Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (15 page)

By piecing together these scattered bits of information, narratives of reasonable plausibility can be constructed:

It was in the year 870 that the Norse king of Dublin, Olaf the White… decided on an expedition to plunder the kingdom of the Britons in Strathclyde. He set off with a large fleet from Dublin and, sailing up the Firth of Clyde, laid siege to Alclut. He was joined by another Viking ruler, Ivar Beinlaus (the ‘Cripple’ or ‘one-legged’), who came north from York, which he had seized in 867. The garrison of Alclut held out for four months. But at length it was compelled to surrender, as the well on the Rock had dried up… The citadel was destroyed and the kingdom of the Britons lay prostrate before the invaders, who remained in Strathclyde over the winter, [before] sailing back to Dublin with a fleet of two hundred ships laden with slaves and booty. The king of Strathclyde was killed shortly afterwards and the kingdom passed for a time under the control of neighbouring kings.
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The Viking fleet sailed away with its loot, heading no doubt for the Dublin slave market, though the presence of Viking-style ‘hogsback’ tombstones in the nearby Govan district indicates that a body of Vikings could have stayed behind.
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But local survivors also remained; and the humbled monarchy of ‘The Rock’ was not eliminated. The exact fate of King Arthgal is hard to discover. One modern authority assumes that he was taken prisoner to Dublin.
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Most accept the chronicler’s statement that ‘Arthgal, king of the Britons, was slain in 872 by counsel of Constantine, son of Kenneth [macAlpin]’. It is certain that the British king’s son, Rhun map Arthgal, had married, or was about to marry, the sister of King Constantine I. The neatest solution, though it is uncertain, would show Constantine setting up Rhun during his father’s absence and then persuading or paying the Dublin Vikings to kill Arthgal and to prevent his return.
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One way or the other, it is clear that the Scots established their supremacy over the ‘Kingdom of the Rock’ in the early 870s, with Constantine I ruling as over-king and Rhun as sub-king.

As the Welsh
Brut y Tywysogion
put it, ‘the men of Strathclyde who refused to unite with the English had to depart their country and go to Gwynedd’. It is likely that the Welsh chronicler was using ‘English’ as the English used the word ‘Welsh’ – to mean ‘foreigners’. Yet the episode shows what really went on in the ‘Dark Ages’ when one native society was overrun by another. Some of the defeated population were sold into slavery. Some, probably most, stayed on to work the land and in time to integrate with the victors. But the ruling elite had to be replaced. If they were lucky, they would be given the choice of submitting to the victor’s rule or of being expelled. If not, they would be killed. This explains how language and culture change in areas where the basic human gene pool remains the same. The example of post-Roman Britannia turning into Anglo-Saxon England is a prime case; the Britons of the north turning into Gaelic Strathclyders is another.

The departing elders of ‘The Rock’, who had chosen to reunite with their British kith and kin rather than with the incoming Gaels, could only have reached distant Gwynedd by sea. Their ships would have sailed on the tide, leaving the Rock behind, gliding past Bute and Arran (which they would have called something else), edging round the coast of
Aeron
, and out past the ‘rip-tide’ of the Ituna. They would have carried their bards and their scribes, who were to pass on the knowledge of the
Gwyr y Gogledd
to their Welsh hosts. As they must have known, hundreds, indeed thousands of years of history were being cut adrift with them. One cannot say for certain when this journey took place, but by 890, the exiles had appeared in the Welsh Annals, and are reported helping the king of Gwynedd to repel the ‘Saxons’.
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From 870/871, therefore, the remaining Britons of ‘The Rock’ were closely subject to the rising Kingdom of ‘Alba’. Formal feudal overlordship, which was slowly spreading round Europe at the time, was not yet introduced, but the shift in power was manifest. The monarchs of ‘The Rock’ henceforth acted in concert with their Alban superiors. The administrative centre was moved across the river from Alt Clud to Govan; and the name of Cumbria came increasingly into use for the sub-kingdom as a whole. Control over ‘The Rock’ and its tributary lands would have assisted sons and grandsons of Kenneth macAlpin to strengthen their inheritance.

It was the Alban monarchs and their fellow Gaels who introduced the name of Strath Cluaith or ‘Strathclyde’, by which Alt Clud would be best known in later times. They had good reason to treat the people of ‘The Rock’ with some indulgence; from their point of view, the rulers of Strathclyde were but a junior branch of their own family through the maternal line. Eochaid map Rhun (
fl.
878–9) even appears to have made a bid for the senior, Alban throne on the strength of being Kenneth macAlpin’s grandson. One source calls him ‘the first Briton to rule over Gael’. He was dispossessed by the shadowy Giric MacRath, or ‘Son of Fortune’, who held Britons, Norse and English in his house as slaves.
Yet the rift between the senior and the junior branches of the ruling family did not lead to a lasting feud. In any case, the imminent and unforeseen collapse of Viking power beyond Hadrian’s Wall was to draw the Strathclyders and the Scots into yet another set of power struggles in which they would need to stand together.

