Deconstructing Nechtan

The Pictish symbol shown here is usually described as a tuning-fork. It has been suggested that it represents the name Nechtan which was borne by several Pictish kings (Cummins 1999, 130). The name itself had a widespread popularity across the British Isles and appears in various texts of the early medieval period.

Four of the attested Nechtans appear in contexts suggesting that they lived at the beginning of the seventh century. This contemporaneity has led some historians to suggest that they were the same person (e.g. Smyth 1984, 64-5).

The four Nechtans of c.600 are listed below. The texts in which they are found are in square brackets.
Nechtan, king of the Picts, nepos Uerb, i.e.grandson or nephew of Uerb or Verb [Pictish king-list]
Nechtan son of Cano, nationality unknown, who died in 621 [Annals of Ulster]
Neithon son of Gwyddno, a North Briton, father of King Beli of Dumbarton [Dumbarton royal genealogy]
Peithan (presumed to be a mis-spelling of Neithan) father of a North Briton called Gwid [from a verse of heroic poetry in the Gododdin]

The conflation of these four individuals into one figure was prompted by the ancestry of the Pictish king Brude who defeated Ecgfrith of Northumbria at the battle of Dunnichen in 685. In the Pictish king-list Brude’s father is named as Bili, a variant of Beli, and in a Life of Saint Adomnan Brude is called “son of the king of Dumbarton”. There is no doubt that Brude was the son of the Dumbarton king Beli, son of Neithon, but some historians take the identification process much further by seeing this Neithon as the same man as Nechtan nepos Uerb, king of the Picts. We are clearly dealing with variants of the same name but this is really as far as we can push the textual data. An old Irish poem describes Brude fighting at Dunnichen “for his grandfather’s inheritance”. Because Dunnichen means “Nechtan’s Fort” the inheritance has been seen as Pictish territory formerly ruled by Neithon of Dumbarton and defended in 685 by his grandson Brude. From this theory historians have developed a political scenario in which Neithon and his son Beli ruled not only the Dumbarton Britons but also some part of the Picts. This scenario is then proposed as an explanation of why the father of Brude, a Pictish king, turns out to be a Briton. The final segment of the conflation identifies Brude’s grandfather Neithon of Dumbarton as Nechtan, Cano’s son, and also as Peithan, father of Gwid, by assuming that Cano is an error for Gwyddno and that Peithan is an error for Neithan.

To me, these conflations seem unwarranted and unnecessary. The texts themselves do not give any hint that the same Nechtan/Neithon is meant in all four cases. Two of the quartet can in fact be removed from the equation:
Nechtan, son of Cano, could be the Irish king Nechtan Cendfota whose son died in battle in c.632 (Anderson 1922, 145, n.3), or an otherwise unknown king or cleric – the name was fairly common in ecclesiastical as well as in secular contexts.
Peithan, father of Gwid. If this man was alive today he might wonder why his perfectly normal Brittonic/Welsh name was being altered to Neithan. Nothing in the rhyme or metre of the Gododdin requires such alteration (Koch 1997, 207) which looks to me like wishful thinking by supporters of the “One Nechtan” theory.

This leaves Neithon of Dumbarton and Nechtan nepos Uerb, king of the Picts. The latter is unusual in that he appears in the Pictish king-list without the name of his father. He was a nephew or grandson of someone called Uerb or Verb whose name may be the attested female name Ferb. The lack of a patronym (X son of Y) points to something odd about this Nechtan’s ancestry and suggests that his father was unknown, unworthy or irrelevant to the compilers of the king-list. Since the scribes of the Dumbarton genealogy had no such doubts about the identity of Gwyddno, father of Neithon, his absence from the Pictish list seems strange (if we try to make him the father of Nechtan nepos Uerb). Why would the Pictish scribes ignore Gwyddno if their Dumbarton counterparts were happy to include him in a royal genealogy? It surely makes more sense to see Gwyddno’s son and nepos Uerb as two individuals who had the same name.

Instead of supporting the conflation theory I prefer to envisage three separate Nechtans:
Neithon, father of King Beli of Dumbarton and son of Gwyddno (but only Beli is securely identifiable as holding the kingship).
Nechtan, nepos Uerb, king of the Picts.
Nechtan, son of Cano, perhaps an Irish king or abbot.

The Nechtan who gave his name to Dunnichen (Gaelic Dun Nechtain) probably lived a long time before the battle of 685. He may have been one of the semi-legendary Pictish kings whose names appear in the earlier generations of the king-list, e.g. the Nechtan who allegedly founded the church at Abernethy in Fife. The grandfather’s “inheritance” connected to this battle may have been adjacent territory once ruled by Brude’s mother’s father, a high-status Pict whose name we do not know.

