THE LAST OF THE FREE
‘And some there be … who are perished, as though they had never been; and become as though they had never been born …’
Ecclesiasticus
Starvation snapped closer at Caledonian heels than any Roman dog of war when the first named ‘Scot’ stepped out of the dark to make his stand.
We know his name because Agricola’s own son-in-law wrote it down. More than twenty years later, Gaius Cornelius Tacitus wrote De vita et moribus Iulii Agricolae - ‘About the life and character of Julius Agricola’. Better known today as the Agricola, it was a book designed to heap praise on the general and to demonstrate how it was possible for a good man to rule effectively and courageously without becoming a despot. It also gives some insights into not just what the Romans encountered in Britannia in the latter part of the first century AD, but also what some Romans thought about the behaviour of the Roman Empire itself.
With the great general heading north - into the lethally dangerous territory of the Caledonians - Tacitus wanted to underline his fatherin-law’s bravery by finding him a worthy foe. It is in this context - that of useful literary device as much as anything made of blood and bone - that Scotland’s first hero strides to centre-stage.
In the autumn of AD 84 a massed force of Caledonians - according to Tacitus, 30,000-strong - gathered in the shadow of a great glen to try and turn back the tide:
… and still they came, flocking to the colours - all the young men and those whose old age was fresh and green, famous warriors with their battle honours thick upon them. At that point one of the many leaders, named Calgacus, a man of outstanding valour and nobility, summoned the masses who were already thirsting for battle and addressed them …
Battles against Rome have been lost and won before, [said Calgacus] but never without hope; we were always there in reserve. We, the choicest flower of Britain’s manhood, were treasured in her most secret places … We, the last men on earth, the last of the free, have been shielded before today by the very remoteness and the seclusion for which we are famed … Romans … Brigands of the world … the wealth of an enemy excites their greed, his poverty their lust for power … Robbery, butchery, rapine … they create a devastation and call it peace [ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant].
Archaeologists and historians still argue about the location of the battle. Tacitus called the place ‘Mons Graupius’ - the Grampian mountain - and a popular interpretation puts the fighting on and around the slopes of Bennachie, in Aberdeenshire.
Content that he had said all that was required, Calgacus - a name that means ‘the swordsman’ - signalled the launch of countless spears towards the massed ranks of 20,000 Roman soldiers lined up on the slopes below them. ‘The fighting began with exchanges of missiles, and the Britons showed both steadiness and skill in parrying our spears with their huge swords or catching them on their little shields, while they themselves rained volleys on us,’ wrote Tacitus. It was the 8,000 or so auxiliaries in the front line that bore the brunt of the aerial bombardment - but still a mighty reply was made in the form of Roman missiles hurled back towards the bellowing faces of the Caledonians. Then it was time for sword work, face to face. ‘At last Agricola called upon four cohorts of Batavians and two of Tungrians to close and fight it out at the sword’s point. These old soldiers had been well drilled in sword-fighting, while the enemy were awkward at it, with their small shields and unwieldy swords, especially as the latter, having no points, were quite unsuitable for a cut-and-thrust struggle at close quarters.’
Then the Roman cavalry, 3,000-strong, was dispatched around the flanks of the tribesmen. According to Tacitus the Caledonians lost 10,000 men dead before the remainder broke and fled back into the trackless hills. Calgacus, along with the bulk of his forces, disappeared then too, never again to be heard of by history. ‘The next day revealed the effects of our victory more fully,’ wrote Tacitus. ‘An awful silence reigned on every hand; the hills were deserted, houses smoking in the distance, and our scouts did not meet a soul.’
As well as the location of Mons Graupius, as well as the fact or fiction of the man called Calgacus, historians debate whether there ever was a climactic battle between Caledonians and Romans. To be ‘climactic’, some of them say, many more than a third of the tribesmen would have to have been slain or taken prisoner. To let 20,000 armed and defiant men - their great and valorous leader among them - escape back into their Highland fastnesses could hardly be counted as securing the conquest of Scotland.
But what cannot be denied is that Agricola was shortly summoned back to Rome (allegedly because Emperor Domitian had grown jealous that his bold general’s achievements were eclipsing his own) and that he was treated there to a ‘triumph’. These were celebrations enjoyed only by Roman war leaders who had notched up unparalleled victories. If Agricola had topped off his proven conquests of the rest of Britannia by trouncing the massed forces of the troublesome Caledonians, then he would indeed have been granted his triumph.
Regardless of what actually happened, it is worth being aware that both the descriptions of the ‘first Scot’ and the details of the Roman ‘conquest’ of Scotland have been handed down to us by foreigners, by others.
The words of Calgacus have exerted a powerful influence on the national imagination since they were first committed to parchment nearly 2,000 years ago; they might just as easily have been spoken by William Wallace himself - indeed the sentiments can be heard tolling like distant bells in the background of Churchill’s speeches. There is one obvious problem, however: they are not and could never have been the words of Calgacus or any other ‘Scot’ of the first century AD. They are instead the words of Gaius Cornelius Tacitus himself, writing twenty years later in hope of delivering a timeless message about the morality of Rome. If a man like Calgacus ever strode across the heather-covered slopes of a Grampian mountain to preach fire and war to his fellows, he would have spoken not in the measured Latin phrases of a Roman historian but in the tongue of the natives living the length and breadth of Britain in those days - the language that survives in the ancient roots of modern Welsh.
Right here, in this moment, is where the mythologising of Scottish history began. Be warned - almost everything we know, or think we know about Scotland during the centuries after the first contact with Rome, was written down not by our ancestors, but by those who encountered, sometimes lived among and often clashed violently with them.
Any wayward patriotism - the sense that Scots, ‘the last of the free’, somehow defied the Romans while all others fell before her - has to be tempered by a couple of facts. Firstly, it was the case in the first centuries AD (and was to remain so for centuries to come) that the northern territories required more money to subdue them than they were ever going to be worth in terms of material gain. Why keep sending expensive armies north in hope of securing ownership of thin soils that could barely sustain a crop and barren mountains devoid of minerals? Secondly, Rome had always to sacrifice any hopes of controlling the north in favour of pulling men and resources back out of Britannia whenever imperial borders elsewhere came under pressure.
However effective their efforts really were is not clear, but the individual tribes among the Caledonians never did let up their attempts to harass and punish the Roman squatters at every opportunity. By AD 122 the invaders had acknowledged the scale of the problem by building the most extravagant and impressive boundary anywhere in the empire.
Hadrian’s Wall drew an unbroken line from one side of the country to the other, between the Tyne in the east and the Solway in the west. So that none could doubt the might of those who had built it (in just six short years, the work of three legions) it bristled with forts and watch-towers. It was painted brilliant white with lime mortar to make it visible for miles around. On the one hand it was a means of controlling trade moving north and south - passage through heavily guarded checkpoints along its length providing welcome opportunities to collect taxes. More than that, the wall was a line in the sand: where civilisation ended and barbarism began.
Twenty years later the Romans made yet another attempt to push north and finish the job of subduing the tribes. As a demonstration of their commitment they built another barrier - the Antonine Wall - stretching nearly 40 miles from Old Kilpatrick on the Firth of Clyde in the west to Bo’ness on the Firth of Forth in the east. It was not to be, this dream of total conquest. Within twenty years of drawing the new line in the sand they were forced back behind Hadrian’s Wall - where they would remain for the rest of their stay in these islands.
The tribes of Caledonia made life intermittently unpleasant for the Romans during the four centuries or so they spent here. Even the wall itself was the target for attacks of varying degrees of seriousness. For their own part the invaders kept trying to score the final success that would bring the remainder of the country to heel - but always they were undone, usually by events elsewhere. Long before the end of the Roman occupation, Britain was attempting to claim independence from the empire. Finally, in AD 410, Alaric the Goth captured the city of Rome itself. The time of the Roman Empire had passed and, back in the stubbornly defiant lands of northern Scotland, the Caledonian tribes were on hand to speed the final expulsion of the enemies at the gate.
It had been the Romans themselves who referred to the northern peoples, those living north of the Forth/Clyde line, as Caledonians. This was a name they applied not just to the people of one specific tribe - the Caledonii who inspired the label - but one that was used as a catchall to describe the whole rebellious lot of them. The Romans even blamed their inability to bring the place under control, in part at least, to the great and impenetrable Forest of Caledon. It seems this was an exaggeration at best and a fiction at worst. By the time of the Romans, clearance of the trees had been going on for thousands of years. The Forest of Caledon probably found its way into progress reports as the kind of excuse a struggling commander might need to appease impatient superiors back in Rome.
Among the Caledonians, and a powerful constituent part of the whole, were tribes like the Maeatae - a name lost to all except students of Roman history. But in AD 297 a word was written down for the first time that was to reverberate through Scottish history until the present day.
When the Romans first reached Scotland they noticed the locals still painted and tattooed their bodies with elaborate, evocative designs. Once upon a time this had been common, not just for the peoples of the British Isles but among all the Celtic tribes of Europe. By the end of the first century, though, it was a practice that had begun to die out. For the legionaries making their first forays north of the Clyde and Forth rivers, the sight of people still adorning their faces and bodies with paint and dye must have been proof, at least in Roman eyes, of the primitive nature of the foe. So it may have been as a soldiers’ nickname that the word Picti was first used and heard - something vaguely abusive or dismissive like ‘Raghead’ for an Iraqi or ‘Wop’ for an Italian. It is also possible it was a Latinised form of what the tribesmen called themselves, but in any case it meant ‘the painted ones’ or perhaps ‘the people of the designs’.
If ever there was a case of east meeting west in a welter of mutual confusion, it was the relationship between the citizens of empire and the painted ones. In AD 211 an extraordinary encounter took place. Two women - a Caledonian princess known only as the wife of a Maeatae chieftain called Argentocoxus and the Roman empress Julia Domna, wife of Emperor Septimius Severus - met during treaty negotiations and each must have seemed fantastically exotic and foreign to the other.
The empress had heard the barbarian women gave their love freely to many men. When she put this to her counterpart, the princess replied with all the haughty majesty of a woman of the highest rank: ‘We fulfil the demands of nature in a much better way than do you Roman women; for we consort openly with the best men, whereas you let yourselves be debauched in secret by the vilest.’ This exchange speaks volumes about different worlds. The Romans never understood the people of the north - and were themselves treated with hostility and misunderstanding in return. To the people of the designs, the Romans were would-be conquerors, wishing to put the whole earth beneath the yoke of tyranny. To the sons and daughters of Rome these painted tribesmen and women were only a curiosity, to be kept at arm’s length.
Whatever else they might have been, the Picts were the direct descendants of the first bands of hunter-gatherers to colonise these lands after the retreat of the ice 12,000 years ago. If the name started out as soldier slang, it has survived into the present as something else. That one syllable comes down to us from the past hushed by mystery, but synonymous with pride.
Part of the explanation for the aura of other-worldliness that has surrounded the Picts lies entwined within their enigmatic designs and symbols - not just tattooed on their bodies but also carved into standing stones and worked into exquisite jewellery. It is a lost language, a world of meaning that feels almost within our grasp and yet defies all attempts at decoding. But those symbols - eternal and eternally mysterious - are just part of the reason these ancestors have exerted such power over the imagination. The stuff of magic is upon them because they themselves have seemed lost, disappeared.
We know the Picts were here for centuries - long before and long after the Romans; we know they had a rich and complex culture. This was a quintessential warrior society and their need to express themselves was so strong it had to show on their flesh. For all that, they managed somehow to vanish entirely from history; indeed they seem to have perished, in the words of Ecclesiasticus, as though they had never been. Most enigmatically of all, in the end they contrived to leave the stage at the very moment when the kingdom of Scotland was created. But it is only by finding a way through the fog surrounding the fate of the Picts, finding the explanation for their disappearance, that we can understand the true nature of the birth of the Scots nation.
Evidence of Pictish culture - more straightforward and revealing evidence - has come from the peaty waters of Loch Tay. Here, 3 metres down, archaeologists came across the remains of an ancient stronghold - fragments of a thatched roof and stumps that were once the stilts of a dwelling that stood above the water; a dwelling in which Pictish people would have lived.
Crannogs were built in Scotland for thousands of years - in some cases they were still in use in the seventeenth century - and were certainly part of the Pictish way of life. It took a great deal of effort as well as sophisticated technology to build out into water. Explanations for such labour-intensive effort range from defence and security - the only access to such dwellings was over a narrow bridge or causeway, either of which was easily defended - to the suggestion that the residents were maximising their farmland by moving the clutter of their homes out onto the surfaces of the convenient and plentiful lochs. Whatever the reason for balancing a home over water, a crannog is a substantial dwelling and Pictish society had to be well organised to construct such things. In the village of Kenmore, on the shore of Loch Tay, members of the Scottish Trust for Underwater Archaeology have built a full-size replica of the kind of crannog that would once have been commonplace.
It has stood for more than ten years now and if you come across it unexpectedly, you could be forgiven for thinking it has been there centuries longer. The walk across the narrow, high-sided bridge that links the house to the mainland is a journey through time. Inside, the crannog is spacious and surprisingly comfortable. A thick carpet of dry bracken and straw covers the floor of woven branches, so it is soft and silent underfoot. It is instantly easy to imagine how small items must have got lost in the tangle every day, only to discover their way eventually into the water beneath, for archaeologists to find in centuries to come.
A central hearth dominates the circular interior and supplies the majority of the light. Around the walls, partitions mark out private sleeping places on two levels. There is also plentiful room for storage and every inch of every horizontal beam and branch seems draped with something useful - drying foodstuffs or raw materials for making clothes, tools and the rest of the paraphernalia of daily life. The gentle lapping of the waters of the loch against the upright posts that support the whole structure provides a constant, soothing music. It has to be said, though, that the fire blazing in the midst of all this tinder is a constant worry to modern eyes. Surely these dwellings fell victim to fire on a regular basis.
The construction process convinced the archaeologists that whoever lived in such places was in control of people and resources in large quantities. Remains recovered from the loch revealed the Iron Age inhabitants enjoyed a rich and varied diet and that they were sitting within trading networks that reached far and wide. Some of the small objects recovered from the water and silt were made of jet - the fossilised remains of ancient monkey puzzle trees - and must have come from at least as far away as Whitby in Yorkshire.
The Kenmore reconstruction, based on the excavated remains of the Oakbank Crannog which was found on the north-east shore of the loch, could accommodate at least twenty and perhaps as many as forty people. It seems likely that while a high-ranking family may have lived in it full-time, dependants living onshore in less secure housing might have retreated to the crannog, effectively a water castle, for protection in times of strife.
By the time the Romans abandoned Britannia, the people they had called Picts were a long-established and distinctive presence occupying the north and east of the country. The most powerful of their men styled themselves as kings - of the sort that had made the trip from Orkney to Colchester to meet an emperor four centuries before. They controlled enough of the surplus from fertile farmland in the eastern part of their domains to enable them to commission jewellery, weapons and artworks from specialised craftsmen. The standing stones that bear the unmistakable designs they demanded of their sculptors have been interpreted as marking out a territory that was supposedly divided, at one stage, into seven provinces: Cat (Caithness); Ce (Marr and Buchan); Circin (Angus and Mearns); Fib (Fife); Fidaid (Moray and Easter Ross); Fortriu (Strathearn and Mentieth) and Fotla (Atholl and Gowrie). More recently, historian Dauvit Brown has dismissed these as a fiction that fails to represent the true territorial divisions within Pictland.
Powerful men and their families had emerged as a nobility whose pastimes included the hunt and who had personal and trading links that connected them to powerful men elsewhere. Some of these links were friendly, about the exchange of artistic and spiritual ideas as well as commerce; some points of contact were less cordial.
To the south of the Pictish territory were lands dominated by the Britons - people who spoke a language similar to that of their northern neighbours but who were different nonetheless. These were the descendants of tribes that had lived directly under Roman rule. Among them were the Gododdin, descendants of the Votadini, with their stronghold around the volcanic rock of Din Eidyn (Edinburgh). A separate group clung to Alt Clut, mighty Dumbarton Rock, in Strathclyde.
To the west of the territories of the Picts and the Britons were the Gaels. If this is not confusing enough already, it is about to get much worse. Depending on what other books you read, the Gaels are sometimes referred to as the original Scots. The origin of the name lies in Scoti, the translation into Latin of Gael, or Gaedil. As well as being a translation, Scoti also had unfavourable connotations. For some users of the word it meant something like ‘pirates’ - and it holds within it an echo of a time when these people were viewed, at least by someone else, as marauders who came from the sea.
Historians cannot agree on whether or not the Gaels - the Scots - came originally from Ireland. There is a tenth-century Irish document called Senchus fer nAlban - ‘The History of the People of Scotland’ - that says the Gaelic-speaking Scots had no doubts they were relatives of the Gaels of Ireland. Maybe it is easier to accept that people living on the west coast of Scotland and on the eastern coast of Ireland would have felt connected, rather than separated, by the seawater between them. A relationship that may have started thousands of years before could easily have given rise to peoples on both sides of the Irish Sea who had more to connect than to divide them. An ancient tale, which is supposed to explain the origins of the Gaels, has a chieftain of the Dal Riata tribe of Antrim - one Fergus Mor mac Eirc - arrive in Argyll around AD 500 to establish his own kingdom. The legend goes that he brought his followers across the sea to find more room for himself and his heirs.
Whatever their origins, the Gaels had put down deep roots on and around the western seaboard by the start of the sixth century. Right at the heart of their kingdom was the hill fort of Dunadd, rising like a clenched fist out of the flatlands that surround it. Brooding, menacing Dunadd glowers over the southern end of Kilmartin Glen above Lochgilphead, in Mid-Argyll. Its height, around 54 metres, is made more impressive by the flatness of the valley floor - a mire known then and now as Moine Mor, the Great Bog. Sea levels were higher in AD 500 than today and the rocky citadel of Dunadd would have provided the perfect location for a people who needed to oversee and defend the comings and goings of their ships.
Four massive circular embankments defended the fortress. Much of the hard work had already been done by nature and gaps between cliffs of natural bedrock were plugged with dry-stone walls 10 metres thick. A narrow natural defile was left as an easily defended entrance that could be barred by gates in times of trouble. The whole thing is shaped much like a lopsided wedding cake, and on each successive tier there would have been plenty of room for houses, stores and workshops built of timber and stone. The Gaels who lived here had much in common with their Pictish neighbours in the east as well as with the Britons to the south - not least an appetite for war. But there were enough differences - subtle, cultural quirks - to mark them out as separate. While they sometimes formed alliances, they were just as often at each other’s throats.
Archaeological evidence from Dunadd reveals a gentler, reflective side of the Gaels: an artistic tradition with a delicate beauty all of its own. Crucibles for melting gold, silver and bronze were found, along with moulds for casting brooches. Such a demand for and abundance of fine jewellery of the most expensive kind could mean just one thing: this fortress was home to the kingdom’s elite. The Gaelic kingdom was run from here; the kings themselves made upon its bedrock. Just below the summit of Dunadd, on a smooth and level shelf, a footprint has been carved (the original was being worn away by many Cinderella visitors and what you see when you visit now is a convincing replica put in place by a helicopter). The ceremonies that were once held here married the kings to the land they sought to rule. For the crowds gathered below, the heir apparent would have appeared in silhouette against the sky as he stepped out onto the rock. At the appointed time he would have placed one naked foot into the footprint, demonstrating to his subjects that this land was both his servant and his master.
There was evidence too for the sophistication of the trading links of the Gaels. A piece of yellow orpiment, used to make ink for illuminating manuscripts, was recovered from Dunadd. This valuable mineral had been imported from one of the Mediterranean countries and is a tantalising hint about a change that had come over the Gaels by the end of the sixth century - a change that drove an unbreakable spiritual wedge between them and their Pictish neighbours. Illuminated manuscripts - and the very skill of writing, the literacy that creates them in the first place - came to the Gaels in the hand baggage of Christianity. While the Picts would hold onto their ancient pagan beliefs for many years to come, the Gaels had accepted conversion by one or other of the missionaries who were there in the years after Emperor Constantine turned Rome herself towards Christ.
While much of the hard work of converting the Gaels was undertaken by unnamed men of God, lost to history, one figure has had the lion’s share of the glory. Columba - Colum Cille, ‘Dove of the Church’ - had either left or been driven out of Ireland in AD 563. He was a son of the O’Neill clan, the most powerful in Ireland, but his warlike approach to conversion in his homeland had culminated in a bloodbath that could not go unpunished. Exiled from all he had known, he used his family name to ingratiate himself with the Gaelic warlords of western Scotland. He was present at the inauguration of King Aedan mac Gabhrain in 574, and for his efforts he was rewarded with the gift of an island. Iona, to the west of Mull, would be Columba’s home for the rest of his life. The monastery he established as a humble collection of huts would become one of the brightest Christian lights in all of Dark Age Europe.
Tradition credits Columba with the single-handed conversion of the tribes to Christianity. But almost all we know about him comes from a single source: ‘The Life of Saint Columba’ written around a century after his death by one of his own successors. Adomnán, a later abbot of Iona, was one of the great spin-doctors. Columba had founded Adomnán’s monastery and it would have made perfect sense for the latest man in the post to make his predecessor the father of Christianity in Scotland.
There is no denying that Columba’s work brought stability to the region around Iona and much further afield. As a noble man and a man of God he was able to open doors that would have remained resolutely closed to preachers of more humble birth. As well as the new faith - a creed that offered answers to the eternal questions - Columba brought literacy to the kings. Here was magic every bit as powerful as the ability to make metal. This holy man wielded the pen as well as he had ever wielded a sword and persuaded the rulers that he could take the very words from their mouths and make them permanent. Once a king’s wishes and demands were written down, copied and circulated, there was the basis of a legal system, of contracts and treaties. People, families and tribes could be bound one to another under terms that could be seen and understood by anyone who could read. The written word, like the soul of a man it seemed, could be raised up into the light by the hand of Christ. The monks of Iona, working in their sparse scriptorium near the beating heart of the monastery, eventually produced The Book of Kells.
Kells, 40 miles north of Dublin in County Meath, was home to the book for centuries, but it was on the hauntingly beautiful island of Iona, a stone’s throw from Mull, that it was created. By any standards it is a masterpiece. It comprises the gospels, together with a handful of other texts, but it is the artwork that marks it out for greatness. People, animals and mythical beasts; knotwork and swirling patterns of the most intense intricacy; 10,000 dots of red ink around a single capital letter; livid, living colours like the yellow orpiment from the Mediterranean, found at Dunadd; blue lapis lazuli from Afghanistan. The peak of artistic achievement reached by the creator or creators of The Book of Kells is unsurpassed.
Iona today feels remote: a tiny island to the west of a small island, to the west of Argyll in western Scotland. But in the time of Columba and for centuries to come it was a central point on the map of faith. That men living and working there could produce such a masterpiece is testament to what the place once meant. A thirteenth-century scholar praised the artistry of The Book of Kells: ‘You might believe it was the work of an angel rather than a human being,’ he wrote. Not everyone was so impressed by the work of the Christians’ God. While the Gaels had embraced Christianity long before the coming of Columba, their Pictish neighbours remained resolutely committed to their old religion. They put their faith in druids rather than monks and relied on memory, the oral tradition, rather than the written word.
The gods, old and new, could hardly have been expected to live side by side. According to Adomnán it was Columba who took it upon himself to face down the old ways. Into the heart of darkness he travelled, to confront the witchcraft of the Picts, and after many hardships he reached the head of Loch Ness and the fortress of King Bridei, possibly at Craig Phadraig, near modern Inverness. Finding the gates barred against him he made the sign of the cross, at which point they opened of their own accord. A battle of supernatural wills followed, with Columba and his cross on one side and Bridei’s druid on the other. Columba’s voice was said to sound like thunder and he brought the druid close to death before, in the finest Christian tradition, relenting and sparing his life. Columba had won the battle but the king remained a pagan.
The religious wedge separating Pict and Gael remained in place for decades, long after the dove of the Church had come and gone. But the journey of the painted ones towards Christianity left its trail upon their stones. For centuries they had favoured mysterious symbols - Z-rods and V-rods, discs, combs, mirrors and other strangeness - as well as all kinds of beasts, both real and imagined. But the eventual conversion of the people - or at least of those with the wealth to commission works of art - shows itself in the later stones.
A collection of thirty-eight Pictish stones from the site of a royal centre near Arbroath reveals the time, fossilised in stone, when both pagan and Christian traditions could feature on the same slab. The Drosten Stone has on its reverse some of the classic images so beloved of the Picts - discs, a crescent, a comb, as well as unsuspecting animals being targeted by a huntsman armed with a bow. All of the images appear in relief, with the stone carefully chipped and pecked away until the symbol or animals stands proud of the background. A hind is lovingly depicted, her suckling fawn entwined with her legs - just one element of a masterpiece that makes plain the skill of the artist. On the front of the stone, in the prime location, is a cross - the empty Celtic cross that represents the risen Christ. A pagan past and the promise of salvation, each philosophy backed by the other.
This policy of inclusion - bringing the central messages of the new faith to the fore while respecting the images and sacred places that had comforted people for centuries - was part of Christianity’s success. As an invader, it not only succeeded in gaining a hold but also out-stayed all the others. The Gaelic religion spanned northern Britain and acted as glue, bringing together and holding together disparate peoples beneath the overarching roof of the Christian faith.
If Columba had been part opportunist - using his rank and literacy to persuade the kings of his generation that there were practical as well as spiritual advances to be had from embracing Christ - then his successor Adomnán was cut from the same cloth. Seizing his own moment, he won agreement from more than fifty kings for a new law. Dubbed ‘The Law of the Innocents’ it was a Geneva Convention for the Dark Ages. It protected women, children and monks in times of war: ‘Women may not be killed by a man in any way, neither by slaughter or by any other death, not by poison, nor in water, nor fire, nor by any beast, nor in a pit, nor by dogs, but shall die in their own lawful bed.’ Life for most remained nasty, brutish and short but Adomnán’s Law was powerful proof of the civilising influence of Christianity. Like the Gaels, the Picts had learned the wisdom of accepting written rules.
They seem to have had it all, these folk who had now added the Latin alphabet to their already ample collection of meaningful signs and symbols. Their culture, rich and sophisticated, was developing new touches all the while. Trade connected the Picts to the wide world, bringing ideas as well as goods to buy and sell. Their lowlying farmland was among the most fertile in Britain and certainly the most productive in the north. Control of the bread-basket of northern Britain provided the fodder for yet more fighting men; power begets power. But as Calgacus had observed all those centuries before, an abundant land excites the greed of others and the territory of his descendants was not to be left in peace.
For part of the seventh century it was the Britons, reaching out with grasping hands from strongholds like Alt Clut, in Strathclyde, who caused the Picts most grief. Between AD 631 and 653 the annals suggest the Picts had several kings descended from the British house. For most of that time it was another people who focused their envious eyes on the north. The Angles were a Germanic people that had come to these shores during the chaos that followed the Roman withdrawal in the early 400s. They had come first as guests but stayed to dominate, establishing the mini-kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira across the middle of northern England.
Early in the seventh century those two joined as one in the kingdom of Northumbria and wasted no time in expanding the territory even further. At first it was to the south of Scotland that they turned their attention, claiming first of all the land of the Gododdin around the volcanic rock fortress of Din Eidyn. Then it was the turn of the Picts, and a succession of Anglian kings tried to add the rich lands north of the Forth to their demesne. At first they settled for installing puppet kings in the land of the Picts and by the second half of the century they were demanding tribute from the kings of the Gaels as well.
