The Faded Map: The Lost Kingdoms of Scotland (29 page)

Particular to East Lothian, this central figure in a highly localised and intense cult may have closer links to the area and its Celtic past. Like a landlocked version of the Bass Rock, Traprain Law dominates the landscape east of Haddington. It was certainly a principal stronghold of Gododdin kings, and archaeologists have established a long sequence of occupation. But no excavator was prepared for what came to light on Monday, 12 May 1919.

After the turmoil of the First World War and having himself been badly wounded on the Western Front, George Pringle must have longed for the relative peace and slow pace of archaeology. But, when he set his workmen on digging at the western end of
the spectacular hill fort of Traprain, Pringle’s hopes for a quiet life evaporated. On that Monday afternoon, a pit full of treasure was discovered. Buried beneath what turned out to be the floor of a house, workmen found more than a hundred items of fine Roman silverware. There were tableware, cups, spoons, bowls, flagons and coins. Little value appears to have been placed on the craftsmanship for many of the objects had been cut up or folded in such a way as to suggest they might be melted down. These were not
objets d’art
but bullion. Perhaps it was tribute paid by the government of Britannia towards the end of the life of the province. The eclectic nature of the pieces certainly suggests an improvised exercise, valuables raised in ad hoc taxation from wealthy individuals. The territory of the Gododdin lay in a strategically vital position, between the Pictish kings on the northern shores of the Forth and beyond and the sparse garrison of Hadrian’s Wall. The coins found amongst the spoons and cups were datable to the reign of the Emperor Honorius, from
AD
395 to 423. It was a huge and immensely valuable hoard.

St Ethernan

Also known as Itarnan, a name derived from the Latin word for ‘eternal’, St Ethernan is remembered on the Isle of May in the Firth of Forth. Like St Baldred at the Bass Rock and the holy men on Inchkeith, the islands in the Forth made good disearts – they were apart from the world but in sight of it. St Ethernan died around 669 and was buried on the Isle of May, which soon became a place of pilgrimage. Many early Christian burials, dating from the fifth to the tenth century have been found and, in the ninth century, a drystane chapel for a shrine to St Ethernan was built. In the twelfth century, a priory of Benedictine monks was established and, near the high altar, in a place of great sanctity, a young man was buried sometime in the fourteenth century. Excavators found something remarkable. Wedged into the mouth of the skull was half a scallop shell. It was the badge of pilgrims to the shrine of St James at Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain. The young man had been there and the shell was buried with him so that St Peter might more easily recognise his piety. And his family had redoubled his chance of reaching Heaven by having him buried on one of Scotland’s most sacred islands. Now St Ethernan is almost completely forgotten and the Isle of May no more than part of a picturesque view.

It was also an archaeologist’s dream, what almost everyone who delves into the soil of an ancient site hopes to find. The official director of the dig on Traprain Law was Alexander Curle, who ran the National Museum of Antiquities in Edinburgh and his weekly visit was not due for another five days. George Pringle judged that Curle ought to be informed immediately of this extraordinary find and a workman was sent down off the hill to nearby East Linton to make a telephone call. This was 1919 and privacy on the phone was not always assured as operators connected callers so Pringle advised his messenger to be discreet – too discreet for Curle waited until the following day to make his way east from Edinburgh. But, once he climbed the hill and looked into the uncovered pit, the impact must have been jaw-dropping. Treasures like Tutankhamen’s were the stuff of archaeological legend and, while the Gododdin king who sat on Traprain Law was no pharaoh, Curle could see that this glittering hoard meant that he was no grunting savage either. Silver gathered together on this scale meant power and, in the Dark Ages, military power.

But what was its precise significance? Something as precious as the Traprain treasure is likely to have been buried only in time of peril and it must be significant that a new rampart was thrown up around the old stronghold at about the same time as the coin dates. And then, sometime after 400, the occupation of the site appears to have come to an abrupt end. The silver was left in its pit and forgotten for 1,500 years.

