The Auldest Tung

Skene

The idea not simply of not necessarily conquest but substantial Germanic settlement of Scotland’s east coast is not a new one. I claim no credit. That it was both below and above the Firth of Forth might, however, feel a tad strange yet again is not novel and all I have done is to use mapping, older and now modern, to burrow down and perhaps explore a little deeper the topographical traces left by it to re-examine and reinforce the original suggestion. Certainly I am convinced and hope you are or will be too, but what I do find curious by their exceptionalism are the events, or rather the outcomes of those events, in Pictland and Northumbria in the second half of the 7^th Century.

That Northumbria in 638 AD had mounted a military campaign across whatever border it then shared with Gododdin, besieging and capturing Dun Etin, Edinburgh, is as close to fact as can be extracted from looking at the history of the period. That it did so was most probably because it could. The Celtic kingdom was after Catterick at its weakest.

However, no similar campaign seems at that time to have been mounted anywhere beyond the Firth of Forth. That only came some thirty years later and would be specifically Pictish in its aims twice over. There was at no time any known siege of what we now know as Dundee or Aberdeen, St. Andrews, Forfar or Montrose and the reason can only be that there was no perception of need. It seems simply to have been accepted that loyalty lay where it was and could be assumed, to the extent that when Ecgfrith used Angus as his base for the second of the campaigns, the one against Bridei and his Picts, neither did he have qualms as to his presumption of right to do so or the locals show any sign of resistance or even concern on their part.

Yet stranger still was that before Ecgfrith’s first 671 AD anti-Drest incursion into Caledonia there had been no sign of disturbance or dissent amongst those same settlements, nor, as Bridei’s Picts organised themselves politically and militarily before Dun Nechtain, does it appear there was any requirement in those same locations to accommodate a new reality. Furthermore, after 685 AD, when Ecgfrith was defeated and killed, there seemed to have been absolutely no change either. There was no obvious opposition, indeed, there was literally no reaction at all, not even a trace of need to accommodate what was not just a new reality, but a new, new one. It was as if it had been accepted where some loyalty had been due, i.e. to Ecgfrith’s Angles when there, but those giving it felt themselves also to have independence enough for it also to be transferable as and where they decided. And they decided on Bridei, the notional Pict, with the result of that as of 685 AD the Scottish east coast above the Forth became a part, if a distinctive part, of the Scotland we know today and, depending on which version of history you accept, 288, 333 or 552 years before the east of Scotland south of that same Firth would do the same.

So the question has to be asked, what was the source of that independent mien and for that, in providing if not the answer then the best explanation I can find, praise is due to William Forbes Skene. An Aberdonian himself by upbringing, his father interestingly James Skene and of Rubislaw, he was born in upper Glen Dee in 1809, was a lawyer in his professional life, an antiquarian in private, gave numerous talks, published a number of notable books and tracts on Scottish history of the millennium after Christ and died in Edinburgh in 1892.

And there is one particular paper he wrote that especially caught my interest and from which I will from now on copiously and unashamedly quote. Its title is “On the Early Frisian Settlements in Scotland”. It was presented to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 1861 with what response I have no idea but its second paragraph contains the sentence that first caused me even to consider putting these fingers to this keyboard. It is,

“The object of this paper is ….. to lay before the Society the evidence which exists to show that the Frisians had formed settlements in Scotland at a period anterior to the date usually assigned for the arrival of Saxons in England.” 

As a statement of intent it is in some measure incontrovertible, since the Saxons acknowledged in their own propaganda, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, that non-Saxon, Germanic people were in England before them. Moreover there were, as already outlined, from other sources, albeit, whilst being all we have, less reliable ones, that by the time of Saxon arrival/appearance in about 495 AD there existed a Germanic group or groups specifically in and/or emanating from Scotland. They were the those led first by Octa, EbissaAbissa, Aesa/Esc and then Colgrin, Baddulph and Cheldric. But, although there are hints in that direction with the equally Hengest-originated idea of Frutes, what we did not have, until Skene is included, was any solid argument that they were not predominantly the mysterious Jutes, nor yet more Angles but Frisians, speaking, well, not English or even Anglo-Saxon since neither yet existed and not Anglic but the version of the proto-German spoken by the Frisians of the time. It would not have been the Frisian of today, New Frisian, spoken in several dialects from the north Netherlands, through Germany to Denmark but something that came before it, Old Frisian, of which we have not a trace, now bar perhaps one. Nor were they themselves antecedents of modern Frisians because the latter only arrived and/or returned in the 7^th Century after the inundations of the 5^th Century. The were Old Frisians. Nor, indeed, was their Frisian homeland the Frisia of today. It was Old Frisia, Magna Frisia, or at least a part or it and one to two hundred miles south of today’s.

