Chapter 4
The North
Large areas of Britain had been only loosely attached to the culture of the most Romanised parts of southern and eastern England. Parts of northern England, Scotland, Wales and Cornwall retained much of their pre-Roman vigour, trading with the Roman army and across the Irish Sea and producing all the mineral wealth of the provinces. It was in some of these areas that British leaders were able to maintain a vestige of independent rule during Roman times which perhaps contributed later to a speedier development of kingship.
Apart from Kent and East Anglia a little later on, the other dominant kingdom of the early post-Roman period was Northumbria. It developed from two originally distinct areas, Deira to the south on the Yorkshire Wolds and Bernicia to the north around what is now Bamburgh. We know the name of an early leader of Bernicia. This was Ǽthelfrith who expanded his dominion to the west and also defeated the incursions of the leaders of Dalriada from Argyll. Soon after this he was able to win control over Deira and create the kingdom of Northumbria. He was succeeded by Edwin of Deira who drove the Bernician royal family into exile in the north but they were able to return on his death in 632 and the Bernician line was restored in the person of Oswald who brought with him from Scotland a number of Scottish adherents, amongst them some monks. The Bernician kings pushed further north, extending their territory to the line of the Antonine Wall by 685 in the southern lowlands between Forth and Tweed. By this time the lands of Cumberland, Westmoreland and Lancashire had also been added to the Northumbrian kingdom..
Further north in what is now Scotland there were three peoples. Most familiar is the name of one of them – the Picts - who were mentioned by Roman writers and who occupied lands north of the Antonine Wall and ruled there until the ninth century. They were not a unified people but a conglomeration of tribes not always on good terms with each other. Their language and customs differed from those to their south-west who traditionally originated amongst the people of Co. Antrim in northern Ireland. Contacts across the short though stormy sea-crossing between Northern Ireland and Scotland are proved to have existed since Neolithic times by the distribution of Irish Court-cairns and porcellanite axeheads on both sides of the North Channel. However, it is proper to point out that doubts have recently been cast on this reading of history and it is suggested that the population was indigenous to northern Britain. Either way, by c500 a dynasty known as the Dálriada had materialised in what we now call Argyll in western Scotland. These people were known as Scots and gave their name eventually to the whole of the country.
South of the Antonine Wall were British tribes, who in the east had formed by mid-sixth century the kingdoms of Gododdin, Rheged and the Bernician grouping whose activities have been described above.
Bede, who was writing in the early eighth century says that the Picts he knew of were divided into two main bodies, the northern and the southern Picts who occupied the valleys of the rivers Tay and Earn and were apparently divided into four groups: the old kingdom of the Caledonii with their chief stronghold at Dunkeld, the Circinn in Strathmore with a stronghold at Dunnechain. (Forfar), Fortrenn on the upper waters of the Earn and the Forth, a rich agricultural area and Fib (Fife) with its stronghold at Kilrymont. Perhaps the northern Picts were dominant during the sixth century. Later on in that century the southern Picts and the Dálriada came to some agreement but conflict between them both and the British of Strathclyde continued on and off. In later centuries the warfare between both groups of Picts and Dálriada continually erupted until the union of the two people in the middle of the ninth century.
The Picts were certainly a powerful and literate people. About thirty Pictish inscriptions exist and they are found across the north and east of Scotland in the same area as the Pictish symbol stones. Inscription are, with some ten exceptions where the text is in Latin, written in the native ogam alphabet, so far not fully understood but most seem to be memorial inscriptions recording Celtic-language names and probably belong to the eighth and ninth centuries. As with the kingdoms further south, it was the missionaries who brought Latin literacy some time in the seventh century to the Pictish courts. This resulted in a Pictish king list, produced after 550, which is fairly reliable but complicated by the Pictish custom of succession through the female so that the names of the ruler’s fathers are not to be trusted.
Pictish symbols are of uncertain ancestry but is thought that southern Iron Age metalwork and Roman objects brought into the region could have had some influence on their designs. Symbols are found carved into rocks, cave walls or rock outcrops. These are termed Class I symbols. Class II are designs, some of them Christian, on dressed stones. Most are found in the lowlands of north-eastern Scotland and include three designs that have widespread distribution. They are crescents, double discs and the so-called ‘swimming elephant’ (Figure Four). Class I stones are usually seen as memorials to the dead and thought to post-date 500, Class II date from the late-seventh century to the early eighth.
These designs might have decorated other materials like leather, textiles, wooden objects or even human skin but we have no surviving examples. In some cases the Class I designs are carved onto prehistoric standing stones or on stones placed above burials. Pictish burials have been carbon-dated and most are from the fourth to the eighth century. Commonly the dead were interred in stone-lined rectangular graves, known as long cists, which can be buried under earth or stone platforms or surrounded by stone kerbs.
