In the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries, when the sculptured stones now preserved in the old parish church at Govan were being carved, the people of the area spoke a language similar to Welsh. This differed from the Gaelic of Ireland and Argyll, having more in common with the language of the Picts to which it was closely related. But the district around Govan was not Pictish. Its inhabitants in early medieval times were not Picts but Britons. They were descended from natives encountered by Roman armies during the invasion and conquest of Britain in the 1st century AD. The Romans used the name ‘Britons’ as an umbrella term encompassing all indigenous people of the island. Later, at the end of the 3rd century, another term Picti came into use to describe troublesome groups of Britons in the highland zone beyond the Forth-Clyde isthmus. Meanwhile, in the far northwestern coastlands, native communities in Argyll and the Hebrides adopted the Gaelic speech of Ireland and, by c.300, were no longer identifiable as ‘Britons’. These groups became known as Scotti (Scots), a name apparently bestowed by Rome on all Gaelic-speakers regardless of where they lived.
A different group of people, the Anglo-Saxons or ‘English’, came to Britain to fight for the Roman Army as mercenaries. After the collapse of Roman rule in the early 5th century they arrived in greater numbers, sailing across the North Sea from homelands in Germany, Denmark and Holland. Within two hundred years they had taken over many southern parts of Britain, seizing territory by force and establishing their own kingdoms. By c.700 only a few western areas remained in the hands of the Britons, the largest block comprising what is now Wales. In the North, the last independent kingdom of Britons lay in the lower valley of the River Clyde. Its main centre of power was Alt Clut, the Rock of Clyde at present-day Dumbarton. From this lofty citadel the kings of Alt Clut looked out on a realm surrounded on all sides by enemies: Scots to the west, Picts to the north, Anglo-Saxons to the east and south.
The Britons of the Clyde were converted to Christianity in the 5th and 6th centuries. Missionaries from other parts of Britain, and from Ireland, preached among them and baptised the kings of Alt Clut. Old legends and traditions assert that the earliest churches were founded by saints such as Kentigern (Glasgow), Conval (Inchinnan) and Mirin or Mirren (Paisley). The first church at Govan is said to have been established by St Constantine, an obscure figure identified in later tradition as a disciple of Kentigern. More will be said of Constantine in a future blogpost.
The kingdom of Alt Clut was still in existence when the Vikings began raiding the British Isles at the end of the 8th century. In 870, a large Viking army from Dublin besieged the royal citadel on Clyde Rock and captured the king of the Britons. It is sometimes assumed that this led to the total collapse of the kingdom, and that it was seized by the Scots, but this is not what happened. The focus of royal power simply moved upstream, away from the Rock of Clyde. One new centre of royal authority began to develop on the south bank of the river, at an ancient crossing-point opposite the inflow of the Kelvin. Here, at Govan, and at other places along the valley, the old realm of the Clyde Britons rose again with renewed vitality. The kingdom received a new name, Strat Clut (Strathclyde) to show that its heartland was now the valley of the river rather than the headwaters of the firth. From here the kings of the Britons began to take back what they had lost. Their reconquest was swift, for their former foes in the Anglo-Saxon realm of Northumbria had already been ousted by Viking warlords. The rule of Northumbrian kings no longer reached across the Solway Firth as it had done in the 7th and 8th centuries. By the early 900s, the kings of Strathclyde held sway over large tracts of what is now South West Scotland, having ousted an English-speaking aristocracy from lands that had been Northumbrian for the previous two hundred years.
Within a couple of generations of the siege of Dumbarton the power of the Britons reached as far south as the River Eamont in present-day Cumbria. The latter has been a familiar name on modern maps since 1974 when the old counties of Cumberland and Westmorland were amalgamated but its origins are much older. It is a Latinised form of Old English Cumber Land (‘Land of the Cumbri’), a name we find in the 10th-century Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Cumbri is simply a northern equivalent of Cymry (pronounced ‘Cum-ree’), a term still used today by the people of Wales when referring to themselves. Both terms derive from an older word combrogi which meant ‘fellow-countrymen’ in the ancient language of the Britons. The kings of Strathclyde, together with their subjects at Govan and elsewhere, considered themselves Cumbri, but to their Anglo-Saxon neighbours they were simply wealas (‘Welsh’) like their compatriots further south.
