The Faded Map: The Lost Kingdoms of Scotland (22 page)

Morcant Bwlc was the heir of Germanianus and the ancestor of Catraut – and the ruler of a kingdom based on Kelso and perhaps the great fortress at Marchidun across the Tweed. When he joined Urien’s coalition at the siege of Metcaud, Lindisfarne, he had the most immediately to gain and the most to lose. Calchvynydd lay on the borders of Bernicia and the attack on the island was a critical political moment.

The British kindreds knew Lindisfarne as Metcaud because of the herbs which grew in profusion in this beautiful, windswept place. They were famously medicinal and toponymists believe that the island was known as Medicata Insula, hence Metcaud. Only an island twice a day when the tides ripple over the broad sands between it and the mainland, it is a unique, atmospheric place which would become much beloved by Cuthbert, Aidan and countless generations of monks in love with the contemplative life and the isolated peace that the tides gave them.

Theodoric, Fflamddwyn the Firebrand, was likely the Anglian king besieged by Urien, Morcant and their allies. He valued Lindisfarne for its stunning, singular rock at the east end and the beach lying below it. Now the site of a romantic castle ingeniously designed by Sir Edward Lutyens, a building which seems both to cling to and grow out of the rock it sits on, it was no doubt seen by Theodoric as an impregnable stockade which would repel the armies of the British as they massed on the mainland shore. Islanders still know that the fairy castle of the nineteenth century stands on Bebloe’s Rock, named after an Anglian queen, Bebba. From the ramparts of the sixth-century stockade, those who looked out over the sea to the south could see another fortress named after her. Bamburgh was ‘Bebba’s burh’, the queen’s stronghold. And on the southern horizon Theodoric could see that it had fallen to a furious assault. Perhaps smoke plumed above the stockade.

The Irish chroniclers wrote of Fiachna, a king in Ulster who
joined Urien’s coalition. He reigned after 589 and was in Britannia in the 590s with his warriors. No matter that a wooden palisade and ditching below it was all that defended Bamburgh, the rock was sheer in places and archaeologists have recently discovered that the only weak point, the gate at the northern end, was well defended with a double rampart. But Fiachna’s men burst in, took hostages and then almost certainly hurried north around the sand flats of Budle Bay to take part in the siege of the island.

What made both Bamburgh and Lindisfarne excellent bases for the Angles was the accident of geography which put a high and defensible rock next to a shoreline good for beaching ships and dragging the keels above the high-tide line. Both fortresses also acted as clear seamarks visible from long distance in good weather. And, on an otherwise flat and sandy coast, the value of this combination was much enhanced. Below Bebloe’s Rock there were beaches close at hand and when the British camped at the mouth of the River Low opposite the island, Theodoric and his desperate defenders will have seen their ships as the only means of escape. This time the Germanic invaders would be driven into the sea.

Morcant Bwlc understood the significance of the moment and that he and the British kings stood at the hinge of history, certainly in the north. The
Sais
might have overrun Gloucester, Bath, Cirencester and the other cities of the Roman south but the Gwyr Y Gogledd, ‘the Men of the North’, would not suffer the same fate. But Morcant also knew that the victor in this struggle would quickly grow more powerful – the High Kingship of the North, perhaps of all Britain, waited. And Urien, not Morcant, would be hailed by the bards and acclaimed by his allies as the victor. Here is the conclusion of the entry in the
Historia Brittonum
: ‘But while he was on the expedition, Urien was assassinated, on the initiative of Morcant, from jealousy, because his military skill and generalship surpassed that of all the other kings.’ And perhaps because Morcant had been made other promises. Native British warriors, Bernician aristocrats, may
have stood defiantly on the ramparts of Bebloe’s Rock with Theodoric. These men would have been known to Morcant and perhaps there were ties of blood for his kingdom on the Tweed was close by. And then there was Fiachna and the Irish war band. They had taken Bamburgh and Urien had allowed them to keep it even though the fortress and its hinterland should have naturally been joined to Morcant’s domain. Perhaps it was indeed jealousy that drove home the assassin’s dagger – ruthless politics and nothing to do with generalship.

When Urien was murdered, the coalition broke apart, the British kings and their war bands saddled their ponies and rode into the west. And the history of Britain and Scotland shifted decisively. The war between Rheged and Bernicia did not end with the treachery amongst the sand dunes of Northumberland, but there were no more reports of battles in the east. Bamburgh was retaken but Theodoric met the war band of Rheged again, for the last time.

Somewhere in the north, the bards offer no clues in their wonderful paeans, the Angle king was cut down in the charge of the Rheged cavalry:

Taliesin’s celebration of the defeat of Theodoric is also the death song for Owain and, after that, there were no more victories for native kings in the north. The bards mourned
internecine warfare, much informed by hindsight, and they whispered that Rheged was brought low by its neighbours as much as the Angles in the east. Gildas’ dire warnings on disunity were coming to pass. There is much poetic convention in what follows but there is little doubt that the deaths of Owain and his brother, Elfyn, and the decline of Rheged fatally weakened the native hold on the north:

Carlisle’s halls did not fall to the Angles immediately. It is much more likely that Urien and Owain’s authority fractured and its pieces were squabbled over by rival native factions. The house of Urien did not fall extinct for his son, Rhun, was still alive in the 620s. He took a crucial role in later developments but his calling as a monk may have disqualified him from kingship.

