Strathclyde and the Anglo-Saxons in the Viking Age E-Book

Tim Clarkson

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 427

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

This book traces the history of relations between the kingdom of Strathclyde and Anglo-Saxon England in the Viking period of the ninth to eleventh centuries AD. It puts the spotlight on the North Britons or 'Cumbrians', an ancient people whose kings ruled from a power-base at Govan on the western side of present-day Glasgow. In the tenth century, these kings extended their rule southward from Clydesdale to the southern shore of the Solway Firth, bringing their language and culture to a region that had been in English hands for more than two hundred years. They played a key role in many of the great political events of the time, whether leading their armies in battle or forging treaties to preserve a fragile peace. Their extensive realm, which was also known as 'Cumbria', was eventually conquered by the Scots, but is still remembered today in the name of an English county. How this county acquired the name of a long-vanished kingdom centred on the River Clyde is one of the topics covered in this book.It is part of a wider history that forms an important chapter in the story of how England and Scotland emerged from the early medieval period or 'Dark Ages' as the countries we know today.

Leseprobe

STRATHCLYDE

and the Anglo-Saxons in the Viking Age

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by John Donald, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

West Newington House 10 Newington Road Edinburgh EH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

ISBN: 978 1 906566 78 4 eISBN: 978 1 907909 25 2

Copyright © Tim Clarkson 2014

The right of Tim Clarkson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh Printed and bound in Britain by Bell & Bain Ltd, Glasgow

CONTENTS

List of Plates

List of Maps

Genealogical Tables

1

Cumbrians and Anglo-Saxons

2

Early Contacts

3

Raiders and Settlers

4

Strathclyde and Wessex

5

Athelstan

6

King Dunmail

7

The Late Tenth Century

8

Borderlands

9

The Fall of Strathclyde

10

The Anglo-Norman Period

11

Conclusions

Notes

Bibliography

Index

LIST OF PLATES

1.Hogback gravestones in Govan Old Parish Church2.Govan Old Parish Church3.Dumbarton Rock4.Bamburgh Castle5.Govan in 1758: from Robert Paul’s engraving A view of the banks of the Clyde taken from York Hill6.Aethelflaed, Lady of the Mercians: commemorative statue erected at Tamworth Castle in 1913, showing Aethelflaed with her nephew Athelstan7.The Gosforth Cross, Cumbria: a tenth-century monument displaying Anglo-Saxon and Norse influence8.Anglo-Saxon cross near the east wall of All Saints Church, Bakewell9.Eamotum: the confluence of the rivers Eamont and Lowther near Brougham Castle10.Lowther Church, Cumbria11.Dunmail Raise, Cumbria12.St John the Baptist, Chester: ruins of the medieval church13.The Giant’s Grave, Penrith14.Carham, 1018: view eastward along the River Tweed near the probable site of the battle

LIST OF MAPS

1.Early medieval Britain and Ireland2.The North Britons in the Roman period3.Northern Britain, sixth to eighth centuries4.Govan in AD 9005.The Solway region: Cumbric place-names of the Viking period [after Higham 1993, 181]6.Britain in the time of Edward the Elder, c.9207.Strathclyde and northern Northumbria in the early tenth century8.The meeting at Eamotum, 9279.The location of Brunanburh: five popular candidates10.North Lancashire and the ‘conflict zone’ of 93711.St Cathroe’s pilgrimage12.Strathclyde and Northumbria in the late tenth century13.Hogback monuments in southern Scotland / northern England and sculpture of the ‘Govan School’14.Geographical context of the battle of Carham, 101815.Kingdoms and peoples, c.105016.Gospatric’s Writ17.Southern Scotland and northern England in the twelfth century18.David’s principality: ‘Cumbria’ in the Scottish kingdom, c.1120

GENEALOGICAL TABLES

Kings of Alt Clut, fifth to ninth centuries, based on the Harleian pedigree of Rhun, son of Artgal. Names in italics are from sources outside the pedigree.

The royal dynasty of Strathclyde

The royal dynasty of Wessex

The royal dynasty of Alba to 1034

The royal dynasty of Alba, 11th to early 12th centuries

The dynasty of Bamburgh

MAP 1 Early medieval Britain and Ireland

1

CUMBRIANS AND ANGLO-SAXONS

Introduction

One thousand years ago, at the beginning of the eleventh century, the valley of the River Clyde was the heartland of a powerful kingdom. In those days, the river flowed through a rural landscape devoid of towns and cities. From its sources in the hills, it meandered north-westward for many miles before widening to form the estuary we know today as the Firth of Clyde. Eleven miles upstream from the head of the firth, and two miles downstream from the site of modern Glasgow, an important ford provided a crossing-point. Here, at Govan, travellers on foot could traverse the river at low tide. It was here, too, that the Clyde was joined by the River Kelvin coming down from the north. Directly opposite the confluence, on the southern bank of the Clyde, the ford was overlooked by a huge mound with two levels and a flattened summit. Further along the southern bank, no more than a stone’s throw from the mound, stood a small wooden church in a heart-shaped enclosure. The mound has long since disappeared, a casualty of nineteenth-century industrialisation, and no trace of it remains today. But a church still stands nearby, the most recent successor of the wooden church of a thousand years ago. This impressive Victorian building, known today as Govan Old, is home to a remarkable treasure: an internationally renowned collection of early medieval sculpture. Visitors come from far and wide to admire the finely carved monuments, all of which formerly stood in the churchyard amidst the gravestones of later times. Among the collection are an ornate sarcophagus, three broken cross-shafts, five hogback gravestones and more than twenty recumbent slabs. Each of the thirty-one stones at Govan Old is a reminder of the skill and artistry of local craftsmen who developed their own distinctive style of carving.1 The patterns and motifs on these stones are similar to those on contemporary sculpture in other parts of the Celtic world – panels of interlace, figures of humans and animals, religious symbols – but the art of the Govan monuments is otherwise unique. This remarkable collection bears witness to the wealth and power of the long-vanished kingdom of Strathclyde.

