The Auldest Tung

Saving Calefrisian

It has to be said that history seems to have been kind to Calefrisian. Post-730 AD it never had to have a D-Day, a turning-point. It never needed it. As a language it has been a chugger rather than a blaster, quietly and efficiently getting the job done, a bit like the people who speak it.

But in doing so it has been fortunate to have been left more or less alone. There has been just one early minor blip. The first Angus, son of Fergus, as already said, died in 761 AD, and of old-age. He was succeeded by his brother, yet another Bridei, who stepped up from being king of Fortriu, admittedly for just two more years but in the meantime the boundaries of the Pictish kingdom appear to have been rock-solid with whatever flux there might have been to the west and outwards if anything. And within those boundaries, at a time when climatic change may have been bottoming out or even beginning to reverse, there seems to have been peace and therefore the greatest chance of prosperity.

However, the truth is that with Bridei’s death in 763 AD this might have all fallen apart. He was replaced by unrelated Ciniod and he was quite probably once more a Gael, although not a Comgall, and therefore unlikely to have Anglic rapprochement at the top of his agenda. For that reason alone Northumbria might have been able to find a reason to cause trouble but did not seem to feel the need. Ciniod stayed in place for eleven years. In part that may have been because he was himself dealing with some problems with rival Gaels. A probably drawn battle was fought in 768 AD. And then in Northumbria in that same period there was either civil war or kings sympathetic to Pictland. Indeed in 774 AD when Ahlred, the Northumbrian king, was deposed he found asylum with Ciniod as meanwhile the frontier remained intact with the Pictish kingdom and its minority Germanic but majority Calefrisian population left to itself to the north, the Anglic-Frisian population of the Lothians likewise with the two no doubt interacting as normal across the “Frisian Sea” between them.

And even when Ciniod’s successors on the Pictish throne came and went, five in fourteen years, they were matched to the immediate south by deposed, deposed and exiled, deposed, murdered and deposed and exiled. And this continued as Caustantin, the probable grandson or possibly grand-nephew of Angus, came to the Pictish throne. He would reign for precisely thirty years and be followed for another fourteen by Oengus, Angus, his brother, forty-four years in all as the sequence in Bamburgh and York was died, exiled, deposed, died and died before Eanred came to the throne in 810 AD. And by that time, although he reigned for thirty-one years, the main aggressor had become Wessex. Indeed from 829 AD, when Wessex actually extracted submission, support for Northumbria was looked for and found by the Northumbrians themselves not north of the Border but across the North Sea and from the Frankish kings, Charlemagne until his death in 814 AD and Louis the Pious thereafter.

It meant that both north and south of the Firth of Forth what were both by then effectively indigenous Germanic languages, which together and separately had had four generations of undisturbed development before the arrival of the next external threat, one of equally Germanic origin. Between 450 AD and 800 AD the problems of powering and steering boats larger enough to take on longer sea crossings had been solved and seemingly in Norway possibly by the Vikings and certainly the Norse. And probably the latter from a base on Shetland or Orkney, perhaps both, had in midsummer 793 AD made their first recorded raid on Britain, as against a slightly earlier, probable landing in southern England that had gone wrong rather then being overtly belligerent. But interestingly that first raid had not been on nearest neighbour, Caledonia, but Northumbrian Lindisfarne. And by chance or planning it was genius.

Had they raided into Pictland with Caustantin on the throne there is every chance there would have been an instant and numerically overwhelming response against Orkney that the Vikings cum Norse might not have survived. But by raiding Northumbria and then Ireland the only Pictish reaction was quite likely applause for the former and indifference to the latter. Moreover the only possible subsequent intrusion was the 795 AD raid on Skye, possibly Pictish but probably already Gaelic Skye and, whichever way, a long way from the seats of power on the Moray Firth and Strathearn, after which any further aggression was turned on Gaeldom itself. Iona, the then still Gaelic not yet Alban religious centre, was attacked in 802 and 806 AD. Indeed, when thirty years later Norse raids did become were problematic for Pictland the east coast including its religious centre of St. Andrews seems still to have been left remarkably alone. Only one king, Eogan in 839 AD, was killed fighting Norse and it seems to have been in the north in Fortriu just before Kenneth McAlpin. So the fifteen years of his reign from 843 AD saw, as probably relatively unimportant Caithness, parts of Sutherland, more of the West and the Western Isles were allowed to be settled, not so much a Pictish retreat, or at least uncontrolled retreat, but more partial abandonment and instead deliberate southern expansion. The Forth was certainly crossed. “Saxonia”, i.e. Saxon-dominated, Anglic Northumbria was invaded six times, Dunbar, probably the Anglic, south-east Lothian, regional capital, was burned, Magilros, Melrose, captured and a large part of the Anglic-Frisian Lothians and Border country beyond might have been effectively absorbed. It meant in total thirty years, when there was not exactly peace but again no political interference from south of the border, and now for Calefrisian a total of four hundred years of almost uninterrupted linguistic peace.

