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October 2002

Parish History Episode 18

Defining the Border

A thousand years ago, as the year A.D. 1000 approached, Europe was very definitely on the way to recovery, after over a century of repeated devastation by Viking, Magyar and Saracen raiders. New nations were emerging, such as France, Castille, Navarre, and the “Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation”. The Roman Papacy was very weak at this period, but the significance of the Millennium had been noticed, and Pope Sylvester II had, in addition to encouraging the reform and renewal of Benedictine monasteries, and sending missionaries to the Magyars (Hungarians), Czechs and Poles, given his blessing to the “Peace of God” movement, important in France, which attempted to limit feudal warfare, and to persuade knights and barons to settle their feuds by arbitration, or, if that failed, and they took up arms, to recognise that all church buildings and all farms, and all priests, monks, women, children and peasants, were under the protection of “the Peace of God”, and should not be deliberately harmed. It was never wholly successful, but its very existence did show that people were attempting to rise above the savagery which had overcome Europe during the previous century.

The “Peace of God” movement had little effect within the British Isles, and during the reign of Ethelred the Unready, the Kingdom of England seemed to be descending back into lawlessness and renewed Viking raiding. However, there was now a Kingdom of England, covering nearly all of what is now England, except for the far North-West (Cumbria), but extending also into much of what is now South- -Eastern Scotland. To those areas from which Alfred had evicted the Danes - the lands South of the Thames and the shires of the Western Midlands - Athelstan had added Cornwall; and those lands of Eastern England from the Thames to the Tees, which had been under Danish rule for a generation or two; and the “Patrimony of Saint Cuthbert” between the Tees and the Tyne; and the Earldom of Northumberland, between the Tyne and the Forth.

The Patrimony of Saint Cuthbert was now, in A.D. 1000, after the incident on Warden Law, centered on Durham, not Chester-le-Street. The saint’s body had lain in a temporary shrine from the time of its arrival on the Durham Peninsula, in 995, until it was moved, in 999, into a chapel in the new cathedral which was being built : an edifice of gleaming limestone, which became known as the “White Church”. This building has completely disappeared, demolished a century later by England’s Norman conquerors, but it was probably much smaller than the later cathedral. There was no dormitory or refectory for the monks attached to the church. They lived, with their families, in rows of cottages beside the church, just as the present cathedral clergy live in houses on College Green.

Long before the White Church had been completed, in the opening years of the Eleventh Century, an important wedding took place beside the tomb of Cuthbert, at which Bishop Aldhun gave away his daughter, Eggfritha, to Ughtred, the eldest son of Earl Waltheof of Northumberland. One may hope that the young people were happy in their marriage, but there seem to have been reasons of state behind this alliance. A second kingdom had arisen on the Isle of Britain, to the North of England : this was of course the Kingdom of Scotland.

North Britain had suffered as much or more from Viking incursions as had South Britain. Norwegian raiders had overrun much of both the Kingdom of the Scots, covering the Southern Highlands, and the Kingdom of the Picts, in Eastern Scotland, but in 843 these two battered kingdoms had been united when Kenneth MacAlpin, already King of Scots, succeeded additionally to the Pictish Throne. Not only were the two kingdoms united, but within a century or so the two peoples had merged. Both Picts and Scots spoke Celtic languages, but the Scottish tongue, Gaelic, tended to prevail. However, the centre of gravity for the new kingdom moved to the East, the Pictish city of Perth became the capital, future kings were to be enthroned upon the Pictish Stone of Scone, and the ecclesiastical capital moved from Iona to Pictish sites : first Dunkeld, and then St.Andrews.

There were thus two kingdoms emerging in the Isle of Britain - Scotland in the North and England in the South. In addition to these two, and the Norwegian settlements in the Northern and Western Isles, the Isle of Man and elsewhere, there were also several small “British” kingdoms, speaking dialects of the Welsh tongue. Besides those in modern Wales, there were Reged, around Carlisle and Dumfries; Galloway in the South-West of Modern Scotland; and Strathclyde in the Clyde valley. The successors of Kenneth MacAlpin were anxious to expand into these areas before the English got round to taking them over. Moreover, during the reign of the hapless Ethelred, when England was at her weakest, they began to have hopes of being able to wrest the Earldom of Northumberland and perhaps the Patrimony of Saint Cuthbert from English control. Earl Waltheof and Bishop Aldhun, knowing that they could not rely on Ethelred, seem to have used the occasion of this wedding to plan joint action in defence of their territory against the Scots. ( And one wonders whether it might have been Waltheof who first suggested to Aldhun that he move from Warden Law to the Durham peninsula. )

Durham Cathedral was thus, before it was even completed, being drawn into the world of secular politics, in a far deeper way than any other English cathedral.

