The Faded Map: The Lost Kingdoms of Scotland (10 page)

A
ruiri
was an overking of a group of several kindreds who were almost always neighbours and he, in turn, might bow to the power of a provincial overking, a
ri ruirech
. To top off the royal pyramid, Ireland had, from time to time, a High King who ruled over all, having been inaugurated at the sacred Hill of Tara. In reality, these relationships must have been much less tidy and they probably fluctuated as reputations waxed and waned and different traditions imposed themselves in different places. But it may be that the man who sat at Rerigonion on Loch Ryan, the Very Royal Place, was a provincial overking, the highest rank, who could control lesser rulers, perhaps all the way east to the banks of the Nith and the limit of the territories of the Novantae.

There exists no direct evidence for the structures of northern kingship in the first century
AD
but Ireland’s cultural influence may have sailed across the narrows of the North Channel. A modern land-based society which thinks in terms of road transport often forgets the historical important of the sea as a highway and how people and ideas crossed it readily – much more easily than on land. And the kingdom of the Novantae was a sea-based polity, without doubt. Galloway’s indented coastline supplied shelter for ships and good beaching was available in many places. A journey from the royal centre at the top of well-defended Loch Ryan to the mouth of the Nith could be made in the fraction of the time it took a traveller to make the same trip overland. And the watchers in the fort at Maryport and the sea wall on the Cumbrian coast inhibited a response to a naval capability of some strength.

If Atlantic Celtic spread through trade and maritime contact, it is possible that it was spoken on both shores of the North Channel and perhaps in the southern Hebrides. The names on Ptolemy’s map of the north are not all incontrovertibly Continental Celtic in character. Early links between Ireland and the western coasts of Scotland became increasingly important as time went on.

British Gaulish

The Celtic dialects of France, collectively known as Gaulish and spoken on both sides of the Alps, began to die out only generations after the conquest by Julius Caesar. It lingered until the second century
AD
when the Bishop of Lyons, St Irenaeus from Asia Minor, reported that he could not always manage in Latin and had ‘to learn a barbarous tongue’. But a dialect of Gaulish, perhaps introduced by the Belgae in the first century
BC
,
did survive and thrive in Britain. Personal names show the influence clearly, especially amongst kings and queens. In Gaulish, Cassivellaunos means ‘Oakdominator’, Tasciovanos is ‘Badger-slayer’, Cunobelinos is ‘the Hound of the God, Belenos’ and Boudicca means ‘Victory’.

If a provincial overking ruled at Rerigonion, some measure of his power might be drawn from later sources and comparisons with the Celtic peoples of Gaul a century before. In
Commentarii de Bello Gallico
, Julius Caesar recorded a society of some diversity. Kindreds were sometimes governed by kings, occasionally by elected magistrates (who had to come from different families so that the grip of oligarchy was slacker), but all were dominated by a military aristocracy. The members of these leading families were themselves warriors and often maintained small war bands at their own expense. It is important to stress that numbers were not large. Few had the resources to maintain more than dozens of warriors.

In order to justify themselves, feed their prestige and hone their fighting skills, these warriors needed to fight. Caesar wrote that the kindreds of Gaul went to war, ‘well-nigh every year’, in the sense that they would either make wanton attacks themselves or repelling such, and other commentators saw these Celtic people as ‘war-mad’.

Poems known as the Ulster Cycle were first transcribed in the eleventh century but scholars believe them to be very much older. The most famous,
An Tain Bo Cuailgne
, ‘The Great Cattle Raid of Cooley’, describes a pre-Christian Ireland and it may first have been recited in the courts of kings in the first century
AD
.
The language used has been dated to the seventh and eighth centuries but even though much of the narrative is clearly mythic, the detail of weaponry, chariots and the traditions of the war band locate the stories even earlier, in the first and second centuries
AD
. Their great value is to supply atmosphere – to say something colourful and memorable about how Celtic warriors societies behaved and how they saw themselves.

