6

The Shaping of Western Britain

The Cornish axis

Across Europe in the sixth century new political landscapes were emerging. Local power structures built on ancient tribes began to re-form. Most prominent of these was the empire of the Franks, based in what is now Belgium, led by Europe’s first expansionist warrior since the fall of Rome, Clovis of West Francia (r.481–511). In Britain, and despite Gildas, the chief conflicts in the sixth and seventh centuries were between local kings seeking to divide the legacy of Roman rule. This led to the cohering of the seven kingdoms of what was later called the heptarchy. These were Wessex, Mercia and Northumbria up the centre of what became England, and the smaller East Anglia, Essex, Kent and Sussex in the south-east. Omitted were Cumbria and Scotland to the north, Wales and the West Country to the west.

While ostensibly on the periphery of the British Isles and mostly beyond the borders of Romanised Britannia Superior, the peoples outside the heptarchy would not have considered themselves subordinate. The western trade routes through the Irish Sea were active. Settlements were cosmopolitan and burials filled with manufactures from across Europe. Churches and monastic communities were closely connected with each other and movement between them was intense. There seems little trace in the west of the paganism that flourished in eastern Britain after the Roman departure.

Hence probably the migration of many of the Dumnonii tribe of Cornwall to Armorica (Brittany), probably in the fifth century. The Cornish regarded the Armoricans as ‘cousins’, and to this day two Breton districts are named Domnonée and Cornouaille. The Gaulish once spoken in Brittany might have been similar to Cornish Celtic. Today, Breton and Cornish are the closest related of the six Celtic tongues, though not the same. For much of its history Brittany was as proudly semi-detached from France as was Cornwall from Britain.

The Cornish migration to Brittany is as yet unexplained and may have been the result of Wessex pressing westwards, though it seems to have preceded any such pressure. It was not until 577 that the Wessex king Ceawlin won a significant victory over the forces of the south-west at Dyrham east of Bristol. In this battle three Brythonic kings, Commagil of Gloucester, Condidan of Cirencester and Farinmagil of Bath, are all said to have died. The victory took Wessex’s domain to the banks of the Severn and was considered critical in ‘dividing the Welsh’ – from Saxon wealh for ‘foreigner’ – those of Dumnonia in Devon/Cornwall from those of South Wales.

West of Dyrham, the Dumnonii put up stern resistance to Wessex expansion. There is the relic of a substantial earthwork, Wansdyke, stretching from Wiltshire down to the Maes Knoll hill fort in Somerset, sign of a major undertaking of collective defence. Dorset and Somerset did not fall to Wessex until almost a century later in the 650s, with Devon following later still, in 822. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that, after the fall of the Devonians, Cornish hostility towards them intensified. Cornwall finally fell to Egbert of Wessex (r.802–39) at the Battle of Hingston Down in 838, despite having turned to the Vikings for assistance. The last king of Cornwall, Dungarth, died c.875, though this did not end Cornwall’s long-standing resistance to English rule. It continues to this day.

The birth of Wales

The Romans initially regarded the six tribes of Wales, notably the Silures in the south and the Ordovices in the north, as unreliable. But once conquered they were not treated as inhabiting a separate province; indeed, they were part of Romanised Britannia Superior from the third century onwards. Wales’s location made its stability crucial to any ruler of Britannia. It was needed by the Romans as a bulwark against raiders from Ireland and points north, and thus merited the two impressive military bases at Caerleon and Chester. Forts and roads were built, with villas extant at least in the south. Wales’s loyalty to Rome was often mentioned. After Rome’s fifth-century withdrawal, Cunedda’s kingdom of Gwynedd in the north was described as so pro-Roman that, when it was finally overrun by Edward I in the thirteenth century, the historian James Campbell joked (I assume) that ‘a strong case can be made for [Wales] as the last relic of the entire Roman Empire, east and west, to fall to the barbarian’.

That said, it was significant that Wales did not later evolve, as did Brythonic-speaking Cornwall and Cumbria, into just another part of England’s western flank. Instead Wales’s former tribal lands mutated, like England, into a Welsh heptarchy: Gwent, Brycheiniog, Glywysing and Dyfed in the south, Ceredigion and Powys in mid-Wales and Gwynedd in the north. Each was to feature in Welsh history throughout the Middle Ages and thus contribute to a distinctive Welsh identity.

Wales had naturally been long in contact with Ireland, some of it welcome, some hostile, with extensive Irish settlements in Pembroke. The name of Breconshire (Brycheiniog) is traced to an Irish chieftain, Broccan. The most remarkable relics of such contact is the number of inscribed memorial stones in the early Irish lettering called Ogham. This has an alphabet of upright strokes and crosses, and is unlike any other known form of writing. Some 400 such inscriptions, mostly of names, have been found in southern Ireland and Pembrokeshire. They are extraordinary and form a unique Celtic script.