Strathclyde is the modern, Anglicised form of a name recorded in ancient sources as Strat Clut or Strad Clud.2 As the name indicates, the kingdom’s core territory was the strath or lower valley of the River Clyde. Its inhabitants were referred to by various names: Clutinenses (Latin: ‘Clyde-folk’), Britones (Latin: ‘Britons’), Cumbrenses (Latin: ‘Cumbrians’) and Straecledwealas (Old English: ‘Strathclyde Welsh’). They probably called themselves Cumbri, meaning ‘fellow-countrymen’ or ‘compatriots’, a name related to Modern Welsh Cymry. 3 Both names share the same meaning and a similar pronunciation, having been formed in what was essentially the same ancestral language. This book is chiefly concerned with one aspect of the story of the Cumbri or ‘Cumbrians’, namely their relations with the Anglo-Saxons or English who dwelt beyond their southern and eastern borders.

Chronological scope

The following chapters are chiefly concerned with a 350-year period running from the middle of the eighth century to the beginning of the twelfth. This corresponds roughly to the second half of the early medieval period or ‘Dark Ages’. It contains the main era of Viking raiding and colonisation (ninth to eleventh centuries), the emergence of the kingdom of Alba (late ninth to early tenth) and the Norman conquest of England (late eleventh). Earlier centuries are covered more briefly, to provide a necessary historical background for the main narrative. In Chapter 2, the origins of the kingdom of Strathclyde are discussed and the kingdom’s history is traced as far as the eighth century. The same chapter deals with the earliest contacts between the Clyde Britons and their Anglo-Saxon neighbours and with the founding of the kingdom of Northumbria. This sets the scene for the first clearly documented conflict between the two peoples, an eighth-century war in which the Picts were also involved. In Chapter 3 the story reaches the Viking Age, a period of profound upheaval which saw the emergence of Strathclyde as a major political force. Two significant events of the late ninth century are highlighted: the collapse of Anglo-Saxon Northumbria and the Viking assault on Dumbarton. Subsequent chapters give detailed coverage of the tenth and eleventh centuries, both of which are fairly well documented in comparison with earlier periods. The end of the kingdom of Strathclyde is examined in Chapter 9, while Chapter 10 looks at the kingdom’s re-emergence in the early twelfth century as a Scottish principality. Chapter 10 also explores the origins of the English county of Cumberland and the survival of ‘Cumbric’ speech and traditions on either side of the Anglo-Scottish border. For the entire period spanned by the book, the term ‘early medieval’ is generally preferred to ‘Dark Age’, chiefly because the latter can all too easily conjure negative images of barbarism. Both terms refer to a period of roughly six or seven hundred years following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century AD.

Terminology

Throughout this book, the people of Viking-Age Strathclyde are frequently referred to as ‘Cumbrians’. In modern usage this is, of course, a term more commonly applied to the inhabitants of the English county of Cumbria. Applying the same term to a people whose kings dwelt a few miles west of Glasgow might seem puzzling, but no confusion or anachronism is intended. In this book, ‘Cumbrians’ is used in its early medieval sense, as a synonym for ‘North Britons’, rather than in relation to any modern administrative entity. In medieval chronicles in which the history of the ninth to eleventh centuries is preserved, Cumbria was a Latin term denoting an extensive territory ruled by the kings of Strathclyde. It was used as a collective name for all lands inhabited by the Cumbrians or North Britons and was not restricted, as it is today, to a region south of the Solway Firth. The language spoken by the Cumbrians was a Celtic language similar to Old Welsh. Specialist scholars now refer to it as ‘Cumbric’, to distinguish it from related languages such as Cornish, Breton and Welsh. These four languages, together with Pictish, belong to a group known as Brittonic or Brythonic because they evolved from the common speech of the Britons, the ancient inhabitants of the whole island of Britain.4 A second group of Celtic languages includes the Gaelic speech of Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man. In this book, the main language of the kingdom of Strathclyde is usually referred to as Cumbric, occasionally as ‘British’, but never as Welsh. Although their English neighbours regarded the Cumbrians as wealas (‘Welsh’) like the Britons of Wales, it would be quite confusing if the same terminology was followed in this book. Some of the early English chroniclers did, however, distinguish the Cumbrians from the Britons of Wales by describing them as Straecledwealas (‘Strathclyde Welsh’). This term, in its modern English form, is sometimes used by present-day historians, but has generally been avoided here.