The marriage alliance was soon to pay dividends. In 1005 a vigorous young king, Malcolm II, ascended the Scottish Throne, and, observing the ineptitude of Ethelred’s policies, he resolved on an invasion of England. In 1006, a year after his accession, he crossed the Forth. Waltheof was defeated in battle, and died shortly after, but his son, Ughtred, repelled the Scots from Bamburgh Castle. Malcolm did not have the patience to attempt to reduce it by siege, and so he pressed on, deeper into England. He crossed the Tyne, and then reached the Wear at Durham. Here he found the English preparing to defend the peninsula, with the half-built cathedral at the centre of their position. A wooden palisade had been erected across the neck of the peninsula, where the market place now is ( and where the tollgate for motor cars is now being erected ! ), and the Scots prepared to storm this barrier.

But Ughtred had not remained in the security of Bamburgh, along with his wife, the bishop’s daughter. He had mustered men, and was now marching in pursuit of Malcolm. He caught up with his enemy just outside Durham, and found the Scots trying to set fire to the English barricade, and about to storm into Durham. From the heights of Gilesgate he swooped down upon the Scots from their rear, and killed scores of them. Malcolm rallied his men, but found it impossible to save the day, and had to retreat to his homeland. He did not however give up his ambitions to rule over Northern England.

After greeting his father-in-law, Ughtred walked over the battlefield, and gave orders that the Scottish dead ( and wounded ? ) be decapitated. The half-burnt palisade was rebuilt, but with sharper stakes, and the heads of the Scottish warriors were impaled on these stakes, so as to impress visitors to the cathedral. It would seem that the “Peace of God” movement had not yet reached our diocese.

Ughtred ruled over Northumberland for the next ten years, and he remained at war with Malcolm throughout the decade. His resources were not equal to those of Scotland, and he was forced to yield ground. He appealed for help, and received some military assistance from the men of the Patrimony, but England’s king, Ethelred, sent no help, other than advice to raise some money and try to pay the Scots to go away. It was a strategy that, from Ethelred’s own experience, seemed unlikely to work, and Ughtred had more sense than to try.

But defeat was inevitable if Northumberland and Durham were left to fight the Scots on their own. In 1016, Malcolm won a great battle at Carham (between Kelso and Cornhill), and Ughtred and most of his men were slaughtered. As a result of this victory, Malcolm annexed all of Northumbria from the Forth to the Tweed. And this new frontier was to prove permanent. To-day, all but a thousand years later, the river Tweed still, in its lower reaches, defines the Border between the two kingdoms.

King Malcolm II had conquered the greater part of the Earldom of Northumberland. But the outcome was, in some ways, to be more like a Northum-brian conquest of Scotland. The English (or rather the Northumbrian) language remained the speech of the conquered districts of Lothian and the Borders, and it soon became the speech of the Scottish Court, for Malcolm chose to move his capital from the old Pictish city of Perth to his new prize of Edinburgh. The Pictish people, who had started to modify their speech, and use more Gaelic, quickly began to abandon both Celtic tongues, and to use this Northern brand of English. When, during the following fifty years, the South-Western kingdoms of Strathclyde, Galloway and Reged were all incorporated into the Kingdom of Scotland, the Celtic peoples of those lands also began to speak Northumbrian as the national language, in preference to their own dialects. Within a century or two, Gaelic was hardly spoken outside the Highlands.

In 1066, fifty years after the Battle of Carham, England itself was to be subjugated by Norman conquerors, who brought with them the French language, and imposed it as the official language of England for the next three centuries. England itself would then seem to be on the way to extinction as a separate nation. But a sort of England, speaking a sort of English, survived North of the Tweed. In a sense, Scotland is the successor state to the lost England of the Anglo-Saxons. Up North there endured a kingdom speaking our language (“Geordie”), as enthusiastic about education as was ancient Northumbria, and with a type of Christianity directly descended from the Irish missions which had once evangelised Iona and Lindisfarne.