In 671 or 672 the Picts drove out one of the puppets - a so-called King Drest - and in so doing attracted the fury of the Anglian King Ecgfrith, who had put him on the throne in the first place. In his vengeful wrath Ecgfrith slaughtered an entire Pictish army that dared stand against him - and much of the Pictish nobility along with it.
Out of the carnage stepped another King Bridei. For years he had made war among his own people, attacking fortresses and strongholds like Dunottar, near Aberdeen, and the hill fort of Dundurn in Perthshire. He was a man who would be king and sought nothing less than to bring together all the Picts into a single entity. Enraged by the continued defiance, Ecgfrith marched an Anglian force north in 685. Bridei and his Picts drew away, luring their foe ever onwards, deep into land that suited Pictish purposes. On boggy, treacherous ground at a place called Dunnichen, near Aviemore, Ecgfrith and his Anglians were rounded up and slaughtered.
Dunnichen - also called Dun Nechtain, or Nechtansmere in some of the books - may well be the battle commemorated on the nearby Aberlemno Stone, a Pictish monument made a hundred years later. It depicts a bloodbath in graphic detail, in much the same way that the Bayeux Tapestry remembers the Norman victory at Hastings in 1066. In one corner of the fight are bare-headed, long-haired Pictish warriors, on the other the Angles wearing distinctive metal helmets. By all accounts it was a one-sided encounter. The massed and disciplined ranks of Pictish spearmen drove their enemy into the cold, dark waters of a loch and butchered them there. The final relief, in the lower right-hand corner of the stone, shows a raven pecking at the dead face of a fallen prince of the Angles. Bridei had done much more than win a battle. By the power of his own will he had forced the Picts to unite under the leadership of one king. The new confederation had a new name as well - it was Pictland.
There are over 200 Pictish stones still standing in the modern landscape. By mapping their locations, it is possible to trace the extent of the kingdom. Following the defeat at Dunnichen the Angles were driven back down south - and in the years to come the Picts gained the upper hand with the rest of their neighbours as well. In the west, both the Gaels and the Britons were overwhelmed and, while each was able to retain some vestiges of its identity, both were forced to pay homage to the Pictish kings. By the middle of the eighth century, the confident young kingdom of Pictland was unquestionably the dominant presence in northern Britain.
But if they seemed invincible, it was just an illusion. As before with the Angles, the wealth and prominence of Pictland drew the attention of those with a hunger for the wealth of others. The new wave of aggressors was in a league apart, warriors with no time for Christian niceties - not for Adomnán’s Law or anyone else’s. Instead they worshipped the old gods of war, Odin and Thor.
The first flood of Vikings to land on British shores hailed from Norway. Large country though it is, comparatively little of it is suitable for farming. Geologists and geographers point to climate as an influence as well: during a time classified as the Medieval Warm Period, temperatures rose in much of northern Europe. Land that was suitable for farming, in a country like Norway, would have become more productive, possibly allowing for population growth. But the new people would simply have increased pressure on the available land and the need to look elsewhere would have intensified.
During the eighth century Norway, like the rest of Scandinavia, was also in the early stages of state formation. Warlords were on the rise; local kings were on the make. Men seeking to attract and maintain supporters would have needed weapons for fighting as well as gold and silver for paying wages. Those in the western parts of the country suffered most for want of land, and would-be kings there were under pressure to keep up with the activities and ambitions of rivals further east. All of this combined to force the most adventurous, the most ambitious and the most ruthless to look across the sea in hope of finding a new path to wealth and power. So it was that towards the end of the eighth century, war bands of Norwegian Vikings took to their lethally efficient longboats and headed west in search of plunder.
For several years there has been a trend among some archaeologists and historians to portray the Vikings as a misunderstood people. Instead of bloodthirsty killers, think peaceful traders and farmers in search of new lands to colonise. They certainly turned coloniser in later centuries - and used plundered gold and silver to buy lands and estates outright - but the first contacts were anything but peaceable.
Their reputation also has been especially bad because of the kind of people they were targeting in those early years: monks and nuns. If you are pagan, you are going to attract criticism if you start attacking communities that are in the habit of writing things down - Christian communities, at that. It had not taken the pagan Vikings long to work out that churches and monasteries tended to be places where fine gold and silver, as well as other portable valuables, were likely to be kept. To make such places even more tempting, they were home not to warriors but to men and women armed with nothing more than faith and prayer.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle noted in the year AD 793: ‘On 8 June the ravages of the heathen men miserably destroyed God’s church on Lindisfarne with plunder and slaughter.’ None was spared during such attacks and while the monks of the monastery on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne were the first recorded victims, their experience would be endured again and again by communities the length of the country. ‘Everywhere Christ’s peoples are the victims of massacre, burning and plunder,’ wrote one monk seventy years later. ‘The Vikings overrun all that lies before them and no one can withstand them.’
It seemed nowhere on the coastline was safe - and certainly not on the coastline of Scotland. The Vikings were not choosy and took what they wanted wherever their longships could reach. The monastery on Iona was looted for the first time in 795 but would suffer two more assaults of even greater violence. It was the constant threat posed by those Northmen that prompted the eventual abandonment of Iona and the removal of treasures, including The Book of Kells, to the monastery of that name in Ireland.
It was the Northern Isles of Scotland, however, that bore the brunt of the Vikings’ unwanted attentions. In 1958 an archaeological excavation was searching for the remains of an early Christian church on St Ninian’s Isle, in Shetland. The place had fallen into disrepair after the Reformation and the steady advance of sand dunes had long since swallowed any trace of it. A schoolboy, Douglas Coutts, was helping the archaeologists when he found a sandstone slab lightly incised with a cross. The slab had been broken and beneath it he found a collection of Pictish silver bowls, cups and jewellery, dating from before AD 800. The hoard has become known as the St Ninian’s Isle Treasure. There were traces of a wooden box that had been used to contain the treasure, but the bowls were overturned and all the other items in a tangle around them. It seemed the box had been buried upside down - and in a hurry. All the evidence suggested the monks had quickly hidden their most precious belongings under the church floor, desperate to protect them from a Viking raid. That no one ever came back to retrieve the hoard is a sobering clue as to what befell the monks.
The Vikings who roamed Britain’s shoreline were not only interested in gold and silver. They came in search of people as well. Captured men, women and children were shipped back to Scandinavia and then on to Constantinople, where they were traded for Middle Eastern gold and silver. It was a ninth-century international slave trade that swept thousands of natives of these islands halfway around the known world.
Over the next hundred years the Vikings did indeed turn colonisers, claiming and settling vast swathes of Northumbria, Ireland, the Hebrides and the area of the Gaels. Danish Vikings began to get in on the act as well, though they concentrated on England. The reach of the Vikings was astounding by any measure. Eventually they had control of territory in regions as diverse as Normandy - the land of the Northmen - France, Greenland, Sicily and parts of Russia. It is also beyond doubt that they were the first Europeans to reach North America, centuries before Columbus.
The north and east of Scotland was comprehensively invaded and settled: like a silent witness coiled within the cells of the living, the DNA of people living in Orkney today makes it plain the Vikings either slaughtered the Pictish men or forced them to leave the islands for ever. The vast majority of the men have Scandinavian DNA - grim evidence of slaughter or eviction. The women are mostly descended from the islands’ original inhabitants, ultimately from the hunter-gatherers who settled Scotland after the retreat of the ice. It seems that while the Vikings got rid of the local men, they took the local Pictish women as wives. Some form of ethnic cleansing is also suggested by the fact that almost no Pictish place names survive on Orkney or Shetland. Everywhere the hills, bays, villages and towns bear names with Scandinavian roots.
At Brough of Birsay, on a tidal island just off the north-east tip of the West Mainland of Orkney, is stark evidence of the way in which one culture was completely consumed by another. Roundhouses of the style preferred by Picts for hundreds of years are abruptly overlain by the rectangular longhouses of the Vikings, cuckoos in the nest. In some of the Viking houses, Pictish artefacts were found, suggesting the new landowners had even kept the personal belongings of those they had dispossessed.
Every year on the last Tuesday in January the modern people of Shetland celebrate their Viking history with an all-night celebration they call UpHelly-Aa . Squads of men dress in extravagant costumes - not all of them Viking - and parade through the streets of the Shetland capital, Lerwick. Every one of them bears a huge burning torch and at the climax, hundreds upon hundreds of torches are flung into a replica longship that is the focus of the night. The flames swiftly consume the vessel and the crowds remember how their forebears chose to burn their boats and stay on the islands, rather than return home to Norway.
It is no ancient festival. It was invented at the end of the nineteenth century as a way of bringing a sense of purpose and excitement to a time of year that is, otherwise, staggeringly bleak. It is a thrilling spectacle nonetheless. But if you forget the air of celebration and pageantry and imagine instead the horror of waking up one morning to find a howling horde of murderous warriors leaping from their longships onto the beach below your home, then it is easy to understand how such a sight would have been a glimpse of how the world ends. It would have meant the end of everything you understood and everything you had ever held dear - unless of course somebody somewhere could find a way to stop it.
The Vikings had made their bloody, pagan entrance into a land of four peoples, four kingdoms - Picts, Gaels, Britons and Angles. Christianity was a common denominator, uniting them in theory but not in practice. Dominance by any one of them over the other three depended, at any given moment, upon the ambition, ability and military might of individual kings or warlords.