The oldest reference to Strathclyde as a political entity is in an Irish chronicle which notes the death in 872 of a ruler described as rex Britanorum Sratha Cluade, ‘king of the Britons of Strathclyde’.5 Earlier references associate this king and his predecessors with a place called Alt Clut, ‘Rock of Clyde’, rather than with the strath or lower valley of the river. The rock in question is the distinctive twin-peaked ‘volcanic plug’ at Dumbarton, now the site of Dumbarton Castle. In the early medieval period a fortress on the summit of the Rock was the principal stronghold of a royal dynasty whose origins may have reached as far back as Roman times. Many historians refer to the kingdom ruled from Dumbarton as ‘Strathclyde’ but this name more correctly belongs to the successor kingdom that arose further upstream after the destruction of the fortress of Alt Clut in 870.6 The earliest English text to mention Strathclyde is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (hereafter ASC) in a reference to Viking forces who are said to have ‘often ravaged among the Picts and the Strathclyde Britons’.7 In the same source we find the first use of ‘Cumberland’ as an English term for all the lands ruled by the kings of Strathclyde. The first element of ‘Cumberland’ probably originated as the Anglicised form of a lost Cumbric word similar to Cymry (pronounced ‘Cum-ree’), a medieval Welsh name for the people of Wales. Although no equivalent of ASC has survived from the kingdom of Strathclyde, it is likely that at least one such chronicle was maintained in a major monastery within the kingdom, by scribes writing in Latin. It also seems likely that these scribes referred to their country as Cumbria, a Latinised form of ‘Cumberland’ found in later Scottish texts. Both Cumbria and Cumberland, together with Welsh Cymry, derive ultimately from Combrogi, a much older term in an ancestral tongue that was once common to all Brittonic-speaking peoples. Combrogi meant ‘compatriots’ and undoubtedly expressed a belief that those whom it encompassed belonged to one nation, regardless of where in Britain they lived. In the lands of the North Britons Combrogi evolved into a form from which neighbouring English-speakers derived Cumber, as in ‘Cumber-land’.8 When we first encounter the name Cumberland in ASC the context is a military campaign by an English king who ravaged the area in 945. There is no doubt that the target of this onslaught was the kingdom of Strathclyde, for the same campaign is noted in another chronicle – the Welsh Annals – as Strat Clut vastata est a Saxonibus (‘Strathclyde was laid waste by the Saxons’). Further confirmation of the synonymity between the terms Cumbria, Cumberland and Strathclyde comes from Scotland, from the early twelfth century, when the future king David I held lordship over a large swathe of territory between the firths of Clyde and Solway. By then, the kingdom of Strathclyde had disappeared, having been absorbed into Alba, the kingdom of the Scots. Contemporary documents describe David as princeps Cumbrensis (‘Prince of the Cumbrians’) and Cumbrensis regionis princeps (‘Prince of the Cumbrian kingdom’).9 Although nominally a subordinate of the Scottish king – his own elder brother – David ruled a large part of southern Scotland as a semi-independent principality. He commissioned a survey or ‘inquest’ of ecclesiastical property throughout his domain, obtaining information on church landholdings in what had once been the heartland of the kingdom of Strathclyde.10 The accuracy of the resulting data was confirmed by five of ‘the older and wiser men of all Cumbria’.11 In spite of this type of clear evidence that Cumbria and Cumberland were synonyms for the kingdom of Strathclyde in early medieval times, some modern historians take a different view by envisaging a separate ‘Cumbrian’ realm centred on what later became the English county of Cumberland.12 This is an erroneous idea based on a vision of history presented by the Scottish chronicler John of Fordun in the fourteenth century. According to Fordun, ‘Cumbria’ was simply the English county, ruled in the tenth century by kings who were Scottish crown-princes.13 The basis of Fordun’s scenario was comprehensively demolished in an important paper, published nearly forty years ago, which demonstrated beyond doubt that early medieval Cumbria and the kingdom of Strathclyde were one and the same.14

The terms ‘Anglo-Saxons’ and ‘English’ are also synonymous in early medieval contexts. Although the former appears in the title of this book, the latter is used more frequently in the following chapters. ‘Anglo-Saxons’ seems to have been coined in the eighth century to distinguish the descendants of Germanic settlers in Britain from the ‘Old Saxons’ who still dwelt in the ancestral homelands across the North Sea.15 It is a useful term for distinguishing between the English of the fifth to eleventh centuries and those of later times. For example, ‘Anglo-Saxon England’ is often used as an umbrella name for the territories under English rule before the Norman conquest of 1066. Similarly, ‘Anglo-Saxon Northumbria’ refers to a powerful English kingdom whose kings held sway over much of northern Britain from the seventh century onwards, until their eventual overthrow by Viking warlords in the ninth. The name ‘Northumbria’ was also borne by this kingdom’s successor, which was under Scandinavian rather than English rule. In the following chapters, ‘Northumbria’ usually appears without any qualifying term unless the context requires it, in which case a prefix such as ‘Anglo-Saxon’ or ‘Anglo-Danish’ is added for clarity. Beyond the northern borders of Northumbria lay what is now Scotland, although this did not become a recognisable political entity until the end of the Viking Age. The great medieval kingdom of Scotland was preceded by the kingdom of Alba which emerged in the ninth century under the leadership of Gaelic-speaking monarchs who ruled a mixed population of Scots and Picts. These two peoples had formerly been politically and culturally distinct but, from the eighth century onwards, they began to converge. After c.900, the notion of a separate Pictish identity had almost disappeared and all the people of Alba had become ‘Scots’.16 It is therefore accurate to describe the rulers of tenth-century Alba as ‘Scottish’ kings, even if their ancestry only a few generations earlier had been Pictish. A measure of caution does, however, need to be shown when the terms ‘Britain’ and ‘British’ are used in an early medieval context. No political connotation whatsoever can be attached to ‘Britain’, a purely geographical term in any historical period before the modern era. Similarly, although ‘British’ and ‘Britons’ are now used as umbrella terms for all the inhabitants of Britain, this was not the case a thousand years ago. To anyone displaying an English or Scottish identity in those days, the Britons were a distinct group who had their own language and culture. In contemporary Latin chronicles they appear as Britones or Britanni, while Gaelic texts refer to them as Breatain. At the beginning of the eleventh century, the last remaining kingdoms of the Britons lay in Wales and on the Clyde. The inhabitants of these areas were, respectively, the Cymry and the Cumbri or, to their English neighbours, the Welsh and Strathclyde Welsh. A tenth-century poem from Wales suggests that, to some extent, both groups still thought of themselves as a single nation sharing a common language.17 Such sentiments did not, however, deter Welsh soldiers from joining English allies in a rampage across Strathclyde in 945. The campaign in question took place at the height of the Viking Age, a period in which new cultures and new identities arrived in Britain and Ireland. The Vikings themselves were warriors and colonists of Scandinavian origin, mostly from Norway and Denmark, who sailed abroad – in search of loot and territory – from the eighth century to the twelfth. Some of them are identified in the early chronicles as ‘Northmen’ (Norwegians) and ‘Danes’ but historians are increasingly sceptical about the accuracy of these ethnic distinctions.18 In this book, Norwegian Vikings are referred to by the conventional term ‘Norse’, while those who colonised Ireland are distinguished as ‘Hiberno-Norse’. The label ‘Danes’ is likewise applied to Viking forces who took control of Northumbria in the late ninth century and whose leaders were regarded by contemporary observers as being of Danish origin.