The
Tain Bo
is a tale of heroes and superhuman deeds. Queen Medb of Connaught has mustered a great army from all her underkings and is marching to invade Ulster to steal a considerable prize, the Brown Bull of Cooley. All that stands in their path is the boy-hero, the seventeen-year-old Cuchulainn. The following description of the ritual before battle, of how warriors worked themselves into a frenzy and intimidated the enemy in front of them, is clearly fantastical but its brilliant images light up the ferocious culture of combat in Celtic Ireland:

The rage-fit was upon him. He shook like a bullrush in the stream. His sinews stretched and bunched, and every huge, immeasurable, vast ball of them was as big as the head of a month-old child. His face was a red bowl, fearsomely distorted, one eye sucked in so far that the beak of a wild crane could scarcely reach it, the other eye bulged out of his cheek. Teeth and jawbone strained through peeled-back lips. Lungs and liver pulsed in his throat. Flecks of fire streamed from his mouth. The booming of his heart was like the deep baying of bloodhounds, or the growl of lions attacking bears.

In virulent clouds sparks blazed, lit by the torches of the war-goddess Badb. The sky was slashed as the mark of his fury. His hair stood about his head like the twisted branches of red hawthorn. A stream of dark blood, as tall as the mast of a ship, rose out of the top of his head, then dispersed into dark mist, like the smoke of winter fires.

Cattle were seen as a measure of wealth in early Celtic societies and cattle-raiding was an important means of venting an over-heated
warrior society. Raids and counter-raids were honourable, added status, were a cause for celebration and feasting and they involved the use of martial skills. Most of all they were much less wasteful of men than all-out battle.

The kings of the Selgovae, the Votadini, Manau and the other kindreds of the north almost certainly sanctioned cattle-raiding, probably originating persistent traditions in the Border hills and the Highland glens. In Continental Celtic, the warriors of these royal war bands were known as the
teulu
, literally meaning ‘the family’. In modern Welsh the adjective
teuluaidd
means ‘aristocratic’ but members of the Selgovan king’s
teulu
need not have been related to him or even high-born. What mattered was military prowess and the numbers of these household warriors will only have been large in the halls of overkings but, even then, only exceptionally more than a hundred. In a later reference,
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
defined an army as more than thirty men.

The royal war band depended absolutely on the king and he on them. Their leader, the
penteulu
, was constantly in the king’s company as a bodyguard and a counsellor, and both men knew that the loyalty of the war band was the whole basis of royal authority and stability. Consequently warriors received a flow of gifts and favour, usually from a division of the spoils of raiding or war. And there was a regular cycle of feasting and drinking to reinforce these bonds of dependence. When the
bardd teulu
sang in their hall, he celebrated the valour and virtue of the war band collectively and by name. Healthy competition was encouraged and the traditions of feasting, such as the award of the hero’s portion, the best cut of meat from the cauldron, came to be famous.

Soldiers have always spent most of their time not fighting and so the war band took on other responsibilities in the royal household from an early date.
Gwestfa
or ‘food rents’ were owed to the king by his kindred and, in order to collect and consume these efficiently, the household was peripatetic, moving on from each place as the rents ran down. In the territory of the Novantae, this annual journey was probably undertaken by sea since at least three ancient royal sites, at Loch Ryan,
Cruggleton and the Mote of Mark, are on the Galloway coast. Known as the
cylch
in later Welsh sources, it was organised and its collections enforced by the
penteulu
and his men.

At each royal centre it is likely that the king took care to show himself and restate his authority. While the
teulu
was the core, he needed a larger force to augment it if war became imminent. When Agricola’s legions appeared in the north after
AD
79, there can be little doubt that farmers and shepherds were pressed into service, even if only for show. Such a host was called the
gosgordd
. But, by itself, it is unlikely that the host of any northern king could hope to be a match for the armies of Rome.

