Scotland: The Story of a Nation. Magnus Magnusson
of Scotland after the initial colonisation by farming peoples soon after 4000 BC – there seems to have been very little fresh blood coming in during the Bronze Age.
Just outside the town of Brechin, in Angus, by the A90 trunk road from Dundee to Aberdeen, an impressive £1.2 million visitor centre was opened in the summer of 1999 in the country park of the Brechin Castle Centre. It is called Pictavia, and can be described as somewhere between a museum and a theme park. The display tells, vividly and graphically, the story of the Picts, and is a splendid introduction to their world for visitors of all ages and abilities; it includes not only many examples of Pictish stones and jewellery but also interactive computer facilities explaining the meanings of Pictish symbols (‘Cyber Symbols’) and the sounds of Pictish music (the ‘Tower of Sound’).
Some time after the age of King Bridei, of Craig Phadrig fame, the centre of Pictish power moved southward, to Angus, Perthshire and Fife, but the Picts’ distinctive culture did not change. They were not by any means the painted barbarians described by Roman chroniclers; on the contrary, they were a cultured society ruled by a sophisticated warrior aristocracy which could afford to employ learned men and, more particularly, craftsmen of all kinds – particularly the sculptors who fashioned the magnificent carved stones which are the unique legacy of the Picts.
This period of early Scottish history has long been known as the ‘Dark Ages’, not because the deeds of the time were so dark but because the documentary sources are too meagre to shed a great deal of light. Modern historians prefer to call the ‘Dark Age’ of Scotland by a less misleading name – ‘Early Medieval’. What is clear is that it was a time of considerable and rapid political and ethnic change. By pulling together the sometimes elusive accounts of medieval chroniclers, and calling in all the available archaeological evidence, it is now possible to see various historical patterns developing in Scotland, both north and south of the Forth – Clyde line.
In our attempt to understand the changing shape of early Scotland it would be enormously useful to be able to call upon the aid of television, with its graphic use of ‘morphing’ – merging collages of images into one another, like long-range weather forecasts. The pattern of conquests and occupations in Scotland in the centuries succeeding the Roman withdrawal presents a confusing kaleidoscope of shifts in power, like an ever-changing jigsaw puzzle. Before we reach a more stable picture of ‘Scotland’ in the twelfth century, say (the time of David I – see Chapter 6), we have to follow the fortunes of several apparently different groupings: Picts, Gododdin, Angles, Britons/Celts and Scoti/Scots/Gaels, as well as specific kingdoms like Pictland, Fortriu, Strathclyde, Rheged, Alba and ultimately Scotia.
The Gododdin
While the Picts were the power in the north, another martial kingdom had been developing to the south of the Firth of Forth, in the Lothians – the home of the British tribe known to the Romans as Votadini. During the Roman occupation they had been a client kingdom, or at least had lived peaceably under Roman subjugation; archaeologists have found a major hoard of rather battered Roman silverware which was buried at Traprain Law in the fifth century, after the Roman withdrawal.
By 600, however, the Votadini had their stronghold in Edinburgh (Din Eidyn), and emerged in history under their proper British, or Old Welsh, name of ‘Gododdin’ in an elegiac heroic poem called Y Gododdin, composed by a local bard named Aneirin at about that time. The poem tells the story of a raiding expedition mounted by the king of the Gododdin, Mynyddawg Mwynfawr, who ruled territories stretching from the Forth to the Tees. He gathered a princely war-band of 360 chosen champions from all over his realm and even farther afield. For a year they feasted and caroused in the towering timber hall of his stronghold in Edinburgh, wearing robes of purple and gold, with gold brooches and neck-bands, drinking from goblets of gold or silver. Then they pledged themselves, according to ancient custom, to conquer or die in the service of their lord. Next morning they went clattering down the Castle Rock, riding southward deep into the lands of the Angles. The encounter took place at ‘Catraeth’, identified as Catterick in what is now Yorkshire:
Men went to Catraeth, they were renowned.
Wine and mead from gold cups was their drink.
A year in noble ceremonial,
Three hundred and sixty gold-torqued men.
Of all those who charged, after too much drink,
But three won free through courage in strife,
Aeron’s two war-hounds and tough Cynon,
And myself, soaked in blood, for my song’s sake.
Gododdin’s war-band on shaggy mounts,
Steeds the hue of swans, in full harness,
Fighting for Eidyn’s treasure and mead.
On Mynyddawg’s orders
Shields were battered to bits,
Sword-blades descended
On pallid cheeks.
They loved combat, broad line of attack:
They bore no disgrace, men who stood firm.
FROM THE GODODDIN (TRANS. JOSEPH P. CLANCY)
It was the very stuff of heroic legend, that ferocious, unforgiving battle.
Legendary or not, historical fact or poetic fiction, the power of the Gododdin was certainly broken a few years later. In 638 Din Eidyn was besieged and captured by the avenging Angles, and the place seems then to have received the anglicised name Edinburgh, by which it is known today.
The Angles
It may come as a surprise, at first blush, to think of Angles in Scotland – the Angles from northern Germany who had come over to the south-east of England, first in the fourth century as invited auxiliaries to assist the Romans in keeping their hold on Britannia but later, in the fifth century, as invaders bent on conquest. They had created their own kingdom in England, ‘Anglia’, in the area of today’s East Anglia. They were a tough warrior people, the Angles, and in 547, according to the Venerable Bede, the Anglian King Ida thrust his way far northwards over the Humber, across the Tees and the Tyne, and established his royal seat on the formidable fortress crag of Bamburgh on the north-eastern coast of England. By the year 605 all this territory had been consolidated into the Kingdom of Northumbria (literally, ‘north of the Humber’) under King Æthelfrith, whom Bede described as ‘a very powerful and ambitious king’.
We must be careful, when we talk about the ancient name Northumbria, not to be misled by the boundaries of today’s Northumberland. Northumbria at its greatest extent in the seventh century extended all the way north (after the capture of Edinburgh in 638) to the Firth of Forth and even beyond, perhaps to the Mounth (the eastern extension of the Grampian massif). In that context, it is possible to see the heroic raid by the Gododdin deep into Yorkshire as an abortive preemptive strike against the growing imperial ambitions of the kingdom of Northumbria.
After the collapse of the Gododdin, the aggressive expansionism of the Angles of Northumbria extended their dominance beyond Edinburgh into the southern part of Pictland; the power-centre of Pictland had by then moved from Inverness south to Abernethy, perhaps, and/or Scone, beside today’s city of Perth, and a new name was being applied to it – the kingdom of ‘Fortriu’. From 653 to 685 much of the southern part of this area seems to have been under Northumbrian control. There was an attempted Pictish uprising in 672, but this was put down with the utmost ferocity and many of the Pictish aristocracy were massacred. The climax came in 685, with a battle between the Picts and the Northumbrians in the Angus glens, north of the estuary of the Tay.