Fordun and Strathclyde

The erroneous belief that early medieval Cumbria and Strathclyde were not one and the same can, as noted above, be traced back to John of Fordun in the fourteenth century. Fordun is the source of two other misconceptions, namely that Strathclyde was part of the kingdom of Alba from the end of the ninth century, and that all kings of Strathclyde thereafter were not Britons but Scots. Unfortunately, his depiction of ‘Cumbria’ as a subjugated territory under Scottish rule has profoundly influenced the views of modern historians. He asserted that any individual described as ‘king of the Cumbrians’ in the tenth and eleventh centuries should be seen as a prince of the Scottish royal house and as heir-apparent to the throne of Alba.19 The kings in question were actually those of Strathclyde, but this historical fact did not fit with Fordun’s vision. He described a system of royal succession called ‘tanistry’ in which the tanist or designated heir of a kingdom gained experience of government by ruling a subordinate realm. Central to this vision was Fordun’s belief that tenth- and eleventh-century ‘Cumbria’ was the area known in his own time as the English county of Cumberland. He claimed that this had been a subordinate realm under the authority of the kings of England, by whom Scottish princes were permitted to govern it in exchange for an oath of allegiance. Some modern historians, while believing that Fordun misunderstood the broader meaning of the term ‘Cumbria’, have nonetheless accepted the rest of his testimony as reliable. For them, his depiction of Cumbrian kings as princes of Alba must be an accurate reflection of his sources. This is why the tanistry scenario has long formed part of the bedrock of modern scholarship on Strathclyde, and why many people assume that the kingdom was little more than a province of Alba from c.900 onwards. Fortunately, not everyone puts so much faith in Fordun. The doubters are right to be sceptical, for there is no reason to believe that he approached his sources objectively.20 None of the older chronicles written in the tenth to twelfth centuries implies that the kings of Strathclyde were Scottish princes. On the contrary, they indicate that the land of the Cumbrians – including Clydesdale itself – remained independent until the eleventh century. Only one period of Scottish domination in the tenth century is recorded but this was fairly brief and seems to have had no major impact on the system of royal succession in either Strathclyde or Alba.21 Fordun is not, in fact, a reliable witness for any period before his own time. His information on the Cumbrian kings seems rather to reflect his own preferred version of the past.22 Much of what he wrote about these kings is linked to his identification of one of them, a certain Owain, as the son of a Scottish king called Domnall who died in 900. While there is absolutely no warrant for making the identification in the first place, it is possible that Fordun found it in a work compiled some years before his own, a source that evidently formed the basis for his chronicle.23 In reality, Owain’s father was a king of Strathclyde rather than a king of Alba and would have borne a Cumbric form of the Welsh name Dyfnwal rather than the Gaelic name Domnall. An older Scottish source, the Chronicle of the Kings of Alba, places the death of Doneualdus ‘king of the Britons’ between 906 and 915 and this may be Owain’s father.24 While it now seems logical to identify father and son as Britons rather than as Scots, it plainly did not suit Fordun’s purposes to do so.

Sources: the English chronicles

Fordun’s chronicle is not a reliable source for the history of Strathclyde. It was, in any case, compiled in the late fourteenth century, three hundred years after the kingdom’s demise. More useful are a number of older texts written when the kingdom was still in existence or shortly afterwards. These are a mixed bag of chronicles, poems, charters, stories and genealogies, none of which was produced by the Cumbrians themselves. The historical value of these texts depends largely on the age and provenance of the manuscripts in which they are preserved. Some, for instance, survive only in very late copies. Others survive in older manuscripts riddled with scribal errors. In some cases the work itself is less concerned with history than with promoting political or ecclesiastical interests or, in the case of poetry, with literary techniques such as rhyme and alliteration. One of the fundamental truths of early medieval studies is that none of the so-called ‘primary sources’ can be taken at face value. All must be approached with caution, even after having been thoroughly dissected by specialist scholars.

