Catraeth and Gwen Ystrat

Edinburgh Castle, site of the Gododdin stronghold Din Eidyn.

In the introductory chapters to his radical reconstruction of the Old Welsh poem Y Gododdin John T. Koch suggested that the sixth-century battle of Catraeth, described in the poem as a defeat for the warriors of Gododdin (Lothian), was a victory for their fellow-Britons of Rheged. Koch believed that a poem known as Gweith Gwen Ystrat (The Battle of Gwen Valley) attributed to Rheged’s court-bard Taliesin was composed to celebrate the event from the victors’ perspective. He suggested that Catraeth and Gwen Ystrat were different names for the same place. In adopting this radical stance he challenged the conventional view of the Gododdin defeat which has long seen it as a triumph by the English kingdom of Bernicia over one of her British neighbours.

I was sceptical about Koch’s theory as soon as I saw it, not least because I don’t see any need to conflate the two battles. In Y Gododdin, Catraeth is clearly stated to be the location of the Gododdin defeat: there is no mention of the Gwen Valley. In Taliesin’s poem, Catraeth is mentioned as a territory associated with Rheged but is not described as the site of a battle. My unease about these and other aspects of Koch’s vision (or revision) of sixth-century history prompted me to discuss his book in the first issue of The Heroic Age back in 1999.

Recently, I looked again at a 1998 paper by Graham Isaac in which the Catraeth-Gwen Ystrat conflation was subjected to detailed linguistic scrutiny. When I first read Isaac’s analysis some years ago I welcomed his rejection of Koch’s theory – having no expertise myself in the complex field of Old Welsh literature I was glad to see a scholar from this area putting the theory under the microscope. Since returning to this topic in the past few weeks I was reminded of something I had forgotten, something quite significant for anyone with an interest in Rheged, namely Isaac’s belief that Gweith Gwen Ystrat should not be regarded as a poem composed in sixth-century North Britain.

In his paper Isaac questions the long-held view that the poem contains archaic linguistic features indicative of an early date of composition. Instead, he proposes that it was composed not by the northern bard Taliesin but by a Welshman of the period 1050 to 1150. If Isaac is right, the implications could be very severe, not just for Koch’s conflation of the two battles but also for conventional perceptions about other poems attributed to Taliesin. As Isaac observes near the end of his analysis: “It may be regarded as regrettable in some quarters that Gweith Gwen Ystrat in particular probably tells us nothing about sixth-century North British history” (p.69). If the poem is a product of eleventh- or twelfth-century Wales, then how confident can we be that any of Taliesin’s poetry about Rheged was composed in the sixth-century North? If one or more of these poems were composed centuries later by a Welsh “antiquarian” poet, how much of their political and geographical information about sixth-century Rheged can be trusted?

References

 John T. Koch, The Gododdin of Aneirin: text and context in Dark Age North Britain (Cardiff, 1997)

G.R. Isaac, “Gweith Gwen Ystrat and the northern heroic age of the sixth century” Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 36 (1998), 61-70

 My review of Koch’s book for the online journal The Heroic Age can be found here.

Additional note: The place Gwen Ystrat has never been satisfactorily located, nor (in my opinion) has Catraeth. I am unconvinced by the conventional identification of Catraeth as Catterick in Yorkshire, which I believe is too far south to be considered part of the Gododdin borderlands. Similar techniques of “sounds like” etymology have been employed to identify Gwen Ystrat with places in northern England such as Wensleydale, Winster, etc, but these are nothing more than wild shots in the dark.

Some of my early doubts about the Catterick hypothesis can be found in an article published sixteen years ago:
Tim Clarkson, “Richmond and Catraeth” Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 26 (1993), 15-20

Brunanburh and Burnswark

In 937 the English king Aethelstan of Wessex gained a victory over an allied army of Scots, Norsemen and Britons at a place called Brunanburh. The encounter was remembered in subsequent generations as the “Great Battle” and has thus been regarded – perhaps incorrectly – as one of the defining moments in early English history. Whatever its long-term political significance the battle was certainly famous in its own time and in the centuries that followed. At some point in the Middle Ages its fame began to dwindle and it is now far less well known than, for example, the campaigns of Athelstan’s grandfather Alfred the Great.

Although the battle is mentioned in various contemporary and later sources its location remains a mystery. A number of places with modern names possibly deriving from Brun- have been suggested as likely candidates but many of these can be discarded on linguistic grounds. Currently, the most favoured candidate seems to be Bromborough on the Wirral Peninsula, a site with easy access to the Irish Sea which is where the main Viking force – the Norse of Dublin – would have come from (a twelfth-century reference to the Humber is probably erroneous). A rival to Bromborough is the prominent Dumfriesshire landmark known today as Burnswark, a flat-topped hill whose candidacy as the site of Brunanburh was strongly argued in 2005 by Kevin Halloran. The case for Burnswark had been made long ago by Neilson but it received an update by Halloran in a well-crafted article in the Scottish Historical Review. At the core of the Burnswark theory are the recorded instances of Bruneswerc as an alternative name of the battle, together with the hill’s geographical position at the head of the Solway Firth. Being a supporter of the Bromborough theory I found Halloran’s argument thought-provoking but I lacked the etymological expertise to scrutinise it more deeply. Then, last year, the Burnswark theory was subjected to rigorous examination by Paul Cavill in a book of essays dedicated to the renowned place-name scholar Margaret Gelling. Cavill demonstrated that Bruneswerc, although clearly an old name for the battle, was an alternative name rather than the original one. By looking closely at the old chronicle references he showed that Brunanburh was undoubtedly the original name and that Bruneswerc was a secondary form derived from it. He also showed that the modern name Burnswark has not evolved from Bruneswerc but is more likely to relate to the “burns” (streams) around the hill from which the nearby place-name Burnside also derives. In my (admittedly biased) view, the candidacy of Burnswark as a plausible location for the great battle of 937 has been effectively swept aside by Cavill’s analysis. To me, Bromborough on the Wirral is still the best candidate, even if its case is impossible to prove.

