It's not often that my Scotland History Tours take you to a location in England, and yet today
that's what I've done. Have I gone rogue, gone over to the dark side, gone completely fruit loop
heid (head) for mince mental, or is it that I'm making a series of videos looking at the different peoples
and kingdoms who made Scotland, from the Scots, to the Britons, the Picts, the Vikings, and today
I've come to Bamburgh Castle to talk about the Angles. If you're interested in the people,
places and events in Scottish history, then click the subscribe button at the bottom right
hand side of the screen. In the meantime, let me tell you a story. People often say to me Bruce
you know a lot about Scottish history, what do you think about independence?
And I say, if the English want independence, they can have it. They can even have Wales,
but we're keeping Northern Ireland. How else are we going to fill Parkhead and Ibrox every Saturday?
That's not going to happen by accident. Our story today starts as the Britons were losing
independence. Bamburgh Castle is on the site of what was originally a Brittonic fort around
the time that the Romans left. Now saying the Romans left, doesn't quite describe the times.
The collapse of Roman Britain was chaos, like nothing most of us have experienced. Imagine
partition in India, when the British wash their hands and leave you after centuries of control.
There's breakdown into factions, fear in a place that had been home, people desperately fleeing
in a quest for safety, economic breakdown, losing your livelihood to save your life,
or think of post-war Europe, where refugees on the move, trying to find a place of safety. Think
of the Wild West where law and order was based on whoever was the strongest, most violent, best armed
or fastest on the draw. Now I'm sure I'm going to get criticism in the comments, and of course
none of these analogies are perfect, I get that. I'm just trying to point out that when
the hegemony of centuries-old imperial order disappears, and civic structure, social structure,
rule of law and currency goes with it, as the Picts and the Scots are clambering over the wall,
zombie apocalypse feels a wee bit more than a video game doesn't it, but wouldn't it be
brilliant if the zombies all wore See You Jimmy hats? I think I've just invented a video game.
Of course some take advantage of the disorder, to set up as rulers in their own little fiefdoms, now
that the Romans have gone. Obviously this didn't all happen on the Tuesday afternoon in October.
There had been times past when Britannia had declared independence from Rome.
The Picts and the Scots, they'd raided before. The legions had left for mainland Europe to
deal with threats to the empire before, but this time, after a while, you realise,
they're not coming back. It was probably before that point that you started inviting barbarians
from across the North Sea to come and protect you from the barbarians coming over Hadrian's Wall.
You see sailing barbarians are fine, it's your wall climbing barbarians you have to watch out for.
When you thought the legions were coming back, they seemed like a stop gap.
When the legions returned, you'd thank the barbarians, you'd maybe have a get together in
the canteen, give out commemorative tankards and wish them all well in whatever
rapey, pillagy, mercenary endeavours that they had planned for the future. Oh we must keep in touch.
Are you on Facebook? Oh give me your details, but then you realise the legions aren't coming back.
The Angles are the new power in the area. This is becoming Angleland.
There were effectively two Anglian kingdoms in the north; Deira, that reached from the Humber
to the Tees, and Bernicia that stretched further north. Now amidst all that goes on over the next
few centuries, the kings of these two kingdoms will fight against each other winning and losing.
Sometimes the Bernician king will control Deira, sometimes the Deiran king, Bernicia.
Sometimes the two will co-exist, and sometimes they'll come together as a single entity.
History tells us that United Kingdoms aren't eternal. They're subject to the vagaries of
identity, fortune, and circumstance, and the warlords in both these little kingdoms will have each other,
and neighbours to deal with. Just as within what will become England, territories changed over time,
so within what would become Scotland. In this series on the peoples who made Scotland,
I've tried to weigh a bit of an anchor in the late 6th early 7th Century. In my video about the
Scots I mention Aeden MacGabrain. The Britons of Alt Clut are referred to Rydderich Hael. In case
anyone's actually following these videos, these two kings coincided with and conflicted with the Angle
King of Bernicia, Aethelfrith. Now the Britons had been fighting a losing Arthurian battle
against the rising Anglian power for a while. They tried to regain control by besieging the island of
Lindisfarne behind us, but the Angles defeated them. When the Britons made one last gasp attempt
to reclaim territory at what's now called Catterick, the Angles defeated them. In my video about the
Scots of Dalriada, I explained how Aeden MacGabrain then led a force to deal with Aethelfrith at Degastan.
What I didn't mention, was that his army would also have contained the remnants of the Britons,
and indeed an Anglian competitor to Aethelfrith for the throne of Bernicia. Aethelfrith
defeated them. From his power base here at Bamburgh, this Bernician ruler was unchallenged.
He then unified the two Anglian kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira, and married the daughter
of the previous king of Deira. Now I'm not entirely sure in which order that happened.
Did she jump, or was she pushed, and why did her daddy, the king, die around the same time?
The point is, that their sons would have the right to rule both those United Kingdoms,
but 13 years later, in 617 AD, it was her brother, the son of the dead king of Deira,
who killed Aethelfrith in battle. Aethelfrith's sons, approaching their teens by this stage,
fled with their mother to live amongst the Scots of Dalriada,
in Dalriada they grew to maturity. At the fortress of Dunadd, they were hosted by the son
of Aeden MacGabrain. It was with the monks of Iona that they were educated.
So when Aethelfrith's son, Oswald, came back from Dalriada to retake his throne 17 years later,
he brought Christianity to the pagan land of Angles and he established the abbey here at
Lindisfarne. I've actually got another video that gives some more detail on that, but not only did
Oswald take control here in Bernicia and in Deira, but like his dad before him, he started making
inroads into the territory of the Britons further north as well, besieging Edinburgh in 638 AD.
In Max Adam's book 'The King in the North', link in the description, he says of Oswald, 'he was
a famed warrior, the first English king to die a Christian martyr, the embodiment of a romantic hero,
the righteous exiled prince, whose destiny is to return triumphant to reclaim his throne'.
More than that, he's almost the first Englishman of whom a biography might be written. His political
legacy was partly responsible for the crusades, and for the idea that Britain is a Christian state.
He was the model for Tolkien's Aragon in The Lord of the Rings. If popular history needs an heroic
figure from the age of Beowulf, there's no need to invent or reinvent one. Oswald was the real thing.
Of course he is, he was brought up Scottish.
Like each of the peoples, who made Scotland, the power of the Angles ebbed and flowed over the
years, and the different royal houses gained and lost in 685 AD, a key battle with the Picts
brought a disaster that'll have to wait for another day, because an even bigger disaster
was waiting. You often see tours from Edinburgh to here in Bamburgh Castle advertised
as the Viking coast. You see in 793 AD, shock waves were sent through the English people, when Vikings
attacked and plundered Lindisfarne here. The Scots of Dalriada faced the same thing with
an attack on Iona two years later. The time of the Vikings had come.
Over the next 50 years or so, Viking attacks brought Picts and Scots together further north, and then
down here, when the great Viking army arrived, that southern part of Northumbria that we called Deira,
became the Viking kingdom of York. Here in Bernicia, the Viking takeover wasn't quite so complete,
but everyone knew who was boss. Now the fact that the Vikings episode's still to come, and yet
they're involