The four women of Durham

De Obsessione Dunelmensis (‘Of The Siege Of Durham’) is a 12th century account of hostilities between England and Scotland at the dawn of the second millennium. It was written by an Englishman, possibly Symeon of Durham, and describes an assault launched by the Scots king Malcolm II. The event was noted briefly by the Irish annalists…

1006: A battle between the men of Alba and the Saxons. And the rout was upon the Scots, and they left behind them a slaughter of their good men.

The bane of the Scottish army in this battle was a young English earl called Uhtred, son-in-law of the bishop of Durham. Gathering an army from Northumbria and Yorkshire he fell upon the besiegers and lifted their blockade of the town. The Scots suffered extremely heavy casualties and were forced to flee, their king barely escaping with his life. After the slaughter a grim fate awaited a number of Malcolm’s warriors, even as their bodies lay dead on the battlefield. De Obsessione Dunelmensis gives the gruesome details, telling how Earl Uhtred

“caused to be carried to Durham the best-looking heads of the slain, ornamented with braided locks as was the fashion of the time, and after they had been washed by four women – to each of whom he gave a cow for their trouble – he caused these heads to be fixed upon stakes and placed around the walls”

Just as the lifeless Scottish heads were selected on the basis of their good looks, so the four Durham women were presumably chosen by virtue of their lack of squeamishness. A strong stomach would indeed have been a desirable quality, unless Uhtred’s promise of cattle provided a sufficient incentive to volunteer for the messy task.

Nine men in a boat

In 973, according to the 12th century chronicler John of Worcester, the English king Edgar received oaths of fealty from eight vassals in a ceremony on the River Dee. The eight were powerful kings and warlords from Celtic territory in the North and West. They included Cinaed II, king of Scots, Malcolm, king of the Strathclyde Britons, Malcolm’s father Dyfnwal and the Viking chieftain Magnus Haraldsson. The rest of the group are less easy to identify but presumably comprised a selection of rulers from Scotland and Wales. Later traditions identified one of these as Scandinavian and a couple more as Welsh. All eight travelled to Chester to meet Edgar, a young West Saxon king renowned for his wisdom and piety. He was known also for his willingness to use diplomacy rather than war to achieve his aims.

The earliest reference to the event precedes John of Worcester by two hundred years and is found in Aelfric’s Life of St Swithin (written c.996). After Aelfric’s time the original story gathered various accretions, including some of doubtful value, to become the version used by John and other English writers. In the late 12th century the monks of Melrose Abbey drew on John’s version to give their own account of what had happened at Chester in 973. The following extract from the Melrose chronicle is an English translation based on the one published in Anderson’s Early sources of Scottish history. It takes up the narrative during the fourteenth year of Edgar’s reign when he was aged 30.

“Some time afterwards, after sailing round northern Britain with a huge fleet, he landed at the city of Chester; and eight under-kings met him, as he commanded them, and swore that they would stand by him as vassals, both on land and on sea: namely Cinaed, king of Scots; Malcolm, king of the Cumbrians; Magnus, king of very many islands; and another five – Dyfnwal, Sigfrith, Hywel, Iago, Ulkil. With these one day he entered a boat and, placing them at the oars, he himself took the rudder’s helm and skilfully steered along the course of the River Dee, and sailed from the palace to the monastery of St John the Baptist, the whole crowd of earls and nobles accompanying him in similar craft. And after praying there he returned to the palace with the same pomp, and as he entered it he is related to have said to the nobles that only thus could any of his successors boast of being king of England, by obtaining a display of such honours and the submission of so many kings.”

