On Some Ancient Battle-Fields in Lancashire. Charles Hardwick
so as to be able to attack them when least expected (which will account for the scene of this conflict being considerably to the west of the direct line from London to York), it is extremely improbable that he would have gone so far north as the Douglas in Lothian, when his object was to attack Colgrin at York. The reading which the Paris MS. and Henry of Huntington give is, I believe, correct, and represents Ince, a name which is retained to this day by a township near to this river, a little more than a mile to the south-west of Wigan, and by another about fifteen miles to the west, and which may possibly have belonged to a considerable tract of country.[6] … Neither the Brut nor Boece mention more than one battle at this time; but the latter says that Arthur 'pursued the Saxons, continually slaughtering them, until they took refuge in York,' and that 'having had so frequent victories he there besieged them;' and these expressions may well imply the four victories, gained in one prolonged contest on the Douglas, and another on the river Bassas, i.e., Bashall brook, which falls into the Ribble near Clithero, in the direct line of Colgrin's flight to York."
If, therefore, the historical hypothesis be accepted, the Lancashire sites for these battles would seem as probable as any of the many others suggested.
From the remains described by Whitaker, it appears certain that some great battles in early times have been fought on the banks of the Douglas, traditions concerning which may have served for the foundation of the after statements of Nennius and others. There are some recorded historical facts which countenance this view. The British warrior, king of the Western Britons, Cadwallon or Cadwalla,[7] with his ally, Penda, defeated and slew Edwin, King of Northumbria, uncle of St. Oswald, in the year 633, at Heathfield.[8] Where Heathfield is we have no perfectly satisfactory evidence.[9] The Brit-Welsh poet, Lywarch Hen, or the Old, a prince of the Cumbrian Britons, celebrated his praises in song. He says—
Fourteen great battles he fought,
For Britain the most beautiful,
And sixty skirmishes.
It is by no means improbable that some of Cadwalla's exploits, mythical as well as real, have become inextricably interwoven with the legendary ones of the heroes of the Arthurian romances. Singularly enough a paragraph in Geoffrey of Monmouth's work would seem to countenance this. In book 12, chapter 2, of his so-called "History of Britain," he refers to negotiations being entered into and afterwards broken off, in the year 630, by Cadwalla and Edwin, while their armies lay on the opposite banks of the river Douglas, the scene of the presumed Arthurian victory over Colgrin in the year 500, according to the same authority. This circumstance is not without significance, as the legendary Arthur has evidently absorbed no inconsiderable portion of the reputations, in the North of England, of Urien of Rheged, and other veritable British warriors. Indeed, Lappenberg says—"The Welsh historians adopted the policy of purloining from a successful enemy, and skilfully transferring to his British contemporaries, if not to imaginary personages, the object and reward of his battles, the glory and lastingness of his individuality in history;" and, as illustrations of this practice, Mr. Daniel H. Haigh, in his "Conquest of Britain by the Saxons," adds, "Thus, Cœdwealha, Ine, and Ivar are claimed by them as Cadwaladyr, Inyr, and Ivor." Mr. Haigh, notwithstanding his faith in the substantial accuracy of much of the contents of the works of doubtful authority, says—"The peace which Ambrosius established was broken in the following year, A.D. 444. The Brut says nothing of this affair; it rarely records the defeats of the Britons." And, similarly, the Saxon chronicle is equally reticent in the opposite direction!
