Chapter 11
Beyond England
Topography probably has more effect on people than is usually taken account of. An open countryside with fertile soil is likely to nurture people with a different outlook to one which is mountainous and with little good agricultural land. Life is easier in the former case, in the latter, it is a struggle and although the folk are both from the same stock, the environment plays a major part in their attitude to life. It is difficult to describe the differences; one can suggest that one group is more independent, the other more innovative because they have the means of being so; but the differences are really indefinable. All that can be said is that they are there.
It may be that the building of Offa’s Dyke could have had a beneficial effect on the people of Wales, at least, on those in the east of the country who were aware of its construction. What it did was to give them some sense of a separateness, illusory as it was since they were of the same stock as those on the other side of the barrier. But it did not lead to a unified nation, although at various times the major part of the country was ruled by a single ruler. Offa’s opponent, west of the Dyke, had been Elise of the princely house of Powys, whose grandson, Cyngen, set up a memorial cross to him in 854 on the banks of the Dee. It stands on a low mound which contains a burial of the fifth or sixth century which may have had some further ancestral significance.
Welsh kingship was subject to gavelkind, a law that a father’s lands be divided amongst all his sons instead of passing to the eldest, the dynastic succession system in England, where it passed from father to son or from brother to brother. In Wales it prevented, except in unusual circumstances, the establishment of a unified state. None of the kingdoms was very big and, owing to the poverty of the landscape in terms of good arable land or even high-class grazing, they were usually poor. Those who owned the land were more or less independent rulers on their estates, owing nothing to the king but the duties of repairing roads and bridges known as ‘gwestfa’ and a certain amount of service in the Welsh version of the fyrd. This lack of legal control over the aristocracy put the kings in a weak position unless they had the personality or ruthlessness to ensure that their wishes were carried out. The nobles, for their part, could defy the king if they felt safe enough to do so and on their estates enjoyed life-and-death control over their tenant farmers and slaves. It was not until the end of eleventh century that kings managed to achieve a little more control, more by custom it should be said, than by force of personality. This allowed them to demand a land tax on the estates. When the demand was successful, it was often a render of food and materials rather than money.
Landholders’ states could be widely scattered with one home settlement, the llys of the lord, but, as in England, he would move about his lands frequently acting as the sole authority in disputes and dispenser of justice. Accompanied by the bodyguards, he could be an awesome presence, his arrival a feared event, but some nobles with a degree of public spirit or perhaps in anticipation of reward, would participate in the king’s council or even take on duties in the king’s administration. Often, a son would be sent to serve in the king’s bodyguard as a way of cementing good relations.
Kings would welcome these volunteers since their resources were small, most of their income coming from their own land holdings out of which they had to fund a rudimentary service of justice and law and fund embassies to other rulers and be generous to the Church
A good deal of our knowledge of the period in Wales comes from a twelfth-century document which contains elements of the Law Code of a tenth-century Welsh ruler, Hywel Dda, who died in 949 and from it we can glean, albeit dimly, some understanding of the social scene of the time. On the estates were bondsmen who were unfree tenants who tilled the land. They were literally tied to the land, being ‘sold’ with the land as it changed ownership. Practically all of them were agricultural labourers – shepherds, foresters, domestic workers - while their wives made cloth, tended to bees, young animals and various horticultural jobs. In the twelfth-century the text implies that the king could call out the bondsmen to serve in his army but how the mechanism of this summons could work is difficult to understand since they could only be made to serve for four days a year which seems a most unrealistic period of time and there could be added complications if their lord was not fully in sympathy with the demand. It is probable that what this really means is that the four days was to be commuted to a sum of money which could be used to pay mercenary troops
Bondsmen had other obligations both to the king and to their landlord. To the king they would pay a twice-yearly tribute, presumably of money. Again, the mechanics of this is not clear. Would a tax-gatherer come round every six months or would it be paid via the landlord? This latter option does not sound a very certain one. To the landlord would go a food-rent, that is, a tithe of produce from the bondman’s holding. Bondsmen lived in their own settlements, presumably surrounded by their allotments. Unlike the English system, the lord had no personal allotment, he would live off the produce that came from the bondsmens’ holdings.
Living alongside the bondsmen were the slaves who worked as agricultural labourers or artisans. Most were born into slavery but it was possible to be condemned to slavery as a punishment. A slave could own property and save enough to buy his freedom but this was difficult for a family man since he would need to be able to free his dependants as well. Slavery lasted longer in Wales than elsewhere. In a landscape which required so much labour to wrest a living from it, there was need for intensive cultivation on those areas where it was possible to raise crops and this ensured the continuance of the system into the medieval period.
The period was still one of colonisation of the moorlands which lay above the ancient forests that were in process of being cut down. In the summer the custom of taking animals to summer pasture (hafod) on the high moorland and bringing them down to the coastal lowlands was common. Pressure of population was causing settlement to creep up the sheltered valleys leading to the moorlands and this was helped when the summer camps became permanent as the level of stocking increased. Assarts nibbled at edges of the moors but it is difficult to recognise these in the landscape today except by the occasional occurrence of stone walls that marked out particular allotments. In the north-west where ice-sheets had shaped the land and scraped away the soil leaving whole areas bare of vegetation, the land bore the same untamed but beautiful appearance that it has today.