Trying to understand who was who in eighth-and ninth-century Scotland (remembering all the time that there was no such place as Scotland yet) is like trying to read Tolkien’s Silmarillion. For much of the time the history of Dark Age, or if you prefer, Early Medieval, Scotland is a dizzying list of unfamiliar, unpronounceable names that seem more likely to have come from Middle Earth than anywhere in the real world. One shadowy figure - sometimes a Gael, sometimes a Pict, sometimes a Briton or an Angle and as often as not a half-breed product of a marriage alliance between any two of the above - follows another through brief ascendancy to power, unlamented death and eternity in an unmarked grave.
Look at this passage from Alex Woolf’s masterly but undoubtedly challenging account of it all in From Pictland to Alba:
In Pictavia, the deaths of the great Onuist son of Wrguist and his brother Bridei and their immediate successor Ciniod son of Wrad and his brother Elphin, were followed by a period of instability in which four kings (three apparently from Onuist’s family) ruled in quick succession. From 789, however, Pictavia gained another strong ruler, Constantin son of Wrguist, who was to reign until his death in 820. The instability in Pictavia seems to have allowed the Dal Riata to reassert its independence, first under Aed Find son of Eochaid and his brother Fergus and subsequently under Donncoirce. Donncoirce seems to have been succeeded by Conall son of Tadg who had apparently challenged Constantin’s succession to the kingship of Fortriu in 789.
I read all this and expect Orcs to put in an appearance at any moment. This is a difficult and confusing period - all of the details are gleaned painstakingly from what few written sources actually survive from anything like the time in question. The simplest way of looking at it all seems to me a matter of accepting that by the time the Vikings were making their presence felt in the 790s, there was still everything to play for in the big game of fighting for control of the territory and the peoples that would one day come together as one nation.
After Bridei’s success at Dunnichen he was followed onto the throne of Pictland by several kings who managed to hold the fledgeling state together. For part of the middle of the eighth century the Gaels of Dunadd freed themselves from Pictish overlordship and emerged once again as an independent presence. One of the Gaelic kings, a man named Cenel mac Gabhrain, may even have had control of Pictland as well. The balance swung back then, in the direction of the Picts, with the eastern kingdom having some sort of domination over its western rival, at least for a while.
In 839 something dreadful befell the ruling Pictish dynasty. An entry in one medieval Irish chronicle - The Annals of Ulster - records that ‘The heathens [Vikings] won a battle over the men of Fortriu [Pictland] and Wen son of Onuist and Bran son of Onuist and Aed son of Boanta and others almost innumerable fell there.’ These last six words, committed to parchment by an unknown Irish scribe, speak volumes. In AD 839 the dominant native aristocracy - a ruling group with, no doubt, Pictish, Gaelic, British and Angle blood flowing in its veins after centuries of war and marriage - was brought to a final, climactic battle by a massed Viking army. The result was catastrophic defeat for the Picts and that native blood - of kings and kings-in-waiting - stained red the grass of some unknown and unmarked field. The scene of the battle is lost to history but it created a power vacuum at the very top. Into that newly empty space strode a man whose name is familiar to every Scot: Kenneth MacAlpin.
Often styled Kenneth I, he is one of the great heroes of Scottish history. Whatever else, he was certainly a warlord but he appears almost from nowhere: maybe a Gael, maybe a Pict, maybe a bit of both. According to the version of events taught to countless generations of Scottish school-children he steps into the apocalyptic aftermath of that forgotten battle and unites the survivors. Now fighting together as one, Picts and Gaels defy the Vikings and drive them off. For his efforts - and his success in uniting the peoples - Kenneth MacAlpin is crowned the first King of Scotland.
If only history was that simple. The idea that Kenneth MacAlpin was ever King of Scotland is a myth. It has persisted for centuries and is certainly the story I learned at school. But the simple, if inconvenient, fact is that Kenneth MacAlpin and his immediate successors were recorded by the scribes as Kings of Pictland. The Vikings had retreated to the north and west, and to the islands, but were still active and possessed of their own distinct culture and identity. The same was true of the Gaels and the Britons, and of the Angles to the south. It is not until forty years after Kenneth died that we get the first mention of kings of Scotland.
The birth of that new kingdom lies not among the achievements of Kenneth of Pictland, but is to be found instead in the pages of a book now held in the collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. The so-called ‘Poppleton Manuscript’ was put together around the middle of the fourteenth century. It was commissioned by a monk called Robert of Poppleton, hence the name, during his time at a monastery in York. It is a collection of writings of various ages and on various subjects and nothing new was composed for it. Instead it is a compilation, its authors tasked with copying the much older work of others onto the pages of a single volume. It sits in Paris because it was bought by a French courtier at the end of the seventeenth century along with other, similarly obscure historical papers. It is as though Scotland’s birth certificate ended up at a car boot sale and was spotted by a French passer-by with an eye for a bargain.
One of the documents within the book is called the ‘Chronicle of the Kings of Alba’. It is not known exactly when the original was composed but it is a list of twelve kings of the House of Alpin, of Kenneth MacAlpin, during the period from the ninth to the eleventh centuries. It is a witheringly complicated document. By the time Poppleton’s scribe set to work, the original had been copied and added to for centuries, and by several unknown hands. But it is of crucial importance because it covers a moment of transition - the ten years or so between AD 878 and 889 when all references to Pictland disappear and the kingdom we might recognise as a newborn Scotland emerges for the very first time.
Hanging from a handful of the names on the list is the story of Scotland’s lost decade. The first of the characters with a key role in those crucial, mysterious years is Aed (pronounced ay-ETH), youngest son of Kenneth MacAlpin. He had the misfortune to ascend the throne of a kingdom in crisis, just as newly resurgent Viking forces returned to plunder Pictland once more. For two years they helped themselves to cattle, slaves and tribute. Pictland was conquered anew and the Northmen took their leave of the place only when there was nothing left to take. Aed’s kingdom was a ruin and, as far as his people were concerned, he had done nothing to stop the devastation.
Of Aed’s time upon the throne, just a year, the Chronicle of the Kings of Alba says the shortness of his reign ‘bequeathed nothing memorable to history’ - a damning indictment indeed. The Annals of Ulster add that he was killed in AD 878 ‘by his own companions’. The belief that the King of the Picts was put to death by his own followers hints at desperate times and desperate men. The scene of the murder is identified as civitas Nrurim. It seems likely Nrurim was in Perthshire, but there is no agreement on quite where. The word civitas, though, means it was the site of an important church. So it was on or close to hallowed ground that Aed met his fate, done to death by men he thought were his friends.
According to the twelfth-century king-lists it was one Giric, son of Dungal, who committed the crime. Giric also appears in the Chronicle - as a King of Pictland. Giric was no Pict; he was a Gael. The kingdom of the Gaels had suffered too at the hands of the Vikings and many refugees, Giric among them, had fled east into Pictland in the hope of making a better life for themselves amongst the erstwhile enemies of their blood. Giric was no Pict and he was no aristocrat either. Rather he was some kind of nobleman - and a man on the make, who used guile and wit to win a place at the side of the king. He had already fled one homeland to escape the thralldom of the Vikings and when Aed proved himself impotent in the face of them, the Gael took matters into his own hands.
After murdering Aed, Giric instigated a regime change. He rid the court of his Pictish rivals and replaced them with his own men. He took control of the Pictish Church as well, appointing a Gaelic bishop to reform it. It had been nothing less than a palace coup. Giric was remaking the kingdom of the Picts in his own image - as a land fit for Gaels. To complete his takeover - and to make his position secure at the top - he seized Pictish estates and handed them over to his Gaelic followers.
Despite all his efforts, Giric could not sleep easy in his bed. Aed was dead but his young son Constantine was not. Neither was Constantine’s cousin Donald, slightly older and a grandson of Kenneth MacAlpin. In the eyes of the Picts - who had seen their king murdered, their homes handed over to Gaelic interlopers, their Church corrupted by a foreign bishop - those boys were the rightful heirs to the Pictish throne. While they breathed, Giric the usurper would never be secure.
Before Giric had a chance to snuff out the threat, men loyal to the House of Alpin spirited the youngsters away to Ireland. It might have seemed a strange move - to send two Pictish princes to a Gaelic country - but there was a warm welcome awaiting them. At the fortress of Ailech, in the north of the country, Constantine and Donald were taken in by their aunt, Mael Muire, daughter of Kenneth MacAlpin and wife of the most powerful king in the land, Aed of Tara. Over and above the considerations of politics, the Irish exile of the princes was about family - and yet it would also have had profound effects on the pair. Constantine was just a little boy when he arrived at Ailech, perhaps no more than five years old and wholly unmade, unshaped. Donald was older, in his early teens, but still young enough to be susceptible to the ways of the new world in which he would spend his adolescence.
Picts or not, family or not, it was a Gaelic court they found themselves within and they grew up steeped in a culture that would otherwise have been foreign to them. There was also the matter of faith and Donald and Constantine would have at least become acquainted with the Gaelic style of worship. It seems ironic - they were saved from a Gaelic takeover of their homeland and yet their salvation was as transforming as anything happening in the land of their fathers.
After a decade or more in Ireland, the exiles were ready to return home and claim their birthright. With righteous revenge in their hearts they sailed back across the Irish Sea and raised a rebellion against the usurper. Giric must have known the day would come - and it seems likely he chose the mighty fortress of Dundurn in Perthshire for the showdown. Behind its massive walls Giric might have felt he would prevail but in the end age and guile were not enough to counter the youth and innocence of those he had wronged.