Traditionally, Christianity was introduced to the Southern Picts by St Ninian during the fifth century when he was bishop at Whithorn, a community which is supposed to have developed from a late-Roman trading settlement. Evidence for the organisation of Christianity has been deduced from the distribution of Eccles place-names which suggest a scatter of dioceses in south-eastern Scotland each, presumably, with its bishop, one of whom is referred to on an inscribed stone from Peebles But it is St Columba who arrived in 563 and founded the monastery at Iona in Argyll who was chiefly responsible for the spread of the faith in the west. His monastery was destined to be the most influential and scholarly, despatching priests to the kingdom of Northumbria and producing the Book of Kells. Around the monastic church the faithful were laid to rest while nearby at Reilig Odhráin were royal graves and a collection of early high crosses. Columba’s life was written up by Adomnán, one of his successors as abbot of Iona and, although it may be a partial account, it is a valuable source for the period. Other, near contemporary accounts, have survived preserved as copies like the collection of oral and written materials in the Old Scottish Chronicle bound up in a fourteenth-century manuscript and the Senchus fer nAlban, written in the late-seventh century, which deals with the structure of society.
Like other Celtic monasteries in the western British Isles, Iona was a simple place, built with timber, hurdling and thatch inside an enclosure, with a church, individual cells for the monks, accommodation for guests, kitchen and dining-building. Being self-supporting, it had to have gardens and fields where the monks grew their food, byres and workshops where carpenters, leather-workers and skilled metal-workers could ply their crafts. A monastery has been excavated at Portmahomack, Easter Ross that has also been suggested as a Columban foundation of the later sixth century where evidence has been found of manuscript production. The site was abandoned during the tenth century. Similar monasteries were founded elsewhere like Ceann a’Mhara in Tiree and Eileach an Naoimh in the Garvellachs where there are still upstanding remains of monks’ beehive cells.
Literacy had been introduced to Dálriada earlier. There is a Scottish king list from the fifth century down to the eleventh together with a general survey of sea areas and land available to the kingdom during the seventh or eighth century. The most important of these kings was Aedán and it was his partnership with St Columba, the leading figure in the power politics of the sixth century that determined the history of the kingdom in succeeding years until it amalgamated with the Pictish kingdom under their king Kenneth mac Alpin. Meanwhile. Dálriada was gradually encroaching eastwards into the territories of the Southern Picts until it clashed with the greatest of the Pictish kings, Angus mac Fergus. This ultimately led to the union in 858 and a centre of power was established at Scone on the banks of the River Tay.
Archaeological evidence supports a mixed economy in both Pictland and Dálriada. Some natural food was collected – wild fruits in season while bee-keeping produced both a sweetener and beeswax. This evidence has come from the excavation of farmsteads in enclosures situated within large units of land, each contributing to the tribute that was owed to the potentates who ruled in regional power centres – in Argyll these would have been kings or members of their families and in Pictland could be appointed officials.
These stone-walled or timber-built homesteads contrast with crannogs or artificial islands that were occupied in Scotland at this time but have been little explored. Some 400 are known but the total may run into thousands when all the lochs have been investigated. One, that at Loch Glashan in northern Scotland, dating from the seventh and eighth centuries, has been excavated, producing evidence of metalworking and the use of imported pottery and may have been the residence of a wealthy individual like the sites in southern Scotland. Crannogs tend to be placed in their lakes opposite good agricultural land that was presumably cultivated by the islanders.
Buiston Crannog in Ayrshire was occupied for some 80 to 90 years, being refurbished at least three times as rising waters affected the palisade surrounding the circular house which in its latter phase had a central stone hearth and was divided into rooms. Hearths and floors were replaced at least four times, on the last occasion the timber was taken from an alder felled in 609. In the layers that represented the occupation between 594 and 615 there was evidence of leather-working, lathe-turning and small-scale metalworking. Various tools and utensils included a mallet, an axe, chisels, a comb, churn lids, a hanging bowl, a brooch, glass fragments and imported pottery from the Mediterranean. These last two items suggest that the owner was a person of some wealth and position, perhaps a chieftain or the equivalent.
In the past, those British who lived south of the Antonine Wall, probably differing only in name but not in ethnicity from those to the north, had maintained some loose economic arrangement with the Romans and had been in receipt of Roman goods and Roman ideas but had developed their own political arrangements involving leaders that are referred to as native princes. Their trade with the Romano-Britons had required passage through Hadrian’s Wall to reach the markets further south and probably used some coastal sea routes as well.
Literacy had been brought to them along with Christianity but we have no written records of theirs surviving today. Their princes employed bards who composed panegyric and elegiac poetry and no doubt performed their own and their predecessors’ compositions in the halls for the entertainment of the courts. These compositions, probably not in their original form but amended regularly to suit the differing tastes and historical perceptions of their lords, have come down to us in ninth-century form, courtesy of the monks of North Wales. Most important of the later princes was Urien of Rheged who hailed from Cumbria and apparently fought against his fellow Britons in Bernicia in intercine conflict that was endemic in the north-west at the time. However, the Bernicians gradually extended their territory to the west and north and this in time created the area we call today the Scottish Lowlands.