Brude’s kingship of the Picts does not demand that his father and/or grandfather also held sway over this people. As a supporter of Pictish matriliny (royal inheritance through the maternal line) I would not expect Brude’s immediate male forbears to be Pictish kings. Eanfrith, an exiled English prince, fathered a future king of the Picts on a Pictish princess before he himself became king of Bernicia in 633. Beli of Dumbarton may have likewise spent his youth as an exile among the Picts, during which time he and a Pictish royal lady together produced the future king Brude. A political context is provided by the long reign at Dumbarton of a king called Rhydderch Hael who sprang from a separate branch of the royal family. Perhaps Beli fled into exile in this period, as a fosterling – like Eanfrith – of Pictish royalty, before returning home to claim the kingship of Dumbarton after Rhydderch’s death?

Other strands of this topic include the maternal ancestry of Owain, king of Dumbarton, who was another son of Beli, plus the alleged kinship of Brude and his Northumbrian adversary Ecgfrith, not to mention the long-running debate about Pictish matriliny.

References

A.O. Anderson (ed) Early sources of Scottish history, vol.1 (Edinburgh, 1922)
W.A. Cummins The Picts and their symbols (Stroud, 1999)
J.T. Koch (ed) The Gododdin of Aneirin: text & context from dark age North Britain (Cardiff, 1997)
A.P. Smyth Warlords and holy men (London, 1984)

Brude’s symbol?

This is the Pictish symbol known as the Crescent & V-Rod. It appears on various carved stones in Scotland, usually accompanied by one or more other symbols. But what does it mean?

Various theories about the Pictish symbols have been proposed, each with its supporters and critics. The one I cautiously lean towards is the idea that they represent personal names, and that where two symbols appear as a pair on a particular stone they commemorate a person “X, son of Y” (or Z, daughter of Y). One supporter of this theory is W.A. Cummins who has suggested that the Crescent & V-Rod – the symbol appearing most frequently on the stones – might represent Brude – the name appearing most frequently in the Pictish king lists.

The abstract design of the symbol has been seen by some people as an arrow breaking on a shield, by others as a crescent moon with a geometrical instrument like a pair of dividers. We will never know its real meaning but the idea that this and other symbols were used by the Picts in a kind of pictorial alphabet for words or names, like ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, is the one I vote for at the moment.

Reference
W.A. Cummins, The Picts and their symbols (Stroud, 1999)

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

King Arthur

Many people think Arthur was a historical figure of the fifth or sixth centuries. This is not a view I share, which is why I generally leave Arthur aside when discussing early medieval topics. My own view is the one encapsulated by Oliver Padel in 1994, when he examined the key question: Did Arthur exist? Padel suggested that Arthur originated in legend as “a pan-Brittonic figure of local wonder-tales” like the mythical Irish hero Fionn (Finn Mac Cool). The two figures share much in common: both appear in tales of magical beings and places; both were associated with mysterious prehistoric monuments; both were portrayed as saviours of their homelands. Padel argues that just as Fionn made the transition from Irish legends to Irish historical texts, so Arthur made the same transition in a British context, becoming a key figure in pseudo-history as well as remaining an important character of folklore. Hence the list of Arthur’s battles in the Historia Brittonum of c.830, and hence his appearance in the Welsh Annals, while a parallel tradition continued to weave him into tales such as Culhwch and Olwen. But there was no real Arthur, according to Padel, unless the legendary figure was created partly out of a folk-memory of the Roman centurion Lucius Artorius Castus (who led an army from Britain to Gaul in c.200).

Views such as the one expressed by Padel are obviously unpopular with supporters of the Historical Arthur but, when the early medieval sources are examined, the absence of this enigmatic figure is very noticeable. Neither Bede nor Gildas mention him, so why should we regard him as important?

Oliver Padel, ‘The nature of Arthur’. Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 27 (1994), pp.1-31

A new book on the Picts

Published by Tempus in March 2008 and written by me, with colour photographs of historic sites and landscapes.

This book takes a straightforward narrative approach to its subject, hence the title The Picts: a history. The varied historical data is presented in chronological rather than thematic format. Beginning with the legendary chieftain Calgacus and ending with the famous (or infamous) Cinaed mac Ailpin the narrative tells the story of Scotland’s “lost people” from their first appearance in Roman times to their final farewell in the ninth century.

Further details can be found by clicking the cover illustration or this link.

The Heroic Age – new issue online

Issue 11 of The Heroic Age is now available. This online journal is well worth a look by anyone interested in early medieval studies. Contents of issue 11 include several articles dealing with folklore related to the Arthurian legends.

Here’s a link to the journal’s homepage

What is Senchus?

In the Gaelic language ’senchus’ (pronounced shen-uh-kuhs) means “history”. It seems an appropriate name for a collection of notes, thoughts and jottings about the early medieval period in Scotland.

The Senchus weblog has a focus on North Britain between the passing of Rome and the arrival of the Vikings. In chronological terms this covers the period AD 400 to 800 but these limits are fairly fluid. In geographical terms the scope includes not only Scotland but also parts of northern England, Wales and Ireland.

The entries posted on this site reflect my own medieval interests together with other snippets of information which I think might be useful or relevant.