Indeed, this weakness is not exclusively an attribute of either British or Anglo-Saxon historians or romance writers. Mr. H. H. Howorth, in his able essay on "The Early History of Sweden," in Vol. 9 of the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, lucidly expounds the character of the contents of the professedly Danish History by Saxo-Grammaticus. He says—"He had no scaffolding upon which to build his narrative. He had to construct one for himself in the best way he could, and to piece together the various fragments before him into a continuous patchwork. His was not a critical age, and we are not therefore surprised to find that his handiwork was exceedingly rude. A piece of the history of the Lombards by Paul and Deacon, and another taken from the Edda, are thrust in after narratives evidently relating to the ninth century, when Ireland had been more or less conquered by the Norsemen. Icelanders are introduced into the story a long time before the discovery of Iceland. Christianity is professed by Danish kings long before it had reached the borders of Denmark. The events belonging to one Harald (Harald Blatand) are transferred to another Harald who lived two or three centuries earlier, and the joints in the patchwork narrative are filled up by the introduction of plausible links." He afterwards adds—"The other important fact to remember is that our author was patriotic enough to lay under contribution, not only materials relating to Denmark, but to transfer to Denmark the history of other countries. To appropriate not only the traditions of the Anglo-Saxons, the Lombards, and the common Scandinavian heritage of the Edda, but also the particular histories of Sweden and Norway, and that a good deal of what passes for Danish history in his pages is not Danish at all, but Swedish, and relates to the rulers of Upsala, and not to those of Lethra; topographical boundaries being as lightly skipped over by the patriotic old chronicler, whose home materials were so scanty, as chronological ones." It is, under such circumstances, vain to expect reliable historical evidence of the identity of locality or the names of the real warrior chiefs who commanded in many of the presumed Arthurian battles and adventures, some of them being evidently mythical or artistic creations. Whitaker's "large old spur, carrying a stem four or five inches in length, and a rowel as large as a half-crown," does not seem to indicate so early a date as the Anglo-Saxon conquests in Britain. Mr. Thomas Wright, in his "Celt, Roman and Saxon," referring to spurs of the Roman, Saxon and Norman periods, says—"Amongst the extensive Roman remains found in the camp at Hod Hill were several spurs of iron, which resembled so closely the Norman prick-spurs, that they might easily be mistaken for them. I suspect that many of the prick-spurs which have been found on or near Roman sites, and hastily judged to be Norman, are, especially when made of bronze, Roman. As far, however, as comparison has yet been made, the Roman and the Saxon spurs are shorter in the stimulus than those of the Norman." Spurs with long stimuli or large rowels do not appear to have been in use until some time after the Norman Conquest. This, however, does not necessarily affect the antiquity of the whole of the remains referred to, which, of course, may have been deposited at different periods.
Hollingworth, in his "Mancuniensis," written in the earlier portion of the seventeenth century, seems to have been aware of the existence of a tradition that referred to several bloody battles fought in Lancashire in some portion of the mysterious "olden time." He, however, assigns them to the period of the Roman conquest, to which I have previously referred. If the incidents in the Arthurian "romances" are no more historically tenable than those in the Iliad or the Odyssey, and as the Roman invasions of the Brigantine territory are undoubted, the elder Manchester historian's conjecture as to the time of the conflicts indicated by the tradition and the remains found near Wigan and Blackrod, may possibly be preferred to that of his successor, as the more probable of the two. Indeed, as has been previously observed, the romance writers and story-tellers have evidently absorbed and modified the historical traditions of many antecedent periods. Hollingworth says—
"In Vespatian's time Petilius Carealic" (Petilius Cerealis) "strooke a terror into the whole land by invading upon his first entry the Brigantes, the most populous of the whole province, many battailes, and bloody ones, were fought, and the greatest part of the Brigantes were either conquered or wasted." Hollingworth, indeed, does afterwards refer to a battle near Wigan, in which he says Arthur was victorious. His words are—"It is certaine that about Anno Domini 520, there was such a prince as King Arthur, and it is not incredible that hee or his knights might contest about this castle (Manchester) when he was in this country, and (as Nennius sayth) he put the Saxons to flight in a memorable battell neere Wigan, about twelve miles off."
Bishop Percy, in his introduction to the ancient ballad of "Chevy-Chase," says—"With regard to its subject, although it has no countenance from history, there is room to think that it had some foundation in fact. … There had long been a rivalship between the two martial families of Percy and Douglas, which, heightened by the national quarrel,