So to William Skene. In the address his opening gambit is to try to pin down dates of first arrival not for the moment of Frisians but generic Germanics and to do so by considering all the pieces of evidence at his disposal, from Roman, British and Welsh sources, of which he identifies four. The first is 368 AD, when, as already stated, “saxons” were recorded with others, natives of Britain and possibly Ireland harrying Roman Britain from the north, whether by land or sea is unclear. Then there is 374 AD, 392 AD and 428 AD each seemingly with a different narrative perhaps individually indicating raider, Roman regular soldier, mercenary and free-lancer with the story of the 374 AD incursion matching in all detail except date that of seventy-five years the mainstream 449 AD account. And his conclusion is that, whilst there might be five possible answers in total not least because they are to five different questions, he believes the first presence, one that might be described as short-lived, to have been 369 AD, when the Roman Emperor Claudius described the successful campaign by his general, Theodosius, to repulse the invaders from the north of the previous year as leaving Ireland,

“weeping over her heaps of (slain) Scots”,

i.e. Gaels, then Thule, that is what has to be mainland Scotland above the Forth,

 “hot with (spilled) Pictish blood”

and the Orkneys left,

“stained (red) by (dead) Saxones”

so presumably already with "Saxon", i.e. Germanic of some sort, settlements on the archipelago and far earlier than those presumed for the Norse or even the Vikings.

However, the truth is that for our purposes the precise arrival date of the first Germanic people in Britain does not matter, only that they were there and from some point between roughly 369 AD and 449 AD there to stay. What is interesting, however, and as Skene points out, is that Procopius, writing from about 520 AD to 570 AD and therefore with the smallest possible information time lag, says that Brittia, so specifically northern England and Southern Scotland, was then inhabited by three peoples, not just Britons, of course, and Angles too, as might be expected by the dates, but also Frisians, to which should be added specifically the Welsh version with its additions not of the arrival of Hengest and Horsa in 449 AD but of Hengist’s children, the scented “Rowena” first and Octa and Ebissa next in the years immediately after.

She had come with selected troops from “Scythia”, with “Scythia” used at times for Scandinavia but given the recording inaccuracies of the period just as likely to be not so much a mistake but a mishearing of Frisia. Moreover they settled Lindsey and might have been at least in part “Wold” people. Furthermore, as the girl had not been given away without consultation with the “elders” of part of the newly-arrived cohort, those of the “Oghgul race”, perhaps, firstly, she, Rowena, was Ughgul or part Ughgul herself and, secondly, that Ughgul too is a mishearing of or even synonym for Ugloe, the area in Southern Jutland immediately to the west of Anglia.

However, for our purposes none of that really matters. What does is that young men, Rowena’s brothers or brother and cousin, arriving soon after but separately not only took themselves north but according to Nennius specifically,

 “…….they, when they had navigated around the Picts, laid waste to the Orkney Islands, and came and occupied many regions beyond the Mare Frisicum, as far as the confines of the Picts.” 

In other words they rounded Aberdeenshire and Moray, attacked presumably Pictish but possibly still "Saxon" Orkney, took what they could but did not necessarily stay, and then sailed back south leaving as they went implantations of their people in various places above what would be called the Fresic, the Frisian, Sea, said by Skene to be the Firth of Forth, certainly in Caledonia because of again the Pictish reference and quite possibly in Brittia too, so both south-east Scotland and north-east England above the Wall. And such was the extent of the manpower required for all this, if the numbers are to believed, somewhere between forty to fifty-six ships in all, perhaps 1,000 to 1,400 men, perhaps a 100 to 150 per drop-off, that,

 “some islands, whence they came were left without inhabitants,”

into which can be read that they were island- not mainland-dwellers, that their islands, still there but at the time probably being flooded by rising waters, were being entirely abandoned because there was an alternative, where previously there had not been and the total population involved, men, women and children, in the boats and in the homeland to follow on might be between 12,000 and 17,000, or in today’s terms ten or eleven times that number.

And it is at this point that Skene makes what might be described as his killer-point, even if he seems unlikely to have used that phrase to describe it. Going back to the statement from Procopius writing in the first half of the 6^th Century that North Britain contained at that time three peoples, Britons, Frisians and Angles and in the knowledge that the first Angles, at least north of the Tyne are said under Ida only to have arrived in 547 AD he concludes that it was Frisians, what we would more precisely call Old Frisians, not Angles, who had been the first non-natives to arrive. And to Skene's conclusion can now logically be added that, firstly, since Hengest might have been Frisian himself it can be assumed, as his sons/nephew, that Octa and Abissa were at least partly too, secondly, that their base by the “Wall” and in the valley of the Tyne was also Frisian in essence and therefore not Anglic, as, thirdly, were all their stopping-off points, including the Firth of Forth, on their travels from Orkney south, fourthly, that until the much later arrival of Anglic Ida they were the only Germanic settlers and therefore speakers at least more or less north of Bamburgh, fifthly, that they would probably remain so largely untouched for about a decade short of 200 years, that is until the final collapse of their buffer against those same Angles, Gododdin, in 638 AD and sixthly there may even be evidence to connect topographically Old Frisia with its new iteration on the other side of the North Sea.