Indeed that peace was to continue through the rest of the 9^th Century, in the second half of which it was helped by the Danish-inspired invasion of what was becoming England by the Great Heathen Army (GHA), and with a single break the whole of the 10^th. Arriving first in 865 AD the GHA landed initially in East Anglia but, unlike the Viking/Norse raiders that proceeded it and looked for booty, it came to conquer not just territory but specifically, firstly as priority, that held by the other Germanic groupings that had once lived in Denmark, Angles, Jutes, etc. and, secondly, that of its still southern, equally Germanic neighbours, the Saxons. It at no time attempted to take Cornwall, Wales north-west England or Caledonia. In fact it only once ventured beyond York, despite that town being its original destination because it was also the source, once more if legend has some truth to it, of the first of the two most pressing problems it had on its three-point to-do list.

The first problem itself was that Aelle II of Northumbria had a short time before captured and killed what had been a well-connected Danish-Swedish raider and his sons came to avenge his death. And that they did. Having over-wintered at Thetford, the following year they went straight north, captured Aella at York, put him and Northumbria’s previous king to death, tucked a first Anglic kingdom under the belt, kept Deira to themselves, put in a local place-man to rule whatever was still considered Northumbrian territory north of the Tyne and moved on.

But, again I stress, it was not north. Instead the Danes turned south and to take on a second Anglic kingdom, Mercia, which rapidly agreed terms, with the GHA over-wintering at Nottingham and returning to York in 868-9 AD. It was two down one to go and, clearly with a massive axe to grind with Anglic kingdoms in particular, it turned on the third, retraced its steps and, having defeated and killed East Angia's king, spent the winter and, it seems, the following year too back at Thetford.

That the GHA had an agenda, almost an obsession, particularly with Angles, is fascinating, not least because it has never been adequately explained. It may have had something to do with the two peoples, as the former finally replaced the later, having crossed swords, perhaps literally, in ancient Anglia, a mutual hatred. However, the chronology does not seem to fit so I suggest something else. The Danish conquest of all of Denmark was new. And go to Denmark even today and they are very coy about what happened to the people who lived on current Danish territory before that conquest. Indeed they seem happy to accept the explanation that those people had simply moved on to England and that the land, when the Danes, arrived had been deserted. Yet it seems unlikely. Far more probable is that there were some still there, there was still from the Danish perspective too much contact, even coming and going, across the North Sea for “sedition”, even invasion from England to be potential problems with the solution a pre-emptive strike and the saga of revenge by his sons of Ragnar Lothbrok the equivalent of the “Iraqi dossier" on weapons of mass destruction.

However, this is a book about Scotland not Denmark so back to the GHA. Perhaps in 870 and early 871 AD it was regrouping, waiting for reinforcement, perhaps it took Essex, but certainly later in 871 AD the GHA made its move against Wessex, was bought off, marched north and overwintered at London. Then it was back to York, more reinforcements, a campaign in Mercia once more, another overwinter close to where the Trent met the Humber, so Gainsborough, another campaign in Mercia with the taking possession of its eastern half in 874 AD, a return to York, the taking of the remainder of Mercia in 877 AD and in 878 AD a second go at Wessex, which this time did not go well. The Battle of Edington in Wiltshire was lost, an agreement was reached and England below the Tees was divided, Wessex in the south, west and west Midlands, Danelaw in the east, East Midlands and north.

And whilst all this was going from its base in Pictland the Alpine dynasty was left alone to rule its lands for another two hundred years with that one, already-mentioned brief interruption. Danelaw was to last until 954 AD, although it had been chipped at since 902 AD, when Essex changed side. East Anglia effectively followed in 903 AD. Mercia was lost in 917 AD, York briefly in 918 AD, whilst some sort of fealty to the Wessex king or treaty arrangement was agreed in 920 AD by a number of rulers including Constantine II, grandson of Kenneth, and in 934 AD still under Constantine, not Northumbria but Athelstan of Wessex, for some reason or other, took a force overland and by sea, it is said specifically as far as Kincardine.

