The Men of the North: The Britons of Southern Scotland by Clarkson Tim

Author:Clarkson, Tim [Clarkson, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781907909023
Publisher: Birlinn
Published: 2012-09-27T16:00:00+00:00

Bede’s words paint a stark picture of ethnic conflict between indigenous and immigrant groups. We should not feel tempted to accept it as accurate reporting. It contradicts not only modern views of Anglo-British relations in the North but also the generally held belief, founded on archaeological evidence, that most Bernicians had British ancestry.5 Bede’s contempt for the Britons is a major thread running through the pages of the Ecclesiastical History and he made no attempt to conceal it. But its origins were religious, not political, and it applied less to the British kings and peasants menaced by Aethelfrith than to the priests of Wales and Cornwall who had refused to evangelise the southern English kingdoms. This distinction did not, however, deter Bede from gloating over the fate of North British communities trampled by the heathen Aethelfrith. God’s vengeance upon the indigenous population was duly served by the swords and spears of Bernician warbands, as punishment for what Bede perceived as an unforgivable crime committed by the native clergy, ‘that they never preached the Faith to the Saxons or Angles who inhabited Britain with them’.6

Behind this ecclesiastical grudge and beneath the rhetoric of ethnic feud we see one northern kingdom, under the dynamic leadership of an English-speaking elite, rising to prominence at the expense of weaker neighbours. The process had begun two generations earlier when the kingship of Berneich passed to a dynasty headed by Ida. Aethelfrith’s military achievements at the end of the sixth century were a culmination of his grandfather’s ambitions and a powerful springboard for his own. His campaigns were not driven by what the chroniclers of our own age grimly refer to as ‘ethnic cleansing’. To Aethelfrith, who commanded what was essentially a mongrel army of ‘Anglo-Saxons’ composed partly of men of British ancestry, the mantle of ethnic crusader woven for him by Bede would surely have seemed a strange and unfamiliar garment.

What, then, did it mean to be ‘Bernician’ in the years around 600? To answer this question effectively we would need to know how deeply a sense of ‘Englishness’ had permeated through the population during the 50 years since the start of Ida’s reign. Unfortunately, the corpus of archaeological clues pointing to cultural affiliation is not large enough to permit such an assessment to be made. Without a sizable sample of evidence we can do no more than offer a guess based on the results of limited excavation combined with other types of data. As noted in earlier chapters, the overall picture gives little hint of a mass colonisation by people of Germanic stock, either in Ida’s time or later. On the other hand, the place-names of modern Northumberland – an area roughly corresponding to Bernicia – are overwhelmingly English with few Brittonic survivals. Of greater significance, perhaps, are the perceptions of Bede and his eighth-century contemporaries who regarded their forefathers in Aethelfrith’s time as Englishmen. By the beginning of the seventh century, when any Bernicians with childhood memories of Ida’s accession would have been

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