One of the chronicles has it simply that ‘in Dundurn the upright man was taken by death’. The wistful, almost elegiac tone suggests there were those who lamented the fall of Giric; but archaeological remains at Dundurn paint a darker picture. Burned timbers and arrowheads were recovered during excavations and these at least bear witness to some kind of violence. Given the ire of Donald, Constantine and those loyal to the House of Alpin, it is tempting to imagine Giric met his death in that moment, among those flames.
In any event, Donald reclaimed the Pictish throne. If his supporters had expected Giric’s Gaelic reforms to be swept away, replaced by the old ways, they were disappointed. Donald and Constantine had left as Pictish children, but they returned as Gaelic princes. The same transformation Giric had visited upon the land had been wrought upon the heirs of MacAlpin as well. They viewed their homeland now with different eyes. Far from being rolled back, under King Donald the Gaelic takeover continued and was made permanent. When he died in AD 900 chroniclers in Ireland recorded his passing, not as the death of a King of Pictland, but of Alba.
Here then is the advent of something quite new. Alba - the name Gaelic-speakers had always given to their territory - now meant the kingdom born of the union of Picts and Gaels into a single entity. The Chronicle of the Kings of Alba contains the earliest known use of the word Albaniam - the Latin translation of Alba. This is the moment when a single kingdom was created: where before there had been Picts and Gaels, two separate peoples, kingdoms, cultures and identities, now there was one - the people of Alba. The Gaels, however, had long borne the nickname Scoti, ‘marauders from the sea’, making Alba the land of the Scots. This single page of the Chronicle of the Kings of Alba, bound in a book that sits at the heart of the capital of France, may be regarded as the birth certificate of Scotland.
Donald was followed onto the throne by his cousin Constantine and by then Scotland was a Gaelic kingdom. They say the world ends not with a bang but with a whimper, and so it had been for the world of the Picts. But while their separate identity went into history, there was no apocalypse, no genocide. Instead, they slowly put aside their culture in the manner of clothes that were out of fashion, that no longer quite fitted. Those who had been Picts sloughed off their old identity and put on instead the garb of the rebranded Gaels: the Scots. In a masterstroke of genius, the Gaels called the new world Alba - a name that marked a fresh start for them as well. But it was a Gaelic rose by another name.
Over the next few generations the Pictish way of life, their otherness, disappeared. Everything about them - the way they worshipped God, the way they carved their stones and shaped their finery - fell from favour. Crucially the very language they had spoken - the way they understood and expressed themselves - was replaced with Gaelic. Gaelic had become the language of power. But these were not sad days - not for the Gaels or for the Picts. Fashions change and in being part of the new, by turning away from the past, the Picts secured for themselves a place in the present and the future.
In AD 906 Constantine travelled to Scone for a ceremony to celebrate his accession. Like the creation of Alba it was about the making of something quite new - but something that had ancient ingredients mixed within it. This is the first mention of Scone in the historical record and so it too appears to have been part of the new, established as a political centre not long before AD 906. From now on it was to be the place where kings of Scotland were made.
Seated upon a block of old red sandstone that had been quarried nearby, Constantine received the blessing of a Gaelic bishop called Cellach. It may be that Bishop Cellach had been a supporter of Giric and that the ceremony was in part a public demonstration of continuing spiritual backing for the new king. Cellach and Constantine also declared together that the rights of the Church would be upheld. Perhaps the ceremony had elements too of a coronation, with the king sat upon and wedded to the bedrock in a self-conscious nod to the footprint ceremony of Dunadd.
The stone used as a seat that day was the same we know now as the Stone of Destiny. For centuries after and up to the present day it has been used in the inauguration of kings and queens. It is on display now in Edinburgh Castle - nothing more or less than a block of the land itself. It is the legacy of the rivers, seas and deserts that worked unwittingly and long ago to make this place. It is a memory of the sand and water of other places and other times. But for all of the time of man it has been rock. The chip of it that is the Stone of Destiny has, like the rest of Scotland, been fought over time and again. It has become the stuff of myth, fantasy and romance - the very symbol of a nation. It is the rock and the rock has always been at the root of it all.
Call it coincidence, call it fate, but around the time Alba came together as a power in the north, another unified entity had crystallised in the south of the British Isles. Constantine was King of Scotland, but a king called Aethelstan ruled in the territory of the Angles, Angleland, England. Aethelstan had advanced into Northumbria, driving off the Vikings, and now dominated a huge swathe of what would be known in time as England.
Enough was not enough, however, for the King of the Angles. An admirer of the Romans, he considered himself their natural successor. As such, nothing less than conquest of the whole of Britain would satisfy his hunger. Like the commander of the imperial legions centuries before him, Aethelstan pushed northwards, driving Constantine and his warriors back. Finally the King of Scots was brought to bay behind the walls and natural defences of mighty Dunottar, an awesome promontory fort near Aberdeen. Only a narrow, steep-sided sliver of land connected it to the main. Sheer cliffs into the sea made any other approach impossible. Constantine was secure as long he stayed on the rock, but his kingdom had effectively been reduced to the few acres within the fortress.
Like Calgacus he faced a stark choice between surrender and final pitched battle with a superior army. But Constantine was a man of imagination, who refused to have his hand forced by circumstances that most would have seen as overwhelming. Instead of fighting or giving up his kingdom he struck a deal. In return for acknowledging Aethelstan as his overlord, Constantine retained his status as king. His dealmaking worked in the short term. The Angles withdrew and Constantine was left alone. But for the young men gathered around him in the febrile atmosphere of state-building, he was seen to have sold out. The future was non-existent for kings who bowed to enemies - Aed’s fate at the hands of Giric had made that clear - and Constantine understood that to survive he had to turn the tables on the overlord. What he did next would have been unthinkable even in the recent past: he made peace with the Vikings. Just as the tribes had come together to face Rome - a foe that threatened all of them, enabling differences to be set aside - so a rainbow alliance of disparate peoples united to defy Angleland.
In AD 937 the very fate of Britain was at stake and all of her peoples took up the cudgels to settle the matter. Out of the south came Aethelstan at the head of an army tens of thousands strong. From the north came another huge force: Constantine and the Scots of Alba, Britons from Strathclyde, the King of the Vikings from across the Irish Sea. After weeks on the move, the huge armies finally met near the mouth of the Mersey River, at a place called Brunnanburh.
For lifetimes to come it was remembered simply as the ‘Great Battle’. It was the ultimate Dark Age bloodbath and defined the shape of Britain into the modern era. An Anglo-Saxon account of the fighting describes how: ‘They clove the shield wall, hewed the war lindens with hammered blades; the foe gave way; the folk of the Scots and the ship fleet fell death doomed. The field was slippery with the blood of warriors … The West Saxons in companies hewed the fugitives from behind cruelly with swords mill-sharpened. ’ All day they fought, face to face in a butcher’s yard the like of which none had seen before. Only the coming of night brought an end to it and by then the fields and beaches were strewn with the dead and dying. Animals moved among the cooling remains, wolves and carrion crows. It was an unlikely fellowship of death: Scots, Angles, Vikings, Saxons, Britons, men of Wales, Gaels from Ireland, Northumbrians, Icelanders.
From the greatest to the lowliest of men, anyone with a mind to lay claim on the future of Britain had come to Brunnanburh. Constantine’s eldest boy was among the slain. Like thousands of others he lay dead upon a sward and a day forgotten now by all save the poets and the chroniclers. The Angles held the field. On paper it was their victory. But in truth, both sides had been so grievously hurt there was no triumph to be celebrated. Aethelstan, heir to Roman ambitions, had been forced to accept there would be no conquest of Scotland. Any attempt to subdue the men of the north would cost more than he had to give. Constantine and the survivors of the northern alliance dragged themselves away from that awful place, back to their homelands.
Everyone has heard of Hastings, of 1066. But who has heard of Brunnanburh? Even the site of the battle has been lost. The best bets place it on the Mersey but there is no consensus. Others place the fighting in the Midlands or the east of England; others say it was somewhere in south-west Scotland. And yet this more than anything that happened in Kent a century and more later was what determined the shape of the Britain we live in today. In 1066 the Normans took over an England that was already made. In 937 the fighting was a battle for Britain, when everything was still to play for.
Brunnanburh was a showdown between two very different ethnic identities: a Norse/Celtic alliance versus an Anglo-Saxon one. It aimed to settle, once and for all, whether Britain would be controlled by a single ‘imperial’ power, or remain several, separate independent kingdoms. Brunnanburh represented a split in perceptions which, like it or not, is still with us today.
Kenneth MacAlpin has gone down in history as the first King of Scotland. He certainly founded the Scottish royal line but he lived and died as an opportunistic Pictish warlord. The job of securing the kingdom of the Scots was the work of Kenneth’s grandson Constantine. He ruled for forty-three years - an extraordinarily long time for a tenth-century monarch - and it was his ability to stay on top, to stay alive, that ensured Scotland’s survival as an independent entity. Scotland is a testament to Constantine’s personal courage, political astuteness and staying-power. He was capable of the unexpected right to the end. After those forty-three years of rule, Constantine relinquished his kingship. Just six years after the greatest battle of his life, he stepped down from the throne, of his own accord, and walked away. There was so much for him to think about; perhaps he wanted the time and the peace to make sense of it all … from exile to Ireland as a little boy, the return with Donald to overthrow Giric, accession to the kingship of his homeland, brief subservience to Aethelstan and the climactic horror of Brunnanburh. By the end he had saved his kingdom and lost his own son.