A reason for Wales’s distinctiveness could be the valleys of the Severn and the Dee as defensible frontiers with England, while upland Wales limited the fertile country to narrow strips in the north and south. In c.630, a century after the Battle of Dyrham, a Wessex army did attempt to cross the Severn and conquer Gwent, only to be beaten back by the Welsh. The historian John Davies wrote that ‘this victory ranks among the most important events in Welsh history’, marking the limit of English advance into Glamorgan. It stopped the English in perpetuity from penetrating across south Wales to Pembroke and the route to Ireland.

To the north, the kingdom of Powys straddled the land between the upper Wye, the upper Severn and the Dee. Its rulers found themselves divided in their loyalty between the ‘pure’ Wales of Gwynedd and English Mercia to the east. This clash was further complicated in the seventh century by frequent conflict between Mercia and Northumbria as both sought mastery of northern England. Around 615 a Powys army was defeated at Chester by the Bernician (later Northumbrian) king Aethelfrith (r.567–616). Though a pagan, he reputedly slaughtered 1,200 Welsh monks after hearing that they had prayed for his defeat. His son Edwin (r.616–33) was later vanquished by the first celebrated king of Gwynedd, Cadwallon (r.625–34), who drove him across England to Doncaster, declaring his ambition ‘to exterminate the English race’. It was at least the ghost of a Welsh presence in Saxon country.

For all this activity, Wales remained a land apart. Its churches survived and prospered independent of those to the east. St Sampson (490–565) was a celebrated founder of sixth-century monasteries in Wales, Ireland, Cornwall and Dol in Brittany. Many similar institutions became clasau or collegiate missions, such as those of St Illtud (c.450–c.530) at Llantwit Major and St Dubricius (c.465–c.550) at Llandaff. The latter was noted for curing leprosy and supposedly crowning King Arthur. Such was the pride of the Welsh that when their bishops met Augustine of Canterbury in 603 and were asked to submit to Rome’s authority, they dismissed him for failing to show them sufficient respect. Wales was the last British church to accept the authority of Rome in 768.

Critical to Wales’s security throughout this period were its relations with Mercia, named for the ‘march’ or border with Wales. Mercia’s king in the eighth century was Offa (r.757–96), the first English monarch to dominate the southern half of Britain. By 771 Offa was overlord of the Midlands as well as of East Anglia, Kent and Wessex. He established early burhs, or towns, at Hereford, Oxford and Stamford, and even opened diplomatic relations with the pope and the emperor Charlemagne. When his ecclesiastical authority was challenged by Canterbury, he lobbied the pope in 787 to make his base at Lichfield a separate archbishopric, which briefly it was.

After early conflicts with the Welsh, Offa reached a border settlement with Powys, to be marked by the eighty-two-mile long dyke and rampart that bears his name. This ran two-thirds of the distance from the Dee in the north to the mouth of the Severn. Its course suggested that it was not a defensive structure but a negotiated boundary between existing Welsh and English settlements. While parts of Powys later disappeared into Mercia’s Shropshire, Offa’s Dyke brought stability and continuity to the border between Wales and later England that has survived ever since.

The Old North and the Scots

Throughout the early Middle Ages the land described as Welsh extended far to the north of England, to the so-called Hen Ogledd or Old North. This embraced Brythonic-speaking Cumbria and Strathclyde, stretching east to the Firth of Forth. These were known to the Welsh as the cymru, or fellowship, the word surviving both in the Welsh word for Wales and in the Lake District’s Cumbria, with its now extinct dialect of Cumbric. Gerald of Wales viewed this language as purer and less ‘Irish’ than that of Wales itself.

At the start of the sixth century a patchwork of such northern kingdoms comprised Rheged in Cumbria and Elmet in north Yorkshire, with, to their north, Strathclyde and Cunedda’s old land of the Gododdin on the Forth. These ancient kingdoms had a genuine affinity with the people of Wales. The sixth-century Welsh poets Taliesin, Arthur’s legendary bard, and Aneurin, author of the saga Y Gododdin, were both active in the Old North.

Rheged passed into childhood fantasy as the domain of Old King Cole, Coel Hen in Welsh. Beyond it lay the kingdom of Strathclyde, ruled from its Clydeside citadel of Dumbarton Rock. The rock now rises dark and uninviting over the Clyde, shorn of the glamour of its sovereign past, recalled in Norman Davies’s Vanished Kingdoms. The Cumbric dialect is currently subject to an attempted revival. It produced a charming numbering of its sheep, recited to me by my (half Yorkshire) mother as yan, tyan, tethera, mether, pimp. My father would counter with the Welsh un, dau, tri, pedwar, pimp. I once suggested to Scotland’s then first minister, Alex Salmond, that Edinburgh airport should not be greeting visitors in English and Gaelic, as it does, but in the Gododdin’s original tongue of Welsh. He was not receptive.