Strathclyde remained a major political power to the end of the 10th century and was still playing an important role in the early 11th. Its kings took part in significant wars and in many other great events of the time. This was the period when the stonecarvers of the ‘Govan School’ produced the crosses, cross-slabs and hogback tombstones that we see today at places like Inchinnan, Lochwinnoch, Arthurlie and Govan itself. The folk who commissioned these monuments, like the craftsmen who carved them, were the people known to the Anglo-Saxons as Cumbras and wealas. To modern historians they are ‘Cumbrians’, ‘Strathclyde Welsh’ or ‘North Britons’. At some point around the middle of the 11th century their homeland was conquered by the Scottish kings of Alba and the native royal dynasty was expelled. By c.1150, the inhabitants of Clydesdale had given up their ancestral language in favour of Gaelic. They were no longer Cumbri but had become ‘Scots’ like their new political masters. Inevitably, as time wore on, the deeds of their forefathers began to fade from memory. Soon only the sculptured stones remained, a handful of monuments scattered across the land, to bear mute witness to a forgotten people.
[…] of Strathclyde. He has several posts up on some of the Govan sculpture like the sun stone , an introduction to the Govan school of stones, and on a 19th century engraving of the Govan […]
How do you know that the people adopted gaelic by 1150 and not just the invading Scotts overlords. How does this fit in with Malcolm Canmore moving his court to Edinburgh and adopting English
Good question, Keith. The widespread adoption of Gaelic after c.1100 can, I think, be inferred from the deep displacement of Brittonic place-names in Strathclyde, with even minor features such as streams and woods being given Gaelic names by c.1200 (evidence from 13th century charters). Survival of Brittonic in isolated pockets does however seem probable.
Surely Malcolm Canmore used Gaelic as his main language? I was under the impression that the Scottish royal court didn’t use Edinburgh as a residence until the 1200s.
Do you have any insight on the Ferguson clan from this time. There was a mysterious fall from power and perhaps fratricide near Loch Ryan?
Thanks for visiting, Carol. I must confess to being quite hazy on Clan Ferguson history, except for a few snippets on the alleged descent from Fergus of Galloway (12th century) and his son Gille Brigte mac Fergusa. I assume the fratricide in question is the murder of Uchtred mac Fergusa by Gille Brigte, but I don’t know much about the circumstances, or whether it happened near Loch Ryan. By coincidence, I’ve been thinking of writing a post about Affraic, daughter of Fergus, over at my other blog Senchus.
Thank you so much for your reply. I too after looking through much Ferguson research feel this may be true. Although why it is alluded to a mystery of the clan history when this fight between King Fergus and his 2 sons is pretty well known, I do not understand.
The only other account I came across said it was stirred up by the Pict women the Fergussons had taken as brides. These women came with land tracks and were “royal” in their own right and this was a grab to regain their power and become ruling regents with their sons, after the fathers were killed.
Does this sound at all correct? Could this be the reason for the fragmented nature of the Fergusson clan lands?
We will be visiting the Clan chief this August and I will certainly ask him about this. Thank you for your input and the clear description of the ancient tribes that ruled Scotland. If you come across any Ferguson clan history I would very much like to hear it.
The story of the Fergussons marrying Pictish women is an interesting bit of clan folklore and I’d like to look into it at some point. My guess would be that it derives from medieval traditions about the special status of maternal ancestry among the kings of the Picts, an idea that goes back to Bede in AD 731. Some historians are now moving away from taking the ‘matrilinear’ idea seriously but others think it’s still worth considering. It’s often confused with matriarchy which is a different thing altogether.
