistic challenges posed by Germanic invaders from the Continent, by Gaelic ‘Scots’ from Ireland, and later by Norse-speaking Vikings.

In modern times, everyone has become accustomed to thinking of Great Britain in terms of England, Scotland and Wales. But this modern map must be put out of mind if one wishes to understand the island’s previous make-up. In the era when Britannia was collapsing, there was no England, since the Anglo-Saxon ancestors of the English were still arriving; there was no Scotland, since the Scots had not even started to arrive; and there was no clearly defined Wales. The former Romano-Britons and their P-Celtic speech were spread over most if not all of
Prydain
, and as the ethno-linguistic jigsaw changed, ‘Wales’ could be found in every pocket where Britons persisted.

One can observe several degrees of the persistence of Romanization in post-Roman Britain. The cities and surrounding hinterlands within the former province of Britannia remained highly Romanized. The upland tribes, including those living beyond Hadrian’s Wall, had been at best partially Romanized. The ‘Picts’ of the further North were virtually untouched.

An important division among the post-Roman Britons resulted from the Anglo-Saxon invasions of the fifth and sixth centuries. As the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ pushed westwards into the Midlands, they drove a wedge between the Britons on either side of them. After the Battle of Chester in 616, Angles moving coast to coast consolidated a belt of territory from the Humber to the Mersey in the powerful state of Mercia. From then on (though contact was maintained along the western sea-lanes), the Britons of the North were cut off from the larger concentrations of their kinsfolk elsewhere. A distinction grew up between the Welsh of ‘Wales’, and the North Welsh, whose beleagured British community was obliged to wage a prolonged rearguard action.

Despite its shadowy outlines, however, the ‘Old North’ cannot be regarded as a mere footnote to the grand pageant of British history. It contained at least seven known kingdoms, whose deeds were no less derring than those of their Anglo-Saxon counterparts. It left a large body of place names and a corpus of literature – known in Welsh as
Hengerdd
or the ‘Old Verse’ – which makes
Beowulf
look like an upstart latecomer.
¹¹

The language of the Old North is usually classified in the category of Cumbric, a sub-group of P-Celtic Brythonic, and related, therefore, to Welsh, Cornish and Breton. A major problem exists for historians, of course, in that Cumbric was rarely written down and can only be reconstructed by linguists from meagre scraps of information. One such scrap is the name of Cumbria (‘Land of the Welsh’) itself, which once extended over a far wider area than today. Another scrap comes from the counting systems of Cumbrian shepherds. It is well attested that people faced by the decline of their native language are particularly reluctant to abandon two things: the numbers, whereby they learned to count, and the prayers through which they addressed their God. An amazing instance of this phenomenon can be found in some of the upland communities of the Borders which nowadays straddle northern England and southern Scotland. Anglicization triumphed in those parts centuries ago either in the form of northern English or of Lowland Scots, but shepherds there continue to count their sheep using the numerals of their Brythonic forebears. The correspondences are unmistakeable, and they were reflected in inscriptions still visible until recently on the old sheepmarket at Cockermouth.
¹²
They are the very last echoes of the Old North.

Table 1. Counting in northern English, Lowland Scots and modern Welsh

Christianity was more firmly established in late Roman Britain than is often supposed. St Alban was put to death for his faith at Verulamium in
c
. 304, and the Emperor Theodosius I did not give Christianity an official monopoly until 380. It would have had little time to penetrate into all levels of society before the departure of the legions.
¹³
Yet for most of the fourth century, the Edict of Milan in 313 had granted religious toleration to Christians, and Christian practices spread patchily. In the subsequent era, knowledge of Latin and adherence to the Roman religion were the twin marks of the
Romanitas
that civilized Britons savoured in the face of heathen invaders.

It was the Romans who came to use the term
Picti
for the tribes who had clung to the old ways – to tattooing, to principled illiteracy and to native religion – and both the Irish and the Britons were accustomed to treat the Picts as a race apart.
¹⁴
The Irish Gaels called them
Cruithne
, which may be what they had once called all the inhabitants of Britain. The Welsh term
Cymry
, usually translated as ‘companions’ or ‘compatriots’, which was coming into use in late Roman times, was a form of self-identification both for Britons of the west (modern Wales) and for the ‘Men of the Old North’, but not, apparently, for the Picts. It possessed definite overtones of
cives Romani
.

Though the Roman legions had marched north beyond their province of Britannia on several occasions, they never conquered the whole of the island and they only occupied the land between the Hadrianic and the Antonine Walls, the
Intervallum
, for less than thirty years in the mid-second century. Nonetheless they stayed long enough to forge close ties with the more co-operative tribes and to gather basic information from them about northern Britain. The second-century geographer Ptolemy, who lived in Alexandria, had met soldiers and sailors returning from Britain, and he drew a map containing many names of rivers, towns, islands and tribes. In the far north, beyond the Antonine Wall, he noted the
Caledonii
. In the area between the walls, he recorded four tribes – the
Damnonii
, the
Novantae
, the
Selgovae
and the
Votadini
. In Damnonia, he recorded six
oppida
or ‘towns’: Alauna, Colanica, Coria, Lindon, Victoria and Vindogara (Colanica can also be found in another source known as the Ravenna Cosmography). Lindon, the
Llyn Dun
or ‘Lake Fort’, has been tentatively identified with Balloch on Loch Lomond. But Alauna is less uncertain. It means the ‘headland’ or ‘spur’, and nicely matches the locality of the Rock.
¹⁵

The Roman names for British tribes were mainly Latin translations of Celtic originals, which English scholars rarely translate. But an attempt can be made. The
Caledonii
were possibly the ‘Hard People’,
Selgovae
were the ‘Hunters’ and the
Novantae
the ‘Vigorous People’. The
Votadini
(mistranscribed by Ptolemy as
Otadini
) were the ‘subjects or followers of Fothad’. The
Damnonii
were in some way connected to the Celtic word for ‘deep’; ‘the People of the Sea’ is the most probable. It fits well with their location, and explains why other coastal tribes in Britain and Ireland, like the
Dumnonii
of the future Devon, had similar names. At all events, Damnonia was the earliest known statelet to be based on or near the Rock. Its maritime activities are hardly to be doubted: a later Irish source mentions an unidentified battleground in Ireland where Beinnie Britt killed Art, son of Conn. Beinnie was a ‘Briton’ from across the water. The Damnonians evidently possessed the capacity for transporting fighting men by sea.