The Faded Map: The Lost Kingdoms of Scotland (18 page)

Scholarly reaction to this text varies enormously. Some dismiss it as late, corrupt and ultimately fanciful, while others are more vehement, seeing it as the poisonous seeds of pointless myth-history. To this way of thinking, Arthur, king or otherwise, never
existed outside the imaginations of a few Celtic clerics and chroniclers. There are other references. In the tenth century
Annales Cambriae
and the death songs known as
The Gododdin
, composed around 600, Arthur is mentioned but those who take these doubtful historical notices seriously are characterised as no-smoke-without-fire-mongers not rigorous scholars.

Others take a different view. The primary sources for the period between 400 and 600 are so sparse, even those transcribed much later, that all evidence should be treated with respect. One eminent scholar wrote of the period as ‘the lost centuries’ of British history. But, if Arthur is not remembered in any texts, he certainly has his memorial in the British landscape. Hundreds of place-names remember the great hero and, even though the mythology swirling around him can be wildly romantic, the core of the story has always seemed credible. A successful native general, the successor of the Vortigern, the Cunedda and Ambrosius Aurelianus halted the tide of Anglo-Saxon invasion sufficiently to allow Gildas in the 540s to enjoy his ‘present security’.

The Nennius text appears to be a version of an older praise poem, something composed by bards to honour the achievements of Arthur, the conqueror. Remnants of poetic conventions are detectable in the alliteration of Cat Coit Celidon, and a rhyme-scheme with Celidon, Guinnion, Bregion and Badon. All of which persuades the sceptical to redouble their doubts – the needs of poetry outweighing the demands of historical accuracy! But why should poetry and accuracy be mutually exclusive? Poems are still composed with real events as their subject matter and they often derive added power for that reason. But then there is the inherent unreliability of oral traditions, history becoming distorted and embellished as it passed down in memory from one generation to another. But why should word of mouth be more untrustworthy than a written source? Who would rely on the British tabloid newspapers of the last thirty years as an honest record of anything? The bards of the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries are to be trusted no less – and no more – than the scribes of the same period.

The central difficulty with Nennius is one of comparison. In his great history, Bede generally excluded fanciful elements (if saintly miracles are taken at face value) and concentrated on what he believed to be true. No dragons flew and only a little lightning rent the air. But, in his apparently forensic rigour, Bede was an unusual chronicler. Most, like Nennius, included an undifferentiated jumble of material uncritically set down, sometimes in a very eccentric order. And that is the problem. Not far from the passage about Arthur is the tale of a boy (the young Ambrosius Aurelianus) brought into the presence of the Vortigern to be put to death in some sort of blood sacrifice. He avoided his fate by the unlikely means of pointing out that two dragons dwelt under the foundations of the Vortigern’s fortress. This sort of thing is seen as a fatal taint, invalidating everything around it. But, in fact, the tone of the Arthur text and other material is markedly different, almost certainly indicating a separate source.

The Nennius text is careful to point out that Arthur was no king but a man appointed by kings as a war leader like his predecessors. There is a sense of unity, of a common purpose and a common enemy, of native kings combining their forces, what Gildas despaired of them doing in the 540s, what he knew had been successful forty or fifty years before he was writing. Alliances of this sort were not uncommon and there would be two famous concerted native efforts against the enemy at the end of the sixth century in the north.

As well as politics, geography is important as Nennius lists twelve battles won under Arthur’s leadership, the last of them corroborated by Gildas, what the sources call the siege of Badon Hill. Four out of the twelve are identifiable, clearly real places where the armies of Celtic Britain tasted victory. And they can be found on maps of north Britain.

‘Gleni’ is the River Glen which flows east out of the Cheviot Hills in what is now north Northumberland. Arthur was likely a
penteulu
, the professional warrior at the head of a royal war band and a man who had attracted a powerful reputation. But why did he form his men up for battle on the banks of an obscure and
windswept river in the wilds of north Northumberland? Because a royal enclosure stood by the Glen, perhaps even a complex of buildings which could be described as a palace. Yeavering was brilliantly excavated in the 1950s by Brian Hope Taylor and, amongst later material, the rare remains of a fifth- and sixth-century native presence were recorded. Kings lived by the little river.

Like the battle at the Glen, others take place at sites by rivers, almost certainly at fords. Tactically they were good places to lay an ambush, perhaps with cavalry charging a surprised straggle of infantry. ‘Bregion’ is attested as another name for Bremenium, the old Roman fort at High Rochester in Redesdale. It stands astride Dere Street, near the head of a valley reaching into the heart of the Cheviots, on what became the traditional invasion road for armies marching north. And it too lies near a ford over the River Rede and is only ten miles south of the Glen. The ‘Wood of Celidon’ later became Ettrick Forest, north of the Cheviots, and it appears in more than one early source in that guise.

Three battles within less than a day of each other – this concentration suggests the faded reports of an ancient campaign fought in the north by Arthur and his squadrons of Celtic cavalry. The siege of Badon Hill is believed by many to have taken place in the south-west, near Bath. But across the valley from High Rochester stands Padon Hill. Perhaps four battles were fought in the north. And, if they were, who opposed Arthur and his allied army? And when did they fight?

Archaeologists have discovered Germanic cemeteries in the north (and therefore evidence of settlement) dating from as early as the late fourth and fifth centuries. The massive forts of the Saxon Shore were built at the end of the third century and there exist several notices of German warriors in Britannia. With the end of the Roman province and the ebb and flow of war, it is very likely that groups of Anglo Saxons were establishing themselves in Yorkshire and the north-east. The rebellion of Germanic mercenaries against the Vortigern in the early fifth
century might well have been repeated elsewhere. Did Arthur go to war against the ancestors of warriors who would later establish the magnificent and powerful kingdom of Northumbria? It seems likely.