Recent excavations on the summit of Traprain Law have come across evidence of early Christian burial and, like the emergence of Baldred and his church from the mists of tradition and conjecture, these new finds may hint strongly at something more. Despite his English name, Baldred is believed to have been a Celtic priest, or at least a priest trained and ordained in a Celtic atmosphere, and to have been sent from the west by St Kentigern to convert the heathen Angles who had settled in East Lothian. Kentigern, or Mungo, has a more substantial historical personality and his principal fame is as the apostle of Strathclyde, the old kingdom of Alt Clut. But his beginnings were said to be at Traprain.

At this point, the story begins to blur into incredibility. Kentigern’s medieval biographer, Jocelyn of Furness – an abbey in South Cumbria – appears to have understood Old Welsh and possibly Gaelic. The great scholar, K. H. Jackson, believed that the life of the saint was adapted and translated in Latin by Jocelyn and that it may preserve features of a much older tale. In any case, it seems that Kentigern was born of royal Gododdin blood and conceived in or around Traprain Law – but not legitimately. His illicitly fornicating mother, Princess Thenu, was condemned to be thrown off the cliffs of the law as a punishment handed down by her pagan father. But after prayers to the Virgin Mary, presumably for a soft landing, she was cast adrift in a coracle in the Firth of Forth. After having fetched up at Culross, the seaside sanctuary of St Serf, Kentigern was born. And his exemplary life followed. Stripped of its Old Testament overtones, the tale may reflect the reality of banishment to the periphery of the Gododdin kingdom. And, as with Columba, it may confirm
the aristocratic origins of one of the north’s most famous saints.

Whether or not the legend that Baldred was sent by Kentigern to East Lothian to convert the Anglian settlers has any substance, the reality was that the new arrivals appear to have organised themselves into parishes and attracted priests to minister to them. The churches at Auldhame, Tyninghame, Haddington and East Linton may have had their fabric frequently changed and renewed but they are all very ancient foundations, perhaps predating the expansion of Bernicia into the Lothians in the seventh century.

To the south of the Lammermuir Hills the more famous church at Old Melrose was flourishing. And the atmosphere of piety around it began to attract young men who believed they had a vocation. One of these would become Britain’s greatest medieval saint, a man whose holiness was revered all over Western Europe, the most famous Bernician who ever lived, who would inspire one of the world’s greatest cathedrals and whose powerful, charismatic personality still inhabits a beautiful and otherworldly island.

Some time around 651, Cuthbert appeared at the gates of the monastery of Old Melrose:

By chance Boisil was standing at the monastery gates when he arrived and thus saw him first. Cuthbert dismounted, gave his horse and spear to a servant (he had not yet put off secular dress) and went into the church to pray. Boisil had an intuition of the high degree of holiness to which the boy he had just been looking at would rise, and said just this single phrase to the monks with whom he was standing; ‘Behold the servant of the Lord,’ imitating Him who, at the approach of Nathaniel, exclaimed: ‘Behold an Israelite indeed, one in whom there is no guile’. An old veteran, Sigfrith, priest of Jarrow monastery, told me the tale; he was there with Boisil at the time, a mere youth in the first steps of monastic life. Now he is living the life of perfection. He has only a few feeble breaths in him and is thirsting for the joys of the future life.

Boisil said no more. He welcomed Cuthbert and when he explained the purpose of his visit, namely to leave the world behind him, Boisil received him with great kindness into the community.

This passage from Bede’s
Life of Cuthbert
has the quality of reportage, gilded a little perhaps but undoubtedly made the more authentic by old Sigfrith’s recollections. Riding a horse, carrying a spear and accompanied by a servant, Cuthbert was clearly an aristocrat of some degree, like most of the leaders of the early church. And his name is English, meaning ‘famous’ and ‘bright’. The latter element is clear in the Galloway place-name, Kirkcudbright, which means what it sounds like, ‘Cuthbert’s Kirk’. The young man’s name passed into common currency as both a surname and a Christian name and, like the seventy-two church dedications to him, it is concentrated in the north of England and Scotland, broadly in the expanded territory of ancient Northumbria.