He took his memories and his sadness to St Andrews. Years of Viking violence and the fusion of the land of the Picts and the Gaels into Alba had shifted power - both secular and spiritual - from west to east. Iona was still a working monastery, kings were still buried there, but its day at the centre of things had passed. Now, fittingly, the Church of the risen son favoured the coast of the rising sun. The two bright lights at the heart of the new kingdom’s religious life were Dunkeld and St Andrews. Columba had been the predominant Scottish saint but more recently the bones of a new man, an apostle of Christ himself, no less, had arrived in the land. The primacy of St Andrews was underlined during Constantine’s reign and it was at the religious heart of his kingdom that he lived out the rest of his days, in a cave near the sea.
In 1140 an English historian, the Archdeacon of Huntingdon, felt able to consign the Picts, the last of the free, to history. He wrote: ‘We see that the Picts have now been wiped out and their language also is totally destroyed so that they seem to be a fable we find mentioned in old writings.’ But while Constantine had withdrawn from the world, content to disappear into the shadows, the Picts had remained in the midst of it all. They had given up the designs that gave them their name, even surrendered the name itself - but in so doing they had fused together with another people to make the world anew. Two peoples, Picts and Gaels, had been thrust into the fires of adversity and had emerged forged as one.
Now the story of the kingdom of Alba - of Scotland - had begun.
After Constantine, the kings of Scots shuffled back into the mist of anonymity and obscurity, characters familiar only to specialists. For most of us, the names of the first few of his successors conjure nothing to mind - first his nephew Malcolm … then his youngest son Indulph … then Dubh … then Cuilen … even the spellings of the names are unreliable, changing from book to book.
To the vast majority of people living in Scotland (and they would hardly have recognised the name) the rise and fall of those kings mattered not a jot. The mass of them had depended on subsistence farming from the beginning and depended upon it still. From day to day, life was about making sure there was something to eat and a roof overhead - regardless of which warlord might be about to put his foot in a hole in a rock and be named ruler.
During the 800s, the mouldboard plough made a greater impact on people’s lives than any machinations of the ruling classes. This new piece of farming equipment was a revelation, enabling much quicker preparation of ground for sowing. It also turned over more of the sod, creating deep furrows that encouraged better drainage in wet areas. In this way, soils that had previously been too heavy to work were now opened up to agriculture.
The people of the tenth century were Scots, but if they were living in a new world it must have seemed to most that the old world’s cares were all around. Serfs worked the land and were owned by its owners, like the beasts that grazed upon it. This was an unhappy hereditary status, passed by parents to children, but at least it carried with it some securities and certainties. They would always have work; always have food. The most vulnerable members of society were those who, though legally free, owned no land. In times when the population was small the strength of their backs might be in demand and relatively costly to those that needed it to buy it. During times of population increase, however, when labour was cheap and plentiful, landless farmers and their families suffered terribly.
Long before the ‘feudalism’ of the Normans defined the relationship between people and land, and between landed and landless, the people of Scotland owed rent of one form or another. Those towards the lower end of the social scale paid for access to the land they lived upon with the sweat of their brows. In addition to working their own plots, they owed some of their labour to whoever controlled the land. This would mostly be in the form of working a rich man’s fields for him - but might mean military service from time to time.
When a landowner was ordered to provide a fighting force for the man above him in the hierarchy, he would tell those who had farms on his land to put down their tools and take up arms on his behalf instead. Further up, rich men owed to richer men the duty of raising whole armies. At the top sat the king - sometimes cajoling and manipulating, sometimes bullying and murdering as he battled to hold onto the throne. He needed the support of at least some of them for all of the time, and would seek their counsel whenever it seemed politically astute to do so. This was how things were done long before the arrival of Norman ways … feuing and parliaments and Domesday Books.
On it goes, the infancy of Scotland, until 1034 and a name and a story that does ring bells. In that year died Malcolm II, last of the heirs of Kenneth MacAlpin. He was followed onto the throne by his grandson Duncan - the same described by Shakespeare as much revered and gentle. In fact he was a young man who had been promoted well beyond his level of competence. He blundered into several ill-judged military campaigns including a clumsy raid on the north of England that culminated in a disastrous attack on Durham in 1039. In the summer of the following year he sallied north to try and put the fear of death into a man whose name meant ‘son of life’. Macbeth was a mormaer - an earl, of Moray. He had the blood of kings of Dal Riata in his veins and his wife Gruoch was also of royal stock.
When Malcolm II died, Macbeth and Gruoch had reason to expect they might rule in his stead. That Malcolm had nominated his grandson for the job - an unusual act in itself - upset Macbeth. It was for this reason that Duncan invaded the north with a view to cowing his rival. The royal territory of Scotland was much smaller than what we understand by the word today - and the further he travelled from his centre, so his power weakened or evaporated altogether.
Duncan I died in battle with Macbeth, somewhere near modern Elgin, and the victor replaced him on the throne. Macbeth then drove both of Duncan’s sons, Malcolm and Donald, into exile and reigned successfully for seventeen years; as rightful a king as many before or after. Only the return of Malcolm the son ended it all for the son of life. Macbeth was defeated in battle and killed in 1057.
Malcolm III is better known to history as Malcolm ‘the Great Chief’, Malcolm Ceann Mor. He was ruthless, a quality befitting a man who would found a dynasty. Macbeth was dead but his stepson, Gruoch’s son Lulach, might find enough support to mount a counter-attack. Malcolm hunted him down and killed him too. But just as it was Kenneth MacAlpin’s heirs who truly created and secured Scotland, so it seems to historians that it was Malcolm’s heirs who have the stronger claim on the moniker of Great Chief. In any case, for the next 230 years the Ceann Mor - or Canmore - dynasty would rule Scotland.
Malcolm III took Margaret as his second wife. She was a relative of Edward the Confessor, the English king who died fighting King Canute of the Danes in 1016. More importantly, she was sister to Prince Edgar, who had been beaten to the throne of England in 1066 by Harold. After William the Conqueror defeated and killed Harold at Hastings the same year, replacing him on the throne, he was initially friendly towards Edgar and his family. But when Edgar became the focus of a rebellion against the new Norman dynasty in 1068, William’s mood turned ugly. Edgar tried to flee to the Continent with his mother and his two sisters, Christina and Margaret. According to legend, God himself intervened and blew their ship north to Scotland instead, where it went ashore in Fife. King Malcolm came to meet the royal arrivals and fell instantly in love with Margaret, marrying her practically on the spot. Now Edgar had an ally in the King of Scots - a possible support for any future rebellion against the usurping William and his Normans - while Malcolm had married into the old royal house of England. He was thumbing his nose at the new, southern dynasty in spectacular style.
Malcolm and Margaret together became a legend - a legend that is in truth much more about her than him. Margaret’s biographer has handed down to history an image of a devoutly religious woman. It seems she dedicated her life in Scotland to her Christian faith - faithful that is to the Roman tradition rather than the Celtic. It was a parting of the spiritual ways that did not endear her to all. King Malcolm never learned to read and yet his devotion to his wife was such that he would get down on his knees to plant soft kisses on the bindings of her copies of the Holy Scriptures.
Margaret - St Margaret as she became in time - also saw to the building of a little Romanesque church at Dunfermline. At her request, Benedectine monks were sent from Canterbury to establish a priory there. She encouraged renewed interest in the cult of St Andrew and had ferries installed on both sides of the River Forth to make it easier for pilgrims to reach his church on the Fife coast. The towns of North and South Queensferry are named in her honour. But while Margaret worked hard to affect the spiritual life of Scotland, her most enduring contributions to the destiny of the land in which she lived were the future kings she bore Malcolm - their sons Edgar, Alexander and David.
While Margaret was the epitome of piety, her husband had more earthly ambitions. Married into the old ruling house of England as he was, he used the splicing of the bloodlines as an excuse for aggression against King William. He invaded Northumbria in 1070 but succeeded only in bringing trouble upon his own house. William retaliated two years later, invading Scotland and winning a submission from the King of Scots that would carry down through the centuries. Called the ‘Abernethy Submission’ after the town on the Tay in which it was signed, it recorded that Malcolm accepted his place as ‘the English king’s man’. He was also forced to hand over his eldest son Duncan, by his first wife Ingbjorg of Orkney, as a demonstration of his obedience. Forever after, English monarchs would look back to the Abernethy Submission as a basis for their claims of overlordship.
Whether he ever felt subject to the English king, it did not stop Malcolm making war against him. Defiant to the end, he died in November 1093, ambushed and killed during another raid on Northumbria. His queen could not bear the loss. She took to her bed and asked that she be brought her most cherished earthly possession, the ‘Black Rood’. This was a cross of gold that held within it a fragment of the True Cross upon which Jesus Christ had died; but not even the presence of such an icon was enough to mend her broken heart. She died in the same month as her husband and her body was taken and laid to rest at her little church in Dunfermline.
Malcolm was succeeded first by his younger brother Donald, who had lived in exile in the Western Isles since the murder of their father by Macbeth. This was seen by many of the mormaers and others as an opportunity to rid the country of the English ways they felt Queen Margaret had foisted upon them. Her children sought sanctuary at the English court and it was there that Edgar, Alexander and David grew up.