That it was Kincardine is, in itself, interesting, as is that the army is then said to have ravaged southern Alba. The former seems apposite. Gourdon and the country back of it to Fordoun was, if the Saxon-Down assumption is accepted, possibly Saxon-settled. Athelstan, like Ecgfrith two hundred and fifty years earlier, was dealing notionally with his own. The latter seems a little pointless in that most of what he must have passed through could have been very largely Germanic anyway and in any case it seems Constantine withdrew, presumably north and, perhaps still with the memory of Dun Nechtain, was not followed on. And in addition at the end of it all in September Athelstan simply got back on his ships and sailed off south never to return. Perhaps he did not fancy an East Coast winter.

And that was almost it, except for the Battle of Brunanburh. Whilst Constantine might have withdrawn he was clearly not happy and by 937 AD was part of a coalition along with Owen of the Scots-Brythonic kingdom of Strathclyde and Olaf, the king of Norse Dublin. It was a strange triumvirate, a Pict, a Briton and a Northman, which on gathering an army landed somewhere on the border of Britannia and Brittia and confrontation with the Saxons ensued. Some say it was an encounter that changed the direction of England, and that is probably correct. What would England, particularly Brittia, have looked like had there not been a Saxon victory? Yet no-one has any real idea where the battle took place. Suggestions are the Wirral but there are also reports, albeit far from contemporary, that the fleet carrying the attacking forces arrived via the Humber suggesting somewhere north of Lincoln or the Jutish Triangle by Doncaster once more. I suggest Barnetby or Barnburgh for no other reasons than name-similarity and they are where they are. And, although the coalition defeat was said, admittedly by Anglo-Saxon sources, to have been decisive, there was never any follow-up, not north of the border, either east or west, or across the Irish Sea. So after a short period of five years of relative disruption life continued as before. It meant now that lack of linguistic disturbance to the north-east of the Forth with now not one but two short, one-summer exceptions had lasted for fifteen years shy of five hundred.

However, lack of disturbance cannot and would not be said even in the short-term for south of the Forth. In 954 AD the Saxons having de facto controlled south Northumbria since 927 AD formally annexed most but not all of the rest. The reasons are slightly convoluted and would seem to have a bearing on why post-937 AD there seemed to have been so little Saxon reaction. Athelstan himself died in 939 AD and he was succeeded by his 18-year-old half-brother, Edmund, at which point Norse Olaf of Dublin was back. More than that he was able to take Northumbria and from there clearly had plans for expansion. Still in 939 AD he agreed a peace with Edmund, yet within two years was in control of East Mercia. Then in 941 AD he was either raiding, attacking an Anglic abbey at Tyningham north of Dunbar, or consolidating his northern territories but either way in doing so he lost his life, killed, it is said, at Auldhame by North Berwick opposite Fidra, the how or at the hand of whom unclear.

Olaf would be succeeded by his cousin, Amlaib Cuaran and stayed in York for three years then was back in 949 AD for another, then doing perhaps a swopsy with Erik Haraldson, also known as Eric Bloodaxe, although there are other versions. That is until the latter was finally expelled in 954 AD by the Northumbrians themselves and may or may not have been killed. It matters not. However, in the meantime Edmund of Wessex had in 946 AD died, probably assassinated, to be replaced again by a brother, Eadred, and it was he who, having tried and failed once to overthrow Haraldson in 948 AD, losing the Battle of Castleford, stepped in on the axe-man’s departure and annexed Brittia’s north-eastern province.

Except that importantly he did not succeed in reacquiring all. That same year Ildulb, son of Constantine, crossed the Forth, taking Edinburgh. In fact the fortress was said actually to have been evacuated and abandoned. And with it came not all the territory to the border but East Lothian. West Lothian was probably absorbed with the adsorption of Strathclyde into Scotland in 1030 AD. But in the meantime on the east coast south the “Frisian Sea” pure Anglic must have been push back with the by then Franglic spoken there more likely to be reinforced by purer CaleFrisian from the other side of the water, in other words by a linguistic flow that was in direction precisely the opposite of what modern historians, wrongly in my opinion, accept as given. And it would have been further consolidated with the formal granting in 973 AD of East Lothian by Wessex in the form of Edmund’s son, Edgar the Peaceful, a name that says it all, to Kenneth II, Ildulb’s cousin, albeit distantly. Moreover, it would have spread further south still to more or less the current border under the last of the Alpin kings, Malcolm II, Kenneth II's son, with his victory at the Battle of Cadham by Coldstream in 1018, by which time Calefrisian would have completed getting on for six hundred years, almost half-time in what we know to be, at least in its heartlands, now a millennium and three-quarters of uninterrupted and independent linguistic existence, enough surely for a life of its own and in direct contradiction to today’s received wisdom.