When Agricola crossed in the leading ship to defeat unknown peoples before, in a curious gesture of intent or perhaps defiance, lining up his forces to face Ireland, he was probably campaigning in the Kintyre peninsula. From the Mull of Kintyre, it is possible to make out Fair Head and the Antrim coast even on a cloudy day. And the unknown peoples his men defeated could credibly have been the Epidii, ‘the Horsemen’. When Ptolemy marked their name on Kintyre, he added a little more when he identified the Mull as Epidion Akron, ‘the Promontory of the Horse People’. In a fascinating survival, Kintyre was seen in the eighteenth century as the homelands of the Clan MacEachern. The extended version of the name is Mac Each Thighearna and it means ‘the Son of the Horse Master’.

Horses were central to Celtic warfare in the first century
AD
and for long after. But not in the same way as the great destriers which carried armoured medieval knights or those brave juggernauts which galloped with the Light Brigade into the valley of death. These were big, heavy and sometimes aggressive beasts trained to trample over opponents in the ruck of battle or to knock them down with the irresistible impetus of a determined charge. The horses bred and broken by the horsemen of the Epidii or Kintyre were not at all like that. They were small ponies, their withers often reaching no higher than a man’s chest. Archaeology confirms (both with skeletal remains and tack) that these were most likely bred from wild native stock. Tough,
nimble, intelligent and with tremendous stamina, these fell ponies (to use a much later definition) were also very adaptable. Warriors could use their ponies for riding in cattle raids, they were able to travel long distances over difficult country and then be used as herders on the way home with the spoils. Or they could become cavalry ponies and fight at close quarter, responding to a rider’s shift in seat or to guidance with the legs as he used both hands for a weapon and shield. The impetus of a horse could add immense weight to the delivery of a blow or its fast reactions avoid the full force of one.

Celtic warriors adored their horses, even venerated them, and, when they harnessed the smaller ones to the yoke of a chariot, their bards became lyrical. Here is another passage from the
Tain Bo Cuailgne
:

Cuchulainn’s war chariot was both broad and fine, shining like white crystal, with a yoke of gold, great panels of copper, shafts of bronze, wheel-rims of white metal, light-framed. It could reach the speed of a swallow or a wild deer racing over the plains of Mag Slebe. The chariot was drawn by two well-yoked horses, swift, strong, roan-breasted and long-striding. One was supple, hard-pulling and great-hoofed. The other was curly-maned, slender-hoofed and sleek.

The habit of plaiting the manes and tails was not something dreamed up by modern Pony Club competitors for the County Show. It was done by the grooms of the war band to avoid tangles with harness and bridles, a matter not of decoration but potentially of life and death if the manoeuvrability of horses was not to be fatally impaired. While a groom drove a chariot (no mean feat to keep it steady on rough ground), probably crouching low on his haunches as a warrior stood behind with his weapons, bracing on the bouncing floor to keep his balance. Often charioteers drove warriors into the midst of a battle where they dismounted to fight. And as they moved about a battlefield, flicking and checking with the long reins, drivers could display
tremendous skill. Julius Caesar watched amazed as charioteers ran back and forth along the pole between their galloping ponies and stood like acrobats on the curved double yokes.

After the expedition to Kintyre, Agricola’s attention turned northwards once more. No doubt with imperial approval from Domitian, the Roman war machine rumbled again through the Stirling gap. Here is Tacitus:

To resume the story, in the summer in which he began his sixth year in post, he enveloped the states situated beyond the Bodotria [the Firth of Forth]. Because there were fears that all the peoples on the further side might rise and the land routes be threatened by an enemy army, Agricola reconnoitred the harbours with the fleet.

The campaign almost immediately met with near disaster. For the first time, according to Tacitus, ‘[T]he peoples who inhabit Caledonia turned to armed struggle’. Agricola had brigaded his legions and auxiliaries into an invasion force of at least 17,000 men, probably more. It seems likely that Agricola’s own legion with whom he had served on an earlier tour of duty in Britain, the XX Valeria Victrix, had marched north with him in some strength. The II Adiutrix were with them and part of the IX Hispana had been summoned from their garrison at York. In addition there were regiments of auxiliaries, the Batavians and Tungrians from the lands near the mouth of the Rhine. It was a substantial, battle-hardened and experienced army.