This book, of course, is not only about the Strathclyde Britons or ‘Cumbrians’. It is also about the Anglo-Saxons or English, a people with whom the Cumbrians had a great deal of contact during the Viking Age. Indeed, much of our information on Strathclyde in this period comes from texts of English origin. Of these, the earliest is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (ASC), a collection of year-entries or annals from 60 BC to the twelfth century. The first version was written in Wessex, the kingdom of the West Saxons, in the late ninth century.25 Most early medieval chroniclers wrote in Latin but the scribes of ASC wrote in Old English, their own everyday speech. The West Saxons continued to update the text with new annals during the tenth century and onwards into the eleventh, by which time a number of copies had been made. Sadly, the original chronicle no longer exists, but some of the copies have survived. These had been distributed among various English monasteries to be maintained and updated and, inevitably, their annals often reflect local interests rather than those of Wessex. Of the nine survivors, the oldest is the ‘A’ text, otherwise known as the Parker or Winchester Chronicle, a manuscript written in various hands from the late ninth to the late eleventh centuries.26 It forms the basis of most modern editions of ASC and is generally regarded as the standard version. Although it has a geographical bias towards West Saxon affairs, the ‘A’ text is nonetheless where we find Straecledwealas, the Old English name for the Cumbrians or ‘Strathclyde Welsh’. However, for a generally more northern perspective we turn to the ‘D’ text, a manuscript of the mid-eleventh century whose compilers had access to a separate chronicle from Northumbria.27 Drawing on this now-lost Northumbrian source, the scribes of ‘D’ were able to give detailed information on contacts between the West Saxons and the peoples of northern Britain. A similar perspective is found in the ‘E’ text, a manuscript written at Peterborough in the early twelfth century to replace an earlier copy lost in a fire.28 Known as the ‘Laud Chronicle’, it can be used alongside ‘D’ as a source for northern information not otherwise found in ‘A’. Sometime around 980, a Latin translation of ASC was written by Aethelweard, a high-ranking English nobleman connected to the royal family of Wessex. Sadly, the only known copy of his Chronicon was severely damaged by fire in 1731. Fragments still survive but much of the original manuscript was destroyed, leaving modern scholars dependent on an edition of the complete text published in the sixteenth century.29 As a contemporary witness of tenth-century events, in some of which he played a prominent role, Aethelweard is obviously a valuable source. However, his Chronicon was based on a version of ASC similar to the ‘A’ text and therefore lacks the northern detail found in ‘D’ and ‘E’.

In addition to ASC, the English sources include a number of chronicles written in Latin during the twelfth century which provide useful detail on relations between the kings of Strathclyde and their English neighbours. Among these is a collection of annals begun in the closing years of the eleventh century and completed between 1140 and 1145. It is usually attributed to John of Worcester, one of its principal compilers, although an alternative attribution to another Worcester monk called ‘Florence’ was popular until fairly recently.30 This chronicle traces the history of the world from the Creation onwards and, although drawing heavily on ASC, it includes material from several sources that are no longer extant. Among its annals are points of detail relating to Strathclyde not found in the equivalent year-entries in ASC. These were almost certainly drawn from lost Northumbrian chronicles, probably originating at Durham where the monks of St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne established their headquarters in 995. Thus, although John and his colleagues were writing in the twelfth century, they were consulting older texts compiled much closer in time and place to the era of the Cumbrian kings.31 The Durham monks themselves have bequeathed a number of texts that add considerably to our understanding of northern history in the Viking Age. Central to their work was the story of their own community from its seventh-century beginnings to the founding of Durham Cathedral. The community traced its origins back to the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria, of which Cuthbert of Lindisfarne (died 687) was a revered patron saint. He was an older contemporary and fellow-countryman of Bede, a monk at Jarrow on the River Tyne, whose Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (‘Ecclesiastical History of the English People’) is one of the key sources cited in the second chapter of this book. Bede had much to say about Cuthbert and wrote two hagiographical accounts of his life, thus playing an important part in the beginnings of a saintly cult. The monks at the monastery on Lindisfarne developed the cult still further by promoting Cuthbert as the premier saint of northern Britain.32 This devotion spread throughout Anglo-Saxon Northumbria, in churches and monasteries in every part of the kingdom. In 793, however, the entire community reeled in shock when Lindisfarne was brutally attacked by Viking raiders. In the wake of this distressing event, Cuthbert’s holy remains were removed to keep them from harm. A safe repository proved elusive and the relics were moved around Northumbria for almost a hundred years until, in 882, the monks settled at Chester-le-Street on the River Wear. In 995, they moved to a new base at Durham where the tomb of the saint can still be seen in the eastern apse of the cathedral. In the early twelfth century, a Durham monk wrote a history of the community from its origins to 1096. Modern scholars refer to this work as Libellus de exordio (‘Tract on the Origins’) or as Historia Dunelmensis ecclesiae (‘History of the Church of Durham’).33 The latter title, hereafter abbreviated to HDE, is the one most commonly cited in the following chapters. As with John of Worcester’s chronicle, HDE gives a number of interesting details about the kingdom of Strathclyde. For example, it identifies by name the ‘king of the Cumbrians’ who fought in the great battle of Brunanburh in 937. The oldest surviving manuscript of HDE was written between 1100 and 1115 but its writer remains anonymous. However, a later copy written in the twelfth century identifies the principal author of the original work as a Durham monk called Symeon and this attribution may be correct.34 Symeon is also regarded as the main compiler of Historia Regum Anglorum et Dacorum (‘History of the Kings of the English and Danes’), a collection of annals and other material drawn from various sources.35 The sources of Historia Regum (hereafter HRA) include identifiable works such as HDE, John of Worcester’s chronicle and a northern version of ASC, together with a number of texts whose existence can only be inferred. Among the lost materials was a set of Northumbrian annals containing information not found elsewhere but providing unique insights into the history of northern Britain in the ninth to eleventh centuries.36 Two other Durham texts, the eleventh-century Historia de Sancto Cuthberto (‘History of St Cuthbert’) and De Obsessione Dunelmi (‘On the Siege of Durham’) of c.1100, are also cited in the following chapters, but the twelfth-century tract De Primo Saxonum Adventu (‘On the Coming of the English’) has not been used.