The kingdom of Strathclyde sustained its independence remarkably from the fifth century to the eleventh. Other northern kingdoms such as Bernicia and Deira were less fortunate, falling early victims to the expansion of the Northumbrians. In c.600 Aethelfrith, later the curse of the Welsh, defeated the Gododdin at the Battle of Catraeth (Catterick), after which only their bard was reputedly left alive to tell his people of their loss. Aethelfrith also defeated an army of the Scots under their king Aedan at the Battle of Degsastan in 603. Brythonic Elmet (round Leeds) was crushed in c.616. The North Welsh clearly made poor warriors. Legend held that the Gododdin at Catterick were so drunk they could hardly hold their swords.

Aethelfrith’s Northumbria had now completed the separation of another ‘Wales’, the Old North from Gwynedd. His domain stretched from the North Sea to the Irish Sea across what is now Yorkshire and Lancashire. Yet though both Mercia and Northumbria had by the eighth century been able to cohere their own kingdoms, neither had been able to breach their ancient borders with Wales and Scotland. Brythonic speaking appeared to have retreated into three separate territories – Cornwall, Wales and Cumbria/Strathclyde – but there it appeared secure.

Sometime in the fifth century the people of Ireland, the confusingly named Scotti, established a kingdom called Dalriada in south-west Scotland. This appears to have been a formalising of a long-standing infiltration from northern Ireland along Scotland’s west coast. Northwards, it touched the islands where the Norwegians still exercised sovereignty, embracing Orkney and Shetland. Dalriada spoke Irish or Goidelic Gaelic, the name of its mainland territory Argyll meaning ‘east Gael’. In 574 a meeting at Drum Ceat in Ulster reputedly divided Dalriada into two kingdoms, Irish and now Scottish.

The Dalriadan kings proved determined expansionists. They soon came into conflict with the Picts, formerly Caledonians, of what was then called Alba, still a romantic name for Scotland. These people occupied a very different country from the lowlands to the south, mountainous and cold, its coast long settled by the Scandinavian Norse. Caledonians had caused Agricola much strife and were forerunners of the Vikings as raiders of southern Britain. Their DNA suggests a strong Scandinavian component, overwhelmingly so in Orkney and Shetland. Experts disagree as to whether their language was Celtic Gaelic, Brythonic or possibly a version of Germanic/Norse.

In 685 these Picts won a crucial victory over the Northumbrians at the Battle of Nechtansmere, probably in the eastern Highlands. This ended Northumbrian ambitions in Scotland, and thus any wider English expansion north of the Forth. Like the Welsh victory on the Wye in 630, Nechtansmere is one of those little-known battles that were to prove crucial in determining England’s borders with its Celtic-speaking neighbours. Had the Picts lost, England might well have extended northwards to the Forth–Clyde line, rendering Gaelic Scotland little bigger than Brythonic Wales.

A Christian Ireland

Ireland is rarely mentioned in Roman histories of the British Isles. Yet in the Bronze and Iron Ages, its position on the Atlantic trade routes kept it in the European mainstream. The Irish Sea was to the peoples of its coasts what the North Sea was to the eastern English. The ancient Neolithic Hill of Tara in Meath long served as the legendary seat of Irish kings. Their leading dynasty was Ulster’s Uí Neíll (O’Neill), descendants of a fifth-century ‘Niall of the Nine Hostages’ and reputed king of Tara.

This Uí Neíll pre-eminence was contested through much of Ireland’s history, not least by the rival kingdoms to the south of Connacht, Munster and Leinster. The island hosted a reputed 200 recorded clans, or tuath, with associated kings, Druids and bards. Feuding was endemic. A leader would emerge and dominate his surrounding country but then swiftly die, either while leading his soldiers into battle or through vendetta. The plethora of prehistoric hill forts suggests a land rarely at peace with itself.

From earliest times the Irish were avid emigrants. Archaeology indicates prehistoric Irish settlements in Cornwall, Wales and Scotland. In the fourth century ad the Déisi of east Ireland resettled in south Wales, possibly relocated by the Romans as a defensive move against other Irish. Most significant was Ireland’s continued role in the dissemination of early Christianity. Following the primacy of St Patrick noted above came the formation of an early sisterhood by St Brigid of Kildare (451–525), the daughter of a Pictish slave and known as ‘the Mary of the Gael’. For their part, the northern Irish Dalriadans exported to Scotland the remarkable St Columba (c.521–97), who in 563 founded an abbey on the island of Iona. Like Germanus, Columba was a military commander as well as a missionary. He led the Dalriadans in their conflict with the Picts, defeating such mysterious Pictish kings as Aedan the False and Eochaid the Venomous. On his Highland travels, Columba reputedly confronted a monster infesting Loch Ness, apparently deterring it from an attack.