William II, his eyes on the northern prize coveted by his father, sent Malcolm’s son Duncan to seize the throne. He had been a hostage of England since the Abernethy Submission and as far as the English were concerned he was a tame Scot. True to English designs, he duly ousted his uncle in 1094, but was murdered within the year and Donald III resumed his reign. Not be thwarted, William next dispatched Malcolm and Margaret’s son Edgar, another exiled Scot well schooled in Norman ways. This time Donald met his match. Defeated in battle, he was hunted down and, in the ancient punishment of fallen kings, blinded. He was made a prisoner then and kept in a dungeon until his death.
With Edgar on the throne the Canmore grip upon the kingship was secure. Pious, peaceable Edgar died without an heir. The royal will left the title of King of Scots, together with the northern half of the territory, to Alexander, elder of the remaining brothers. Lothian and southern Scotland, however, were made over to the younger brother, David.
Alexander and David were two more Scots boys who had grown to manhood under the English king’s protection. William the Conqueror’s youngest son, Henry I, was on the throne now and married to Edith, a sister of the Canmore brothers. When Alexander married Henry’s daughter Sybil, the Scots and English royal houses could hardly have been more closely entwined. One King of Scots after another was growing up a vassal of the English king. It is easy to see how the English monarchs developed their conviction that Scotland herself should be under their thrall.
Alexander, a stranger in his own homeland, could hardly help feeling the need to draw around himself people and institutions he had become familiar with earlier in life. Norman French knights had been made welcome in Scotland since at least the time of Macbeth and now Alexander did the same. He had grown up in England, and had learned too the wider, western European ways of doing things. He kept Scotland’s doors open to Norman knights, and encouraged Augustinian canons to set up home in Scone and on the island of Inchcolm in the River Forth, at Dunkeld and at St Andrews.
There was no Norman ‘conquest’ of Scotland, as there had been of England. Instead the kings of Scots were sensitive to the ways of the wider world - keen, where it suited them, to become what they had once beheld. ‘Scotland’, after all, had emerged from the melding of Pictish and Gaelic cultures. Now the fledgeling kingdom was absorbing even more. As a fire draws oxygen towards itself, so Scotland sucked in the ideas of others.
Like his elder brother before him, Alexander died without an heir. David was in his forties by the time he ascended the throne in 1124 and, with vast estates and lands across England, already the grandest nobleman in the south. With David I on the throne, one of their own, England could have been forgiven for thinking there was nothing to fear now from the north. Like Alexander, he wanted familiar faces around him and so invited several knightly families to join him in the north. So it was that during David’s reign there arrived in Scotland some of the names that would subsequently resonate through the place. To the Bruce family, who were probably from Normandy originally, he gave the territory of Annandale in the south-west; to the Fitzalans, who hailed from Brittany, he gave lands in the area of modern Renfrewshire (for the first of these, Walter Fitzalan, David created the hereditary title of High Steward of Scotland and in time his descendants became the Stewarts). It was at David’s invitation that the Balliol family, originally from Picardy, made a home for themselves in the west of Scotland. Although these families were of French descent, they had long been part of English society. Among other grand titles, David was Earl of Huntingdon, a fantastically valuable territory, and as such commanded the attention, even the affection, of many of England’s elite. Also arriving in numbers to take up David’s offer were Douglases, Giffards, Lindsays, Morvilles, Murrays, Oliphants and Ridels. These were French-speaking nobles whose language, manners and ways the Scottish elite would seek to ape. The peasants who travelled north with the Norman families spoke another tongue - Scots - probably the purest form of the Anglo-Saxon language. It was by this means, the arrival in Scotland of Anglo-Saxon speakers in the train of a transplanted, French-speaking nobility, that Scots was established in southern Scotland at least.
The new King of Scots, friend of so many southern families, was also keen to promote commercial enterprise by granting royal charters to burghs, from which he could collect revenue. Berwick-upon-Tweed and Roxburgh were the first of them, but there would be many more. Indeed many of Scotland’s towns and cities date their origins to the reign of David I. It was also under David’s rule that Scotland produced her first coinage, a practice made considerably easier after he took control of the silver mines of the north Pennines. Once people had money, quite literally, in their pockets then the whole business of trade and commerce was changed for ever. Cash flowed in and out of the burghs as goods were bought and sold, rents collected. By the last decades of the twelfth century, even the humblest members of Scottish society were handling money.
There was a pious side to the king as well. The four great abbeys of the Scottish Borders - Kelso, Melrose, Jedburgh and Dryburgh - were all David’s work. And a legend has it that while hunting near Drumselch church near Edinburgh, David was unhorsed by a white stag. As he lay on the ground, with the beast poised to gore him, he beheld his mother’s ‘Black Rood’ suspended between its antlers. Rather than kill him the stag suddenly withdrew back into the forest. David’s vision had convinced him to found an abbey on the site and Holyrood was the result. In addition he founded St Mary of Cambuskenneth beside the Forth, Newbattle on the River Esk and upgraded his mother Margaret’s Benedectine priory at Dunfermline to abbey status. Godly works were much on his mind.
But so too were the ambitions of his predecessors and when the death of Henry I of England plunged his southern neighbour into near civil war, David saw his opportunity to make inroads on Northumberland. With the English distracted by their internal travails, David marched south in the summer of 1138 with an impressive force. The chroniclers recorded how the Scots plundered and burned the northern English settlements and churches they found in their path.
On 22 August they met the English army, much smaller than their own, outside Northallerton. What followed, the Battle of the Standard, was a military disaster for the Scots. At the Scottish centre were the so-called Gallgaels from Galloway, relics of an older world but lively and out for blood. Without waiting for commands, this lightly armed force charged full-tilt into the shade of countless English arrows. They fell like mown hay, rose as best they could and fell again. David’s treasured son Henry led a body of horse into the howling thick of it all and was lucky to escape with his life. Seeing that it was not to be his day, David ordered the withdrawal and the rump of the Scots army retreated.
Despite the reverse, David proved a lucky man. Torn by their internecine squabbles, the English were in no position to follow up their advantage. Those Scots that had survived the fighting made it all the way home - and David even managed to secure territorial advances from the peace. Northumberland was handed over to Prince Henry, the territory of Cumberland to the king himself. Where before Scotland’s border had taken its line from the River Tweed, now it was closer to the River Tees. It was not to last. Henry of Anjou ascended to the throne in 1154 as Henry II, bringing to an end nearly two decades of uncertainty in England, and promptly rode roughshod over any deals that had been struck with his northern neighbour before his time.
By then, David had already been in his grave for a year, his son Henry for two. In accordance with David’s wishes, the throne had passed to his grandson Malcolm IV, known to history as Malcolm ‘the Maiden’. In spite of the connotations of his soubriquet, Malcolm was courageous and determined - one chronicler noted that the young king ‘terrorised the wicked and insolent by his royal authority and sternness’ - but Henry II was too much for him to cope with. Summoned to Chester in 1157, he was made formally to accept the loss of Northumberland, Westmorland and Cumberland.
Malcolm died aged twenty-four in 1165 without children and was succeeded by his twenty-two-year-old brother William IV, known as William ‘the Lion’ - a man cut from different cloth. A ginger-headed bear of a man, William ‘the Lion’ would prove to be Scotland’s longest-reigning monarch. Throughout his forty-nine years on the throne, he harboured the age-old Scottish obsession with adding Northumberland to his kingdom, an obsession that brought only grief. First he pestered Henry II for rights to the land, to the point where the mere mention of William’s name would send the English king into a rage. Next he went to war for it, only to be captured at Alnwick in 1174 and taken before Henry to answer for his crimes. He was only given back his freedom, five months later, after signing the Treaty of Falaise in which he accepted that he must, forever after, pay homage to the English king, ‘for the kingdom of Scotland and his other lands in England’. The castles of Berwick-upon-Tweed, Edinburgh and Roxburgh were all turned over to English garrisons. Falaise was an unprecedented surrender of Scottish independence.
For the remaining fifteen years of his life and reign Henry held his vassal to the terms, underlining at every opportunity the bald truth that he was Scotland’s overlord. Only after Henry died and his son and heir Richard I needed funds to join the Third Crusade against Islam in Palestine did William finally manage to overturn the Treaty of Falaise. In return for the huge sum of 10,000 merks, Richard accepted a new agreement, known as the Quitclaim of Canterbury, in 1189, which effectively tore up the earlier, humiliating document.
Undeterred by bitter experience, William immediately began repeating his demands for ownership of Northumberland. When Richard was followed onto the throne by his brother John, William contemplated war once more to settle the matter of the north of England. In the end, having lost his nerve as he stood on the brink of actual fighting, he signed the Treaty of Norham of 1209. More humiliation: among other concessions, William had to pay John 15,000 merks’ worth of compensation; surrender for ever any claim on the northern territories and hand over two of his daughters, Margaret and Isabel. He expected one or other to become John’s daughter-in-law, but in the end both were married off to mere nobles.
William died aged seventy-one in 1214. His lifelong bid to extend the southern boundary of his kingdom had ended in outright failure. He never saw either of his daughters again. He was buried close to the high altar of Abroath Abbey, which he had founded in 1178, and replaced on the throne by his son, Alexander.