The above account portrays the ceremony on the Dee as a ritual of homage by under-kings to a dominant overlord. Modern historians have tended to share this viewpoint, seeing the boat journey as evidence of Edgar’s supremacy in areas far beyond his native Wessex. It is not, however, the only possible interpretation. An alternative view disregards much of the account as 12th century propaganda and instead sees the royal gathering as an assembly of ambitious rivals seeking peaceful solutions to their differences. Such high-level assemblies, where important political issues were discussed, required an appropriate setting and were often conducted on frontier rivers regarded as neutral zones. The Dee was a suitable choice of venue, being a major waterway of the Anglo-Welsh border as well as lying close to the boundary between the English lowlands and the Celtic-Scandinavian North. The journey along the river from palace to monastery is usually understood as eight sub-kings hauling the oars to symbolise fealty to an over-king steering the boat. The alternative view sees the journey as a symbol of peace and co-operation between powerful rulers, each of whom helped to propel the vessel. In this scenario the nine kings can be imagined as a kind of “team” comprising eight members who hauled the oars while the ninth – their English host – held the rudder. Being a man of small stature and puny physique (which allegedly amused Cinaed of Scotland) Edgar was ideally suited for the role of coxswain. In the context of this alternative interpretation, which sees the event of 973 as a diplomatic meeting rather than as a ritual of submission, it is perhaps no coincidence that Edgar’s usual epithet is “the Peacable”.

 

References:

Alan Orr Anderson (ed.) Early sources of Scottish history. Volume 1 (Edinburgh, 1922), pp.478-9

Julia Barrow, ‘Chester’s earliest regatta? Edgar’s Dee-rowing revisited’ Early Medieval Europe 10 (2001), pp.81-93

Two Pictish princesses

In recent years a major archaeological project has unearthed evidence of an important Pictish monastery at Portmahomack in Easter Ross. The story of the site can be seen in the nearby Tarbat Discovery Centre and in Martin Carver’s book about the excavations (see reference below).

Visitors to the Discovery Centre are greeted by the life-size bronze image of a Pictish princess. Here she is….

  

Whenever I look at this evocative sculpture I consider how little we really know about Pictish noblewomen, many of whom were the wives, sisters, mothers and daughters of great warrior-kings. As a supporter of the matrilinear theory of Pictish royal succession I find it regrettable that the historical significance of these women was disregarded by the contemporary sources. Regrettable, yes, but not altogether surprising: such disregard was the norm in societies where literacy and the recording of history were controlled by patriarchal elites. Indeed, females of the Pictish royal kindreds would have been astonished if their names and deeds had appeared in contemporary chronicles.

Our main documentary sources for Pictish history are Bede and the Irish annals. Bede mentions Pictish royal women in passing but does not refer to any of them individually. To locate a specific female Pict we have to turn to the annals, where we find the following entry:

AD 778: Eithne, daughter of Cinadhon, died.

The name Eithne has a proud heritage. It was borne by a pagan lady whom Saint Patrick converted to Christianity and also by the mother of Saint Columba. These two women were Irish princesses and both were later elevated to sainthood. A famous bearer of the name today is the musician Eithne Brennan who uses the phonetic spelling Enya for the benefit of non-Gaelic speakers such as myself. But who was the Eithne of 778? Why is she the only Pictish woman named by the annalists?

The first question can be answered by going back three years to an earlier entry:

AD 775: The death of Cinadhon, king of the Picts.

In the Welsh Annals and in the Pictish king-list Cinadhon is called Ciniod, a variant of the name Cinaed (Kenneth). He is usually regarded as the Cinadhon mentioned in 778. His daughter Eithne was therefore a Pictish princess. She may have borne a Gaelic name because of her ancestry: her paternal grandfather was an exiled Scot from the Lorn dynasty of Argyll.

The second question is less easy to answer. Why did the Irish annalists mention Princess Eithne alone of her countrywomen? The Picts had no ruling queens so she was certainly not mentioned because of some Boudicca-like achievement on the battlefield. She might have been the mother of a renowned king but so were other Pictish women and this would not have been enough to get her noticed by the annalists. Perhaps a solution can be found by considering the primary purpose of the annals?

First and foremost, the annalists were keen to record important events affecting the great monasteries of Ireland and North Britain. They were accustomed to noting secular items such as major battles and the deaths of kings but they themselves were monks and their primary interests were therefore ecclesiastical. They rarely mentioned women but those whom they did identify by name were usually noted in religious contexts. An example is Kentigerna, daughter of an Irish king, who went to Scotland and who eventually became a devout Christian hermit on an island in Loch Lomond. The annalists noted her death in 734 and later Scottish tradition made her a saint. Could the Pictish princess Eithne have followed a similar path of religious devotion, perhaps as a nun renowned for her piety, and been accorded the honour of an obituary notice in the annals?

Book reference: Martin Carver, Portmahomack: Monastery of the Picts (Edinburgh, 2008)