From southern England in the twelfth century come the works of William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon, both of whom wrote detailed histories up to their own time.37 Like their contemporaries at Worcester and Durham, William and Henry provide unique information relating to Strathclyde and must have had access to older texts that no longer survive. The challenge facing modern scholars is the value of such information when its very uniqueness puts its reliability in doubt.38 This applies to any twelfth-century text containing historical details that cannot be verified in an earlier source. Not even the Durham material, written at no great geographical distance from what had once been the southern frontier of Strathclyde, is immune from such scrutiny. Scepticism inevitably deepens when we turn to texts produced even later, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, for we then move into a period that produced the fictionalised histories of Fordun. Some writers of this later period are nonetheless worthy of consideration, an example being Roger of Wendover who wrote a chronicle called Flores historiarum (‘The Flowers of History’) in the early thirteenth century.39 Roger is our source for one small but significant piece of information relating to contact between a king of Strathclyde and an English counterpart. By then, of course, the Clyde kingdom was already a distant memory and its history was ripe for manipulation.40 Fordun, as we have seen, repackaged its kings as Scottish princes because it suited his purposes to do so. His contemporaries in England were at liberty to make similar alterations of their own.

Sources: Ireland, Wales and Scotland

The Celtic areas of Britain and Ireland have bequeathed a rich assemblage of early medieval literature ranging from annals and genealogies to poetry and hagiography. It is thus a matter of regret that so little of this material is from Strathclyde. No chronicles or king-lists survive from the Cumbrian kingdom. No hagiographical account of any local saint written before the kingdom’s demise in the eleventh century has been preserved. A twelfth-century vita or ‘life’ of Kentigern or Mungo, the patron saint of Glasgow, does seem to incorporate older material but it remains a difficult and controversial text.41 Snippets of information on other early saints who supposedly founded churches and monasteries in Strathclyde are scattered among a variety of later Scottish works but their historical value is questionable. A single stanza of heroic poetry, probably composed at Dumbarton in the seventh century, appears in a collection of medieval Welsh verse of uncertain date and provenance.42 This fragment may be the only surviving literature from the kingdom of the Cumbrians, which is why so much of the raw data for this book comes from other lands.

The English chronicles have already been discussed. Our focus now switches to sources of Celtic origin, and we begin with the Irish annals. Although these obviously have a primary focus on Ireland, they provide a wealth of information on Britain too, much of it not repeated in texts of English, Scottish or Welsh origin. Two of the Irish annalistic compilations are of particular interest: the Annals of Tigernach (hereafter AT) and the Annals of Ulster (hereafter AU).43 Although these survive, respectively, in manuscripts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, both are based on much older chronicles and are regarded by modern specialists as generally reliable. Many of their year-entries are the same, a clear indication that their respective compilers had access to similar source material, but the two compilations are sufficiently distinct to show that they do not derive from a single work.44 Each took information from older chronicles, now no longer extant, of which one was a set of annals compiled at the Hebridean monastery of Iona. Many of the entries in AU and AT relating to northern Britain were taken from this ‘Iona Chronicle’, especially for the period up to c.750, while those for the ninth to eleventh centuries seem to have originated in Ireland. This means that although both AU and AT note the deaths of two tenth-century kings of Strathclyde, there is no indication that the information came from a written source in Britain, still less from a chronicle compiled in the Cumbrian kingdom itself. News of both deaths may have come directly to Ireland via travellers passing to and fro on the seaways in between. Other Irish chronicles giving useful data on northern Britain in this period are the Annals of Clonmacnoise (hereafter AClon), the Annals of the Four Masters (AFM), the Annals of Inisfallen and the Fragmentary Annals of Ireland (FAI). All four contain items of unique information not found in AU or AT. AClon is a seventeenth-century translation, into English, of a chronicle traditionally believed to be a product of the monastery of Clonmacnoise in County Offaly.45 The original chronicle is lost but the translator’s description of it as an ‘old Irish book’ indicates that its year-entries were written in Irish Gaelic not Latin. Although the translation is a rather curious work containing unfamiliar spellings of names, it is thought to be a fair rendering of its source and a useful witness of early medieval events. Also from the seventeenth century comes AFM, the four ‘masters’ of its title being its principal compilers.46 As with other works produced in this period, AFM relied on older chronicles for information from early medieval times and its entries have much in common with those in AU and AT. From the fifteenth century come the Annals of Inisfallen and FAI, the former a chronicle originally begun in the 1100s, the latter surviving now in a seventeenth-century copy.47 Of the two, FAI is of particular interest in the present context because it contains the only account of a military alliance in which the Cumbrians of Strathclyde agreed to help the English against the Vikings. Some modern scholars take a sceptical view of this account because it appears in a narrative tale added to a year-entry, a common feature of FAI that sets it apart from other Irish chronicles.48 Although such stories do tend to be of uncertain provenance, they provide information not found elsewhere and are therefore worthy of consideration, even if their historical value is sometimes difficult to assess.