Another interesting blog, Tim. I would like to contest the idea that during the late and immediately post-Roman period the intramural peoples were considered ‘Britons’ by those below the Wall. For me, the early imperial perception of the Forth-Clyde line as a dividing line between, first, conquered and barbarous Britannia, and, second, ‘Pict’ and ‘Briton’ had been eroded somewhat by the events of 367: the late fourth-century Roman historiography speaks overwhelmingly of the Hadrianic frontier as the partition between ‘Roman and barbarian’. As for the provincial population, since 212 all the civitates communities were citizens, thus their notion of Britishness excluded the intramural communities as non-citizen barbarians.
After all, Gildas considered that the Picts occupied all the lands upto the lower, stone wall.
I think that the intramural communities British ethnic identity was a consequence of their conversion to Christianity in the post-Roman period.
Hello Edwin. I’m quite happy to think of the intramural Brits being regarded by their southern neighbours as barbarians or ‘Picts’ or whatever, at least until (as you suggest) they abandoned paganism. It would mean Gildas wasn’t ignorant of what happened around AD 400 and didn’t get totally confused about the Roman walls after all. The real confusion probably lay in the actual process of how these groups adopted ‘ethnic’ identities, concepts of nationhood etc in the late 4th/early 5th centuries.
Hi Tim. It’s interesting that Historia Brittonum (c. 38) appears to reaffirm the southern Wall as the border with the Picts, at least as the situation was in the early fifth century – as the author understood it, at least.
I’ve always assumed the author of HB used Gildas as his main source on northern events c.400 and didn’t have much else to work with, other than Bede’s Anglocentric reading of Gildas. On the other hand, neither Gildas nor the HB author, both of whom were Britons, seem to have blinked at the idea of lumping their ‘countrymen’ north of Hadrian’s Wall with the Picts. It’s all a bit complicated, as usual. If we could be sure Coroticus was a king of Dumbarton we’d have good evidence (via Patrick) that the people of the Clyde were regarded as distinct from the Picts by c.450. Even without Coroticus we know (from burial evidence at Govan) that some, at least, of these Clydesiders were already Christian, which would divide them from the Picts even further. We might even go as far as calling them ‘Romano-Britons’ if we take Patrick literally, although I don’t suppose it would hold much water.
In the translation of Njal’s Saga by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pallson (Folio Society) it says of Kari Solmundarson, Grim Njalsson and their merry band: “They raided in the south around Anglesey and all the Hebrides. Then they made for Kintyre and landed there; they fought with the inhabitants and gathered much booty and returned to their ships. From there they went south to Bretland and raided, and then to the Isle of Man”.
The footnote explains, “‘Bretland’: this has always been assumed to be Wales, but there are strong indications that here and elsewhere in the sagas it refers to the area in south-west Scotland then occupied by Britons, known as the kingdom of Strathclyde”.
In Egil’s Saga, translated by Hermann Pallson and Paul Edwards (Folio Society), it says: “When Atherlstan took over the kingdom (c895), some of the noblemen who had lost their domains to his forebears made war against him; they thought it would be easy to reclaim them with a young king on the throne. These nobles were Britons, Scots and Irishmen”.
In this context I suspect that the ‘Britons’ referred to were not the Welsh of what is today Wales. They may have been descended from the nobility of the ‘tiroedd coll’ (lost lands), by then part of Mercia or, more likely, they were ‘Gwyr y Gogledd’ (Men of the North). Who played a very important role in Welsh history with the migration of the Votadini troops to north Wales, where they expelled the Irish settlers and founded what became the most powerful of the independent Welsh kingdoms, Gwynedd.