The power of this early church is shown in its outreach into parts of the British Isles as yet not subject to the disciplines of Roman rule. Ireland appears to have developed a religious community and a missionary zeal in advance of England’s. A later Irish missionary, St Aidan, moved in 634 from Scottish Iona down into Northumbria at the invitation of King Oswald. There he founded Lindisfarne abbey and with it a tradition of Irish/Celtic scholarship and art. Oswald’s brother Oswy went on to found another Ionan monastery at Whitby in 657.

This Irish missionary zeal was to reach out across Europe, with visitations recorded in Ukraine, Italy, Germany, Denmark and Iceland. It also reached deep into England, a southernmost outpost surviving on the Essex coast in St Peter-on-the-Wall at Bradwell, built c.654. Alone and deserted in its coastal meadow, it is as evocative a site of Celtic Christianity as any hut on the west coast of Ireland.

So-called Celtic Christianity did not long outlast the determined diplomacy of the Roman church. It met its demise at the Synod of Whitby in 664, at which the eloquence of Bishop Wilfrid of Ripon brought victory to Canterbury. The defeated monks left Whitby and retreated to Ireland, reputedly in disgust. A saying held that ‘the Celtic church gave love, the Roman church gave law’. At Whitby law triumphed, but love produced the more lasting art. The Ionan monks who remained at Lindisfarne went on to produce one of the most exquisite works of art in early medieval Europe, the Lindisfarne Gospels (c.710–15). Their Irish compatriots a century later produced the Book of Kells. Churchmen such as Patrick and Columba wrote vivid accounts of their lives at a time when the English were still tongue-tied. It is through them that we can perhaps see the sixth and seventh centuries in the British Isles as Celticism’s finest hour, a beacon across Europe of what was briefly a coherent culture.

Wilfrid’s triumph at Whitby was critical in the unification not just of an English church but of England itself. The old Roman province of Britannia had combined from heptarchy to the four kingdoms of Northumbria, Mercia, Kent and Wessex. When Bede wrote his Ecclesiastical History of the English People in 731 he referred to that people in the singular, at least in their adherence to Rome. The cathedral of Canterbury now ‘ruled’ them all, under one episcopal leadership and a combined corps of educated clergy. The English church was established as what might be termed a national government in waiting.

In 669 Theodore of Tarsus arrived to establish fourteen territorial bishoprics under the archbishopric of Canterbury. The kings of Kent and Wessex were told to write legal codes based on those in use throughout the papal domain. These stipulated the separation of church and state and exempted the church from all civil dues and duties. These significant liberties sowed the seeds of many later disputes between European monarchs and Rome. But it brought to England the outline of a new unity. As for the ancient Celtic church, so long a beacon of religious dynamism, it retreated into itself, fragmented and disorderly.

Still no place called England

Whatever may once have been the true extent of Celtic-speaking across the British Isles, by the end of the eighth century it had retreated before the indubitable advance westwards of the Anglo-Saxon-speaking kingdoms. These kingdoms were not yet stable. While Clovis and Charlemagne were establishing a new Frankish empire on continental Europe, England was still afflicted with what Milton called the ‘wars of kites or crows flocking and fighting in the air’. Of the three now-dominant nations, Northumbria had led during the seventh century and Mercia during the eighth, but by the ninth century Wessex was moving into the ascendancy. The victory of Egbert of Wessex (r.802–39) over the Mercians in 825 moved England’s political centre of gravity emphatically south to the Wessex capital of Winchester. His successor, Alfred the Great (r.871–99), was to lay the foundations of a new English statehood. His founding of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as a record of past and present events at last drew back a curtain on the history of England.

Celtic-speaking Britain now faced a new reality. To the east, monarchies, courts and aristocracies were forming. Cities were growing. Bishops were acquiring an authority recalling that of Roman Britannia. At Whitby these bishops had established loyalty to a collective church, template for a new nation. But this emergent statehood was not that of the British Isles as a whole. The rugged geography of the west remained a security, a borderland of separation for England’s neighbours. It impeded any move towards their coherence, but it was also their protection.

When, in Shakespeare’s Richard II, John of Gaunt spoke of an England ‘whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege … and serves it in the office of a wall’, he was confusing England with the British Isles. The ‘office of a wall’ in truth described the Welsh mountains, the Irish Sea and the Highlands of Scotland. The wall they formed was against the English.

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