Turning now to Scotland, we possess no major collection of annals similar to those produced in Ireland. The so-called ‘Iona Chronicle’, commonly assumed to be an important source used by the Irish annalists, would have been a significant Scottish example had it survived to the present day. It is indeed unfortunate that no chronicles from the great monasteries of medieval Scotland have been preserved. We are left instead with a number of texts in various formats and of varying reliability. For the period covered by this book, one of the oldest and most reliable is the Chronicle of the Kings of Alba (hereafter CKA), a work of the tenth to twelfth centuries now preserved in a manuscript of the fourteenth.49 As its name suggests, CKA is a record of early Scottish kings, beginning with Cináed mac Ailpín in the ninth century and ending with his namesake Cináed mac Mail Coluim in the tenth. Each king’s reign is summarised in a brief account of important events including major battles and royal deaths. The original chronicle seems to have been compiled within a decade of the death of Cináed mac Mail Coluim in 995 so we are clearly dealing with a source of potentially high value. Like all ancient texts it does, however, require careful handling, not least because it has undergone several stages of transmission from original version to surviving copy.50 It nevertheless provides unique insights into relations between the kings of Alba and their neighbours, including those on the Clyde. Somewhat more problematic is the Prophecy of Berchan, a long poem on early Scottish kings which partly overlaps with CKA in its coverage.51 Berchan was a sixth-century Irish abbot but the poem itself was probably composed in the twelfth century, its cryptic verses supposedly reporting his prophetic visions. The prophecies are, in fact, retrospective allusions to events that had already happened. Each verse refers to, but does not name, a Pictish or Scottish king of the ninth to eleventh centuries, with a rather esoteric account of his reign. Some parts make little sense at all, while others are corrupt, so the work as a whole is somewhat frustrating. Nonetheless, despite its difficulties it remains a useful source of early medieval Scottish history and, like CKA, makes a number of interesting references to Strathclyde.

When the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle referred to the Clyde Britons as Straecledwealas, ‘Strathclyde Welsh’, it acknowledged their affinity with the inhabitants of Wales. The Welsh themselves recognised this ancestral connection, for many of their earliest poems and stories revered as illustrious heroes a number of North British kings of the sixth and seventh centuries. Some of the most famous poems circulating among the royal courts of Wales in the Viking Age and later were supposedly composed by northern bards such as Taliesin and Aneirin in the period 550 to 650.52 One verse attributed to Aneirin, who seems to have been associated with the kingdom of Gododdin around Edinburgh, celebrates a victory won by a king of the Clyde Britons over the Scots in 642 or 643. It is almost certainly the sole surviving fragment of a longer poem composed at the victor’s royal fortress on Dumbarton Rock. No other poetry survives from the heartlands of the Clyde kingdom, if indeed such literature was ever written down. From further south, in territory ruled by the kings of Strathclyde in Viking times, comes another stray verse also erroneously attributed to Aneirin and likewise preserved in Wales. This curious item, apparently a child’s lullaby, appears to refer to the Lodore Cascade, a spectacular waterfall on the River Derwent in what is now the Lake District in north-west England.53 Whether it was composed during the period of Strathclyde rule in the tenth and eleventh centuries or in some earlier era of Cumbric speech has yet to be established. From Wales itself a major chronicle known as Annales Cambriae or ‘Welsh Annals’ has survived in a number of copies, the oldest being a compilation of the tenth century preserved in a manuscript of the twelfth.54. Other, later manuscripts continue the sequence of annals beyond the tenth century to the thirteenth. In comparison with the major Irish chronicles, the coverage of Annales Cambriae is somewhat patchy, with brief entries and many gaps. Although the history of northern Britain receives scant attention, the few entries relating to Strathclyde are valuable nonetheless. Among the other Welsh texts is Historia Brittonum (‘History of the Britons’), a curious work of the early ninth century that appears to be a compendium of historical and legendary lore from a variety of sources.55 Its information on a number of North British kings of the sixth and seventh centuries makes it a potentially useful resource for Chapter 2 of this book, but it is less helpful than we would wish. Some of these kings also appear in Welsh genealogies or ‘pedigrees’ which trace the ancestry of key figures from history and literature. Most of the pedigrees are fairly short, consisting of only a few generations, but one of the North British ones stands out as being far longer than the rest. It traces the paternal descent of Rhun, a ninth-century king of Strathclyde, through many generations back to shadowy forefathers who ruled from Dumbarton Rock in the fifth and sixth centuries.56 Although some of Rhun’s ancestors are unknown outside his pedigree, the historical existence of others can be verified by entries in the Irish annals recording their deaths. Either Rhun himself or his father Artgal was the first ruler of the new kingdom of Strathclyde after the Viking siege of Dumbarton in 870 which brought the old realm of Alt Clut to an end. Unfortunately, there is no pedigree for the period after 870 when the royal dynasty transferred its main centre of power to Govan, so the names of Rhun’s descendants and successors have to be sought elsewhere.