This was achieved under Cunedda, who married Gwawl, a daughter of another northern Welsh king, Coel Hen (Old Coel, or ‘Old King Cole’). They are reputed to have had nine sons who gave in turn gave their names to various territories. Ceredig to Ceredigion, formerly Cardiganshire; Meirion to Meironnydd, now part of Gwynedd, formerly Merionethshire; Maldwyn to the area known in Welsh as Maldwyn, in English, Montgomeryshire, and today the northern part of Powys.
To which I might add that until fairly recently the shepherds of Cumberland and Westmoreland used to count sheep in what was, virtually, Welsh. Why this persisted long after the language shift to English is a bit of a mystery, unless we regard it as an arcane ‘trade’ argot known to its practitioners and not needing to be understood by anyone else. Alternatively, a ‘code’ to baffle outsiders.
All of which tells us that for many centuries after the end of Roman rule there persisted in the area between the Clyde and the Ribble a Welsh presence the strength of which may have waxed and waned, but it persisted and it was recognised for what it was by all, including Icelanders. So it’s a pity that over the centuries so many have chosen, for blatantly political reasons, to promote the lie that the Welsh have always lived in Wales, and nowhere else; and that those who lived in England and Scotland during and after the Roman occupation were a totally different people.
Let me leave my Scottish cousins with one final thought, the oldest surviving Welsh poetry was written in late sixth century Scotland, by Aneirin, a bard in the Gododdin, the kingdom centred on Edinburgh, or Caeredin, as it is in Welsh. This poem can be read and understood by speakers of modern Welsh, yet scholars (of the typre referred to above) insist that it was written in a different language called Brythonic or Brittonic. While those same ‘scholars’ insist on calling Anglo-Saxon, a foreign language to speakers of modern English, ‘Early English’.
Many thanks for adding this interesting info here. I think you’re probably right about the identity of the Britons/Bretland in the sagas. In this context, Strathclyde makes more geographical sense than Wales. On Aneirin and Y Gododdin, however, I’m feeling rather less certain about the Edinburgh origin. Welsh literary experts seem to be drawing away from the idea that this poetry was composed in the sixth-century North, or indeed anywhere outside ninth-century Wales. I can’t quite buy into such a sceptical view, because it would mean we could no longer regard the Gododdin as a source of fascinating snippets about early northern history. But these experts know a lot more about Old Welsh literature than I do, so their views cannot be brushed aside lightly. Where I do tend to adopt their stance is on the historical value of Cunedda and Coel Hen, both of whom I see as figures of pseudo-history (which is where I believe their role in John Morris’ Age of Arthur belongs).
Tim, I came across this site whilst trying to ID a stone replica (I believe) of a Scottish cross that I have. It has the horseman as on the Jordanhill Cross, but below that it has an emblem similar to the one you use, half moon and compass (?), but this is vertical. Any ideas what this could be? I can send you a picture. Becky
Hello Becky. The image file didn’t come through as a link but if you email it over I’ll gladly take a look. My email is etarlindu [at] gmail [dot] com
Tim, I am surprised that nowhere in your discussion of the Britons of Dumbarton and Strathclyde do you mention the ancient tribe of the Damnonians, who were probably the indigenous people of the Strathclyde region. They apparently also migrated in part to northern Ireland, where they were known as the Fir Domnann. Do you have any information to share on the Damnonians/Fir Domnann?
Thanks!
Robert
Yes, I’ve neglected the Damnonii in my blogposts. They get mentioned in my books but have yet to appear here at Heart of the Kingdom or over at my other blog Senchus. A blogpost is already in the pipeline but it’s long overdue. It will probably focus on defining Damnonian territory (e.g. via place-names such as Dowanhill which might derive from the tribal name) and on the question of whether Damnonii is a scribal error for Dumnonii.
This is along with other sources is for me really amazing information. It’s incredible that from the conventional British texts, Alt Clut is located way down in the south end of Northumbria. The history of this small kingdom is completely different. Now that I have verified the information I have concluded English authors have it wrong. They are completely off base. The question is how could it have happen?!