Traditions vary but, much to the continuing distaste of some at Durham Cathedral, it seems likely that Cuthbert came from Lauderdale, the valley which saw the bloody battle at Degsastan fifty years before. In his magisterial
Antiquities of Roxburghshire and Adjacent Districts
, Alexander Jeffrey recorded the belief that the young man rode only a short distance to Old Melrose, from the disappeared settlement of Wranghame, at the foot of Brother-stone Hill. It appears that he had been fostered out to a family there and raised by a woman called Kenspid. Bede wrote that he often visited ‘the house of his old nurse, indeed he always called her “mother” ’. Aristocratic boys were often sent away from home in this way and fosterage was a tradition which persisted amongst the Highland clans until the eighteenth century.

Although much of Bede’s hagiography is formulaic, consciously drawn from biblical examples and designed to establish Cuthbert, the man of God, as a great saint, the author includes a remarkable passage in the prologue addressed to Bishop Eadfrith and the community of monks on Lindisfarne:

While the book was still in note form, it was often looked over and revised by our very reverend brother, the priest Herefrith, whenever he came here, and by others who had lived a long time with the man of God, and who were, therefore, more conversant with the details of his life. On their advice I made several amendments. I have tried to avoid all ambiguity or hair-splitting and write a clear investigation of the truth in simple terms. I have already taken care to let you yourselves examine what I have written, so that what was false could be amended, what was true confirmed.

When, with the help of the Lord, the book was finished, and had been read for two days before the elders and teachers of your community, and its every detail had been considered, they then approved all I had written, declaring it fit to be read and transcribed by all whose holy zeal moved them to do so. The discussions you held among yourselves have brought to light many other facts, just as important as those I record here and well worth writing down, except that it hardly seems right to make insertions and add to a carefully planned and completed work. Furthermore, since I have been quick to carry out the task you thought fit to impose on me, may I suggest that you crown your kindness by not being slow to reward me with your prayers. When, in reading my book, your hearts are raised to a more burning desire for the Kingdom of Heaven, by the memory of our holy father, do not forget to intercede with the divine mercy on behalf of one so small, so that I may be found worthy on earth to long for and hereafter in perfect bliss to see ‘the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living’. And, when I am dead, pray for my soul and say mass for me as though I were one of your own household, and be so good as to inscribe my name on the roll with your own.

Few scholars before modern times took such trouble as Bede to verify his information from trustworthy sources where it was possible. But there is more than a faint echo of tetchiness in the second part of this extraordinary extract. Bede was not modest and knew he was scrupulous – it appears that he had been forced
to cry ‘enough’ and defend his work from never-ending meddling from Lindisfarne. Cuthbert was a figure of vast importance – powerful Northumbrian churchmen knew it – and this unmistakable evidence of squabbling over the detail of his saintly life only serves to underline that importance. But Bede was not to be moved. Echoing clearly across thirteen centuries is the stamp of man putting his foot down. The
Life of Cuthbert
became the definitive text, the basis of a tremendously popular cult, and its author’s name was indeed inscribed on the roll of the pious. In Durham Cathedral, the tomb of St Bede keeps company with that of his hero.

Bede Himself

Most of the writers of the textual sources for the Roman period and the Dark Ages have little or nothing to say about themselves. Tacitus was the son-in-law of Agricola and a Senator, Aneirin survived the battle at Catterick and Nennius apologised for his poor Latin. Uniquely, Bede of Jarrow offered posterity more than a passing sense of his life, his preoccupations, occasional irritations and his temperament. Here is his own potted autobiography at the end of the
Ecclesiastical History of the English People:

I was born in the territory of this monastery. When I was seven years of age I was, by the care of kinsmen, put into the charge of the Reverend Abbot Benedict and then of Ceolfrith, to be educated. From then on I have spent all my life in this monastery, applying myself entirely to the study of the Scriptures; and amid the observance of the discipline of the Rule and the daily task of singing in the church, it has always been my delight to learn or to teach or to write. At the age of nineteen I was ordained deacon and at the age of thirty priest, both times through the ministration of the reverend Bishop John on the direction of Abbot Ceolfrith. From the time I became priest until the fifty-ninth year of my life I have made it my business, for my own benefit and that of my brothers, to make brief extracts from the works of the venerable fathers on the holy Scriptures, or to add notes of my own to clarify their sense and interpretation.