Sources: hagiography

Hagiography was a type of religious literature, common throughout medieval Christendom, in which the achievements and virtues of famous saints were eulogised. A small number of hagiographical texts are cited in the bibliography at the end of this book, these being selected because they contain useful information on Strathclyde. Most hagiographical writing conformed to a standard template, namely the vita or ‘life’ of an ecclesiastical figure revered as a saint by his or her devotees. The subject was usually the founder of one or more monasteries that existed in the hagiographer’s own time and who, in life, would normally have held the rank of bishop, abbot or abbess. Western Christendom produced a large number of saints and many were honoured with vitae, not all of which have survived in complete form. Some were produced within a few years of the saint’s death, while others appeared much later – in some cases hundreds of years after the lifetime of the saint. To the present-day reader, a vita might seem to offer an authentic glimpse of the period when the saint was alive, but this is often a false hope. For a start, a hagiographical work cannot be described as biography in the modern sense.57 The author of a vita was less interested in writing a factual life-story than in creating an idealised portrait of a paragon of Christian virtue. Moreover, the author probably had close links with a church or monastery founded by the saint and, in all likelihood, had been commissioned to write the vita as a publicity exercise for the place itself. Thus, a twelfth-century abbot or bishop might seek to promote the interests of his own monastery by commissioning a vita to enhance the fame of a long-dead founder. This was also a useful tactic for attracting pilgrims to the cult-centre of a saint, or for making one group of monasteries look more important than a rival group founded by a different saint. For the purposes of this book, the most useful hagiographical texts are two vitae of Kentigern, produced at Glasgow in the 1100s to honour a saint who died five hundred years earlier, and a tenth-century vita of St Cathroe of Metz who died c.971. One of the Kentigern vitae only partially survives, in a manuscript of the early fifteenth century. Its author is unknown but it was commissioned by Herbert, bishop of Glasgow from 1147 to 1164, and for this reason is usually referred to as the ‘Herbertian Life’. The other vita survives in complete form in a manuscript of c.1200 but the version preferred by modern editors is in a manuscript from later in the thirteenth century. It was commissioned by Bishop Jocelin in the final quarter of the twelfth century and was written by his namesake Jocelin of Furness. Although both vitae deal mainly with the period of Kentigern’s lifetime in the late sixth and early seventh centuries, their production is closely connected with the Scottish conquest of Strathclyde five hundred years later.58 The vita of Cathroe, a Scottish saint who ended his days as abbot of Metz in France, is the work of a monk of Metz whose name was Reiman or Ousmann. It was written sometime around 980, just a few years after Cathroe’s death. Sadly, the original tenth-century manuscript has not survived so scholars usually rely on a copy published by John Colgan, an Irish Franciscan friar, in 1645.59 The vita includes an account of Cathroe’s pilgrimage to the Continent, a journey that brought him face-to-face with a number of kings as he travelled southward through Britain. One of these was Dyfnwal, king of Strathclyde, whom the vita describes as a kinsman of the saint. Dyfnwal offered Cathroe the hospitality of his court and safe passage to his border, from where the pilgrim travelled onward to York, stronghold of the Viking rulers of Northumbria. In spite of its value as a contemporary source, this vita has often been neglected by modern historians, perhaps because it belongs to a genre traditionally regarded with scepticism. Also part of the same genre, but treated here as distinct from the vitae of Cathroe and Kentigern, are a number of shorter hagiographical works called lectiones (‘readings’). An important collection of these is the Aberdeen Breviary, a sixteenth-century calendar in which information about Scottish saints was written under their anniversaries or ‘feast days’. The Breviary, commissioned by the bishop of Aberdeen, was intended to be a definitive compendium of hagiography relating to all saints who had a connection with Scotland. Its sources included earlier vitae, most of which are now lost, together with oral legends relating to shrines and cult-centres. Among the saints commemorated are several obscure figures who had connections with Strathclyde but of whom we know almost nothing outside their lectiones.60

Sources: non-Insular texts

The term ‘non-Insular’ in this context refers to sources that were not written in the British Isles. The vita of St Cathroe is one such text, having been written at Metz in France. It is one of a small number of non-Insular sources providing information of relevance to the history of Strathclyde. One aspect of Cathroe’s vita that makes it so useful to present-day historians is the fact that it was written within a few decades of the events it describes. The same can also be said of the chronicle of Ralph Glaber, a Burgundian monk who lived in the first half of the eleventh century. Although Ralph’s Historiarum Libri Quinque (‘History in Five Books’) was primarily concerned with the ecclesiastical affairs of tenth- and eleventh-century France, it includes some interesting and unique references to Britain.61 Indeed, Ralph is our only source for certain dealings between the kings of England and Alba that have a bearing on the last phase of Strathclyde’s existence as an independent realm. Both he and Cathroe’s hagiographer were geographically separated from Britain but fairly contemporary with the events they wrote about. This is not the case with a large group of non-Insular texts known collectively as the Norse or Icelandic sagas. These narrative tales deal with people and events of the Viking period but were written no earlier than the thirteenth century, predominantly in Iceland. Contrary to popular belief, they do not appear to preserve a record of real events of Viking times but seem rather to be imaginative tales composed by later storytellers.62 Their creators were probably seeking to portray a nostalgic image of the past, often by using real figures from the ninth to eleventh centuries as the main characters in a story. Nevertheless, many historians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries regarded the sagas as authentic sources, using them alongside the Insular chronicles to build a detailed picture of Viking activity in Britain and Ireland. Little trust is placed in the sagas today. They are now regarded as vivid, action-packed tales rather than as reliable historical texts, hence their absence from the bibliography at the end of this book.

Sources: charters

The final group of sources comprises legal documents relating to the ownership of territory or to the bestowing of rights and privileges. These are mostly in the form of charters confirming land-grants, the majority of which are ‘diplomas’ or royal charters issued by kings. A similar document was the ‘writ’ in which the rights and restrictions of certain individuals were defined by a king or high-ranking lord. Some charters and writs survive in their original form, while others are known only from later copies. Detailed study of these early legal texts is a scholarly discipline in its own right and much meticulous work has been done on understanding them. For historians the key issue is authenticity, especially where a document purports to give useful information about a particular king. Authentication by specialists is indeed crucial, for analysis has shown that some supposedly early charters were written much later, to provide fake evidence in disputes over land-ownership or to support a dubious claim. Under such scrutiny, the documents that have been identified as genuine become primary sources of the highest value. They can, for instance, give insights into the mechanisms of government in an age when loyal service to a king or lord was rewarded with land and privileges. Moreover, a charter issued at a place far from a king’s core domain might tell us something about the real extent of his authority. Similarly, a charter’s list of the dignitaries who witnessed it might include subordinate rulers who can thus be identified as vassals of the king who made the gift. Charters were issued by a number of Anglo-Saxon kings in the period covered by this book and some of these documents identify subordinate kings by name.63