Gildas and other sources offer unexpected help and general agreement on the dating of Arthur’s great campaign against the barbarians all Britain called the Saxons. Many were Angles from Angeln on the borders of modern Denmark and Germany, others were Jutes from Jutland, to the north of them, Frisians to the south and there were even Swedes and Franks amongst the settlers and land-grabbers. But, in all of Britain’s Celtic languages, the word is the same –
Sais
in Welsh,
Sasunnaich
in Gaelic and variations in Manx, Irish and Cornish. Gildas called them
furciferes
, literally ‘fork-bearers’ or ‘servants’, and it is sometimes translated as ‘rascals’. In any event, he and other chroniclers rejoiced at what they saw as an emphatic, momentum-halting defeat at the siege of Badon Hill and they reckoned that the battle was fought in 500.

Since that date attracts unprecedented consensus amongst the sparse sources, it ought to be taken gratefully as a fixed point. And, if it was such a final and decisive encounter, then it strongly suggests that Arthur’s campaign against the Saxons was fought in the 490s. The latest mention of the great general is in a battle said to have been fought at a place called Camlann in 517. The entry
in the annals reads: ‘The battle at Camlann, in which Arthur and Medraut fell, and there was plague in Britain and Ireland.’ Castlesteads Fort on Hadrian’s Wall was known as Camboglanna and, like Camlann, it means ‘Crooked Glen’ or ‘Valley’.

British Cuckoos

A Cornishman who spent much of his professional life in Scotland, Professor Charles Thomas, was more aware than most of the links between the ancient lands of the Old Welsh-speakers. He noticed a trio of place-names in Dumfries and Galloway and East Lothian – Terregles, Penpont and Tranent – and compared them with three in Cornwall – Treveglos, Penponds and Trenance. This sort of awareness is to be applauded but it is not recent. Sir John Clerk of Penicuik was the origin of Walter Scott’s
The Antiquary
and he called his home Mons Cuculi, a Latin version of the Old Welsh name and it means ‘Cuckoo Hill’.

Medraut is a Celtic name, certainly not a Saxon one, and Camlann sounds like a battle between British kings, their generals and their war bands. Gildas complained that this sort of internecine bickering was a principal cause of the ruin of Britain. Tradition insists that Arthur and Medraut, or Mordred, were enemies and, in what Lord Tennyson called ‘the last, dim, weird battle of the west’, the great hero may have died.

Arthur’s legacy has been enormously powerful and almost all of it has clung to the south-west of Britain, to Glastonbury, Tintagel, Cornwall and Wales. Many of these associations were confected in the Middle Ages, and such traces as can be found in the threadbare historical record of the fifth and sixth centuries suggest a northern figure, a general who rode out of the half-forgotten Celtic kingdoms of southern Scotland.

At the Battle of Guinnion Castle, which may have stood in the valley of the Gala Water, another route to the Forth and the north, Nennius recorded that ‘Arthur bore the image of the Holy Virgin, the mother of God, upon his shield, and through the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, put the Saxons to flight, and pursued them the whole day with great slaughter’. By 500 and Badon Hill, all of the native kingdoms of Britain were Christian and those in the north talked of the war against Y Gynt, ‘the Gentiles’, ‘the Heathens’, by which they meant the Saxons. When they sang of the deeds of their own armies, the royal bards sang of Y Bedydd, the warriors they called ‘the Baptised’.

I
N THE 530S
,
THE
Roman Empire was resurgent. Under Justinian’s dynamic rule, generals led seaborne expeditions to recapture Italy, North Africa and even parts of southern Spain. Perhaps Rome might reach out as far as Britain once more and come to the aid of the
combrogi
, the fellow citizens. The Vandals, the Goths and the Visigoths had all been vanquished and surely the Saxons could not resist the legions of the emperor as the Mediterranean again became a Roman lake. But it was not to last.

In order that the glorious progress of reconquest was properly recorded for a grateful posterity and the needs of present politics, Justinian’s ministers had sent the historian, Procopius, with the expeditionary forces. In 536 the dashing general, Belisarius, sailed west to North Africa and defeated the Vandal kingdom but, as Carthage and other cities were retaken, the skies began to darken and the sun was dimmed. All eyes were raised to the Heavens and men were terrified, wondering if the end of days was at hand. Procopius wrote, ‘During this year a most dread portent took place. For the sun gave forth its light without brightness . . . and it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear.’

A catastrophic event on the other side of the world was the cause. What happened in 536 was recently confirmed by an expedition led by the geologist, Harald Sigurdsson and recorded by Ken Wohletz of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the
USA. On the seabed between the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra, Sigurdsson’s bathyspheres discovered a huge caldera with deposits which could be reliably radiocarbon-dated to the sixth century. This volcanic depression was vast, measuring an astonishing 40–60 kilometres across, and it lay near the point where the island of Krakatoa famously blew itself apart in 1883. What happened in 536 was of a different order of magnitude – so devastating that it might have severed Java from Sumatra and created the Sunda Straits.

Computer modelling has postulated worldwide effects on every continent which lasted for at least two years. When the eruption broke through and boiling magma was met by inrushing seawater, a huge volume of vapour rocketed into the sky. The plume may have been 50 kilometres high. Mixed with vaporised seawater were huge volumes of superfine volcanic dust and as it rose through the stratosphere, great ice clouds were formed. As much as 100 cubic kilometres of ash and ice crystals then began to dissipate as the stratospheric winds created by the eruption began to blow and a significant cloud layer quickly darkened over the northern and southern hemispheres. This reflected much of the sun’s light and warmth back into space, allowing very little to penetrate.