In the tenth century, a resurgent Wessex came to the fore in southern Britain. Within twenty years of King Alfred’s death in 899 it was showing signs not only of reducing the Danes and Vikings to submission but also of creating a united ‘Kingdom of all-Britain’. Athelstan (r. 924–39), Alfred’s grandson, succeeded to the Kingdom of Mercia as well as to Wessex, and in 927 he launched a lightning northern campaign, destroying the Viking Kingdom of York, overrunning Northumbria as far as the Forth, and obliging Constantine II, king of Scots, to sue for peace. A meeting of five kings at Eamont Bridge in Cumbria acknowledged Athelstan’s overlordship. Apart from Athelstan and Constantine, the participants included the king of ‘West Wales’, the ‘king of Bamburgh’ and Ywain map Dynfwal of Strathclyde, otherwise ‘Owen of Cumbria’. The act of homage to Athelstan signalled more than the advance of Anglo-Saxon power from the Tyne to the Forth; it marked the first step in a long campaign by the English kings to claim hegemony over their northern neighbours.

Nonetheless, the humbling of Viking York and Northumbria allowed the Strathclyders to move into part of the resultant vacuum, and to recover many of the historic territories of the ‘Old North’. In subsequent decades, they reached southwards into the former lands of Rheged and deep into the Pennines. Acting as a sub-state of ‘Alba’, they pushed the frontier with England back beyond the zone where the Borders would eventually settle. A boundary stone on the summit of Stainmore, variously known as Rere Cross, Rear Cross or Rey Cross – halfway between Penrith and Barnard Castle – probably marks the limit of Alban and Strathclyde rule. A cluster of Cumbrian parish churches dedicated to St Mungo/Kentigern, notably at Dearham near Cockermouth, attests to persistent Clydeside influences. In this era, the customs and language of the Brythonic elements of the population, not least the Cumbric sheep-counters, would have been strengthened, though the established dominance of the Anglian and Norse elements was not displaced. The great majority of Lake District place names, for example, like Bassenthwaite, Langdale or Scafell, are self-evidently Norse in origin, while only a minority, like Derwent, ‘Oak Valley’, or Helvellyn, ‘Yellow Moor’, are Brythonic. Dunmail Raise on the road between Keswick and Grasmere, where in future times a cairn would mark the boundary between Cumberland and Westmorland, was named after one of the three sub-kings of Strathclyde of that name. In the early tenth century, the Dunmail cairn could have been a southern counterpart to Rere Cross on Stainmore.

Respite, however, was short. In 937, one of the most crucial, but frequently neglected battles in the history of the Isles was fought at
Brunanburh
, an unspecified location somewhere on Merseyside.
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The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle breaks into verse for this entry. The poem, known as
The Battle of Brunanburh
, was translated by Alfred, Lord Tennyson:

Athelstan King,

Lord among Earls,

Bracelet-bestower and

Baron of Barons,

He with his brother

Edmund Atheling,

Gaining a lifelong

Glory in battle,

Slew with the sword-edge

There by Brunanburh,

Brake the shield-wall,

Hew’d the lindenwood,

Hack’d the battleshield…

At Brunanburh, Athelstan of Wessex, titular ‘King of All-Britain’ faced a coalition of Welsh, Scots and Norse kings who were evidently alarmed by the surge of southern English power and who had brought their troops into Athelstan’s territory. The king of Strathclyde, probably Ywain map Dynfwal, was among them. This was the point at which, if the fortunes of battle had favoured them, the non-English forces could have clipped the wings of Wessex. England was no more inevitable than Scotland was, and different turns could have been taken at every step of the way. As it was, Athelstan triumphed, and the anti-English coalition was broken. The Anglo-Saxon chronicler (again translated by Tennyson) proclaimed an ultimate victory over the ‘Welsh’:

Never had huger

Slaughter of heroes

Slain by the sword-edge –

Such as old writers

Have writ of in histories –

Hapt in this isle, since

Up from the East hither

Saxon and Angle from

Over the broad billow

Broke into Britain with

Haughty war-workers who

Harried the Welshman, when

Earls that were lured by the

Hunger of glory gat

Hold of the land.

The consequences of Brunanburh – what the English were to call the ‘Great Battle’ – were not immediately apparent. Indeed, Athelstan’s early death inspired a temporary recovery of his enemies, and his heirs were required to fight hard to confirm his conquests. In 944–5, for example, Athelstan’s half-brother and successor, Edmund the Elder, invaded the extended Kingdom of Strathclyde, defeated its sub-king, Dynfwal III – whom the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle calls ‘Dunmail’ – and, as part of a general settlement, insisted that Strathclyde be formally subordinated to Alba. The Alban Scots were being told to keep a tighter rein on their dependants. The sovereign life of the former ‘Kingdom of the Rock’ was reaching its term.

A solitary sentence in the Welsh
Brut y Tywysogion
is worthy of note. After listing the death of Bishop Emerys of St Davids in 944, it records, entirely without comment: ‘
Ystrat Clut adiffeithóyt y gan y Saeson
’ (‘Ystrat Clut was devastated by the Saxons’). This must have been at least the fourth time that ‘The Rock’ had been devastated, and the perpetrators can only have been the troops or allies of Edmund the Elder. But it was the first occasion that the Welsh dropped the traditional Brythonic name of Alt Clud, replacing it by Ystrad Clut, or ‘Vale of Clyde’ – a simple calque of the Gaelic name. The Brythonic/Cumbric character of the kingdom was slipping; Gaelicized Alban ‘Strathclyde’ was emerging, and the Welsh were aware of it.
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The Britons of the Old North were not even mentioned.