References

Kevin Halloran, “The Brunanburh campaign: a reappraisal” Scottish Historical Review 84 (2005), 133-48

Paul Cavill, “The site of the battle of Brunanburh: manuscripts and maps, grammar and geography”, pp.303-19 in Oliver Padel & David Parsons (eds) A commodity of good names: essays in honour of Margaret Gelling (Donnington, 2008

George Neilson, ‘Brunanburh and Burnswark’ Scottish Historical Review 7 (1909), 37-9

George Neilson, Annals of the Solway until A.D. 1307 (Glasgow, 1899)

Perth and Bertha

Historians generally agree that the Scottish city of Perth has a name deriving from a Pictish word pert meaning a copse or wood. The antiquity of this name is less clear and is a matter of some debate, as is the question of where the original settlement called Pert was located. Did the city begin as a small trading village on the bank of the River Tay, with a seasonal market frequented by Vikings? Did it develop around an ancient Christian site in the vicinity of the present-day Saint John’s Kirk? Or was the ancestor of Perth originally a Pictish ceremonial centre near the Roman fort a mile or so further upstream where the Tay meets the River Almond?

The earliest record of the place-name Perth or Pert occurs in the 12th century when the town was named among property granted to Dunfermline Abbey in a royal charter of King David I of Scotland. In the following century the place-name appears in the variant form Berth or Bert. This variant was subsequently borrowed by medieval Scottish historians such as John of Fordun and Walter Bower as the basis of a fictional name for the Roman fort at the mouth of the Almond. In their chronicles they called the fort Bertha, a name invented by them because they did not know the Roman name for the place. This name has since stuck and the fort is often marked on maps in a way that could fool the unwary into believing that Bertha was what the Romans called it. The original Roman name was probably Tamia, derived from a native name for the River Tay. In early medieval times, when the long-abandoned site was still used for ceremonial or other purposes by Pictish and Gaelic kings, its name was Rathinveramon (Fort at the mouth of the River Almond). Perth, then, means ‘copse’ or ‘wood’ in the old Pictish language (which was a Celtic language related to the ancestor of Welsh). Bertha is a medieval variant of Perth and was erroneously applied to the nearby Roman fort. The interesting point about Perth’s early name is that it pushes the date of the original settlement backwards into the Pictish period, thereby making the city’s origins far older than the time of its elevation to town status in the 12th century.

Reference

 M. Hall, H. Hall & G. Cook, “What’s cooking? New radiocarbon dates from the earliest phases of the Perth High Street excavations and the question of Perth’s early medieval origin”, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, vol.135 (2005), pp.273-285.

The name Kirkintilloch

A few miles to the east of Glasgow stands the town of Kirkintilloch. At first sight the name of this place seems to be an example of the kirk- type found all over Scotland. Names prefixed by kirk(originally a Scandinavian word) usually mean “Church of…” and often contain the name of a saint, e.g. Kirkpatrick (Church of St Patrick) or Kirkbride (Church of St. Bridget). Closer inspection of Kirkintilloch reveals, however, that it is not in fact a kirk- name at all but instead provides a curious snapshot of early medieval history.

In one version of the ninth-century Welsh chronicle Historia Brittonum (The History of the Britons) the Antonine Wall is said to terminate in the west at Carpentaloch. This is the oldest form of Kirkintilloch and shows clearly that it does not belong among the typical kirk- names. It had a different origin that pre-dated the arrival of Scandinavian words as elements in Scottish nomenclature.

Carpentaloch can be broken down as caer-pen-tulach, a hybrid name formed from Brittonic and Gaelic words and meaning “Fort at the head of the hills”. This form must have originated at a time when Strathclyde, the last surviving kingdom of the North Britons, was absorbing an influx of Gaelic-speaking immigrants of Scottish or Norse-Scottish ancestry. Such a hybrid place-name can only have been formed after 870, when Strathclyde was ravaged by Vikings and brought within their sphere of colonisation. Prior to this time Brittonic speech held sway and Gaelic terms such as tulach (hill) were absent from the area’s etymology. The original form of Kirkintilloch may thus have been Caer-pen-bryn or something broadly similar. Eventually, long after bryn was replaced by tulach, the Brittonic word pen (head) was altered to cenn which has the same meaning in Gaelic. This change will have occurred when the ancient speech of the Britons was in terminal decline, probably in the decades after 1018 when Strathclyde’s last native king died in battle. By c.1300, when the town of Kerkintalloch was first recorded in Scottish landholding documents, only the prefix caer (fort) remained to indicate that the original inhabitants were speakers of a language that had long since faded away.

Reference: W.J. Watson, The history of the Celtic place-names of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1926), p.348.