It was the appearance of the Vikings that persuaded the Welsh kings into some sort of unity. Rhodri Mawr was the first leader of importance who became king of Powys and a good deal more of the country. His reign saw the repulse of the Danes and the killing of one of their famous leaders, the fearsome Gorm. Rhodr died in 878 in battle against the English and his sons sought help from the Wessex king, Alfred, in an alliance and his grandson, Hywel the Great, went further and established a policy of conciliation with the English, becoming a sub-regulus, subservient to Athelstan. This enabled him to extend his rule over Gwynedd and Powys in a territory that was known as Deheubarth, covering most of Wales apart from the richest part, the kingdom of Glamorgan in the south-east. Hywel died in 950, described as ‘the chief and most praiseworthy of the Britons’ in the Chronicle of the Princes.
During his reign, as mentioned above, the Law of Hywel was drawn up, a systemization of the ancient customs that had developed in Wales over the centuries. In many ways it was in advance of the English codes, for example, it gave status to women who were guaranteed property rights and the right to seek compensation from a violent husband and also the right to half of the family property on divorce. Illegitimate sons under the Code were entitled to part of the patrimony.
In 1039 Gruffydd ap Llwelyn became overlord of the Wales, being recognised as such throughout the country. He was an able ruler with a ruthless attitude to the lawlessness and intertribal warfare that had broken out during the century since the death of Hywel which permitted him to bring all the kingdoms until his control for a short time during the years between 1057 to 1063. His growing power was becoming a threat to the English midlands and Harold Godwinson, leading King Edward’s army, made an attempt to capture him in one of his strongholds. However, Gruffydd got wind of Harold’s approach and managed to slip away leaving his stronghold and his ships to be burnt by the English.
A few months later Tostig, Harold’s brother, lent his help by marching a force down from Northumbria into North Wales while Harold, at Bristol, embarked a force and recconoitred along the Welsh coast. The Welsh outside Gruffydd’s hereditary lands were in no mood to come to his aid and co-operated with the English forces, helping to harry him from one refuge to another until he was eventually killed by his own men.
North of the Scottish Central Lowlands, Pictland was certainly a nation but before the early eighth century cannot be described as a state. Perhaps it was the introduction of the Roman Church and its educated clergy that began the process of politicisation. Land re-organisation and the creation of the rank of thane, a level of nobility below that of the earl, helped to give structure to the kingdom. It reached its greatest extent during the eighth century before the Viking incursions had begun. The chief church was founded at St Andrews between 729 and 747 and its European connections are exemplified by the elaborate carvings on the famous sarcophagus in the church.
It was Cináed mac Ailpín who established Scone in Pictland as a royal centre and the church at Dunkeld as a major ecclesiastical centre, a rebuilding of the early eighth-century timber church in red stone and the investing of it with relics of St Columba. He also established the first Scottish dynasty with inheritance passing from father to son and is claimed as the first king of a united Scottish/Pictish kingdom. As a result a new name ‘Alba’ came to be current after 900 for the kingdom, replacing the centuries-old ‘Pictland’ but Pictish things survived. St Andrews, the chief church in Pictland in Fife held its own against the increasing importance of Dunkeld and its bishop was accepted as the primate of the nation.
Viking attacks clawed at the edges of the new kingdom in the north but as a compensation the English hold on the area in the south between the rivers Tweed and Forth was weakening and Scottish kings were able to exercise more authority in the area that came to be known as Lothian. To this period belongs the Sueno stone, perhaps a memorial to some long forgotten battle. It stands more than 6.5m high decorated with a cross and a ceremonial scene below and on the other side are four panels each a battle scene featuring archers, horsemen, soldiers and decapitated fighters. The side panels are decorated with inhabited vine-scrolls like those on the Northumbrian Bewcastle cross. In Argyll, Viking attacks had been devastating and although power had shifted further east, some of the mac Ailpín kings continued to be buried on Iona and the monastic community rebuilt St Columba’s shrine.
Constantin mac Áeda was one of the most influential of the dynasty, reigning from 900 to 943 and consolidating his territory by marriage and intrigue. He profited from the squabbles between the Danes of York and Dublin and perhaps he could be said to have brought the kingdom of Scotland onto the international stage before he retired to the monastery of St Andrews. One of his successors, Malcolm II, took an army across the Tweed and defeated a locally-raised English army at the Battle of Carham in 1018. This finally set the English/Scottish border on the Tweed and it has remained so until this day. West of this was Strathclyde whose kings were appointed by the kings of Alba. In 1034 Duncan, King of Strathclyde, inherited the throne of the Scots kingdom and Strathclyde was swallowed up into the new united monarchy of Scotland which, however, still did not rule those parts of the Scottish mainland and the islands where the Vikings were in control.
It was Duncan who features in Shakespeare’s play ‘Macbeth’. He and his father had been brutal in removing all rivals amongst their relations in other branches of the family and Macbeth was a scion of the branch which was powerful in Moray and the north-east of Scotland. He was probably not the black-hearted villain portrayed in the drama but his quarrel with the king resulted in the ousting of King Malcolm and his own elevation to the throne which he occupied for seventeen years until he was overthrown in 1057 by Malcolm III, the old king’s son.
Malcolm III, known as Canmore from the Gaelic Caenn mor or ‘big head’, which may refer to his person but could be a fawning reference to his power. He reigned for thirty-six years and, although he started off well with good relations with the Norse rulers, he incurred the enmity of the English by whom he was killed in an ambush during a raid into their territory.
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