The pace of political change accelerated after the siege of Metcaud and whatever power remained with the royal house of Rheged was soon to be overtaken by events. The hegemony of the north passed to the Gododdin kings in Edinburgh but their time in the front rank was brief. Aneirin composed the great
poem which bears their name, the earliest example of sustained literature to survive in Britain:

In other recensions of the great epic of
The Gododdin
, the composer, Aneirin, claims to have been the sole survivor, the bearer of the news of disaster at Catraeth, Catterick. Even though bards would have accompanied war bands as witnesses of their deeds, this is, of course, a poetic convention. Nevertheless the
overall truth of the tale is that there had been a terrible slaughter and that the warriors of the kings of Edinburgh and their allies had been utterly defeated.

Bards sang or recited their compositions while using a small harp, known as a
clarsach
in Scots Gaelic and a
crwth
in Old Welsh, to add drama and shape. With its carefully made metrical structure, the poetry had its own music and it drove the narrative using a mixture of devices like alliteration, assonance, repetition and rhyme. Chords on the harp were probably plucked to point
up climactic moments or punctuate changes in mood, pace, time or place.

Lords of Catraeth

The epic of death songs known as
The Gododdin
has been open to many interpretations. Sometimes ambiguous, sometimes opaque, the Old Welsh used to transcribe it had certainly changed since the songs were first composed. The king of the eponymous kindred of the Gododdin is said to have been Mynyddog Mwynvawr but the words could plausibly describe a place as well as a person. Since there is no mention of Mynyddog at the Battle of Catraeth or Catterick – and, if he had been there and been killed, there surely would have been – scholars have preferred to see the name as a reference to the citadel of the Gododdin, Edinburgh’s Castle Rock. Mynyddog Mwynvawr could mean something like ‘the wealthy mountain court’. It seems likely that Yrfai map Golistan led the host but Gwlyget of Gododdin is also cited. He was the steward of the king – or the wealthy mountain court. Even more complications begin to pile up with the contention that, at Catraeth, the Anglian host was led by a British king, who was none other than Urien of Rheged, and his war band. In a description of an overwhelming victory at Gweith Gwen Ystrat, ‘the Battle of the White Valley’, Urien is described as Lord of Catraeth. Some scholars have conjectured that the two battles are in fact the same but seen from opposite sides and that Catraeth/Catterick was essentially a conflict between Rheged and Gododdin with the Angles involved as allies. That, in turn, would imply an earlier date than 600 but it is not an impossible interpretation. The underlying value of these contradictory views is that they further break down the easy ethnic division of native British against Germanic invaders by showing a potentially very complex picture – maybe too complex in this case.

Bards needed audiences and most sources set the recitals of eulogies, epics and elegies at a feast. In the circles of rushlight and firelight and the dark shadows beyond, the imaginations of the listeners took flight. Bards could conjure armies, the din of battle, the war cries and screams of dying men, the gore and the glory. War-gear, horses and tack and all the rituals around the
teulu
and its heroes were celebrated and its gorgeous detail dwelt upon.

When Aneirin had composed the horrors of Catraeth into the first version of Y Gododdin, he told a tale of heroism and shattering defeat, a series of baleful death songs for the fallen. Led by Yrfai map Golistan, Lord of Edinburgh, the host clattered out of the fortress on the Castle Rock. Northern allies had mustered – warriors from the kingdom of Rhydderch Hael in Strathclyde (Ystrad Clud) and from Aeron to the west. Unlikely comrades-in-arms for Y Bedydd, heathen Picts had ridden from ‘beyond Bannauc’, the Bannock Burn. This is the earliest explicit reference to the barrier of Flanders Moss and its function as a boundary between kindreds. Other Picts came to Edinburgh from beyond Merin Iudeu, the Firth of Forth.

After reaching the fortress at Calchvynydd and joining with the war band of Catraut, the growing host rode south, almost certainly down Dere Street. Men sent by the kings of Elmet and Gwynedd met Lord Yrfai and they massed near Cataractonium, the Roman fort which watched over the crossing of the rapids, the cataracts of the River Swale, by Dere Street. As at York and Carlisle, the Roman buildings may have survived more or less intact and Catraeth stood at a pivotal strategic position. Astride Dere Street, the fort also lay near the junction with the Roman road which led west over Stainmore and on to the lands of the Carvetii and Carlisle. Some Gododdin allies, perhaps the war bands of Strathclyde, may have travelled it and joined the host just before the battle. Catraeth was now threatened or possibly even occupied by the war bands of Deira and Bernicia. It was a takeover which would consolidate the Anglian gains east of the Pennines.