Excavations in Scotland have been carried out at the royal Pictish fort at Burghead (Alcock and Alcock) which probably dates from the fourth century. It was the largest of the coastal promontories and stood on a headland that was cut off from unwelcome visitors by three large ramparts and ditches. The interior was divided into two parts by a double wall of stones infilled with rubble and surmounted by a wall walk. Its ramparts were made using a timber framework that was held together with iron spikes and nails with a facing of coursed slabs. During construction of the eighteenth-century harbour here some 30 symbol stones were found including the famous one depicting the Burghead Bulls. Burghead is usually thought to have been used as a base by the Pictish ‘navy’ that preyed on shipping from the late-Roman period onwards and during the seventh century ravaged the Orkneys.
Other forts have produced dates of the fifth or sixth centuries (Alcock and Alcock) and developed from that starting point to their full status in the seventh or eighth centuries. Dundurn was built on an isolated crag in Perthshire and defended by a timber stockade that was later replaced by a nailed timber-framed rampart infilled with earth and stone. Finally, masonry was carried from a Roman site to help build a third enclosure surrounding the summit and a terrace below it.
Dunadd in Argyll (Lane and Campbell) was a fortified site during the Iron Age and fresh fortifications were added on the summit of the hill during the fourth and fifth centuries. These were augmented during the seventh century with additional enclosures. Radiocarbon dates show that the period of most intensive occupation was from the sixth to the eighth centuries but it probably remained as an important centre until the tenth. Finds evidence point to it being a high-class and perhaps royal fortress. Over 250 sherds of crucible fragments demonstrate the love of expensive metallurgy made of gold, silver, copper alloys, lead, tin, iron and glass in the form of buckles, discs and penannular brooches in moulds whose extensive remains have been found together with glass beads and early medieval querns. Dunadd’s position in the trade of the time is demonstrated by French pottery and glass from the Mediterranean showing that it lay on the terminus of the route that first made landfall in south-western Britain then called in on South Wales, then North Wales, making calls at various places in Ireland on the way, before reaching Dálriada. Fragments of gold and garnet jewellery of Kentish or Frankish style suggest also that this trading network was more complicated than previously thought a few years ago.
Further south Dumbarton (Al Cluith) was the most important stronghold of the British in south-western Scotland on the north side of the River Clyde but there were others like Carwinley, perhaps in the Roman fort of Netherby near Longtown in the north of Cumbria. In 870 the Vikings sacked the place. The kingdom of Strathclyde survived the assault but its principal royal centre moved eleven miles upstream to Govan which became a rival to Dunadd in Argyll, centre of the old Scottish kingdom. Dunadd was beginning to decline at this time, yielding power to Forteviot, in Perthshire. Much of the evidence for Govan’s importance at this time was swept away when Glasgow’s shipyards were built but the Early Christian churchyard survives with its curving pear-shaped boundary. In the church there is a collection of early medieval sculptured stones carved in the British style. Some are gravestones, five hog-backs and 21 recumbent slabs with interlace crosses which are thought once to have marked the graves of the Strathclyde royal house. Apparently, part of the monastic vallum has been found on one side of the churchyard with some traces of a wooden church and workshops perhaps for the processing of jet. (Glasgow University)
In the south-east of the churchyard are the remains of a metalled road that lines up with a modern street that leads to the former site of Doomster Hill, now under the shipyard, and appears like a royal way leading from the church to the court on the hill.
The hog-back tombstones and the analogies of the layout of the ancient place with the Tynewald on the Isle of Man suggest Norse influence on the British court after 870 and even intermarriage with the Manx dynasty.
This was a heroic society. The leaders were expected to display courage and reward with generosity their followers’ loyalty and service but although boastful and showy they were Christians and not barbarians. Poetical records that have come down to us advertise these qualities but, of course, we are seeing these people at their feasts and in the hunting field through the eyes of their bardic dependents and even at their best they certainly don’t appear as docile churchgoers.
They were governed by laws which, though written down later in legal form, were basically the traditional customs of a people whose wealth lay in cattle and slaves but they tell us little about more everyday social matters like the rights of women or treatment of the sick. Kingship was the most important institution, the rulers being described in a variety of terms like arglwyd (lord), tywysog (prince) and brenhin (king), all three terms being legally synonymous. The word for court was llys, the royal place, usually fortified, where the lord would hold court and try lawsuits, the king being the fount of all justice. Next in importance was the church which, owing to its late appearance in heroic society, does not figure largely in the laws, although the church itself had its own code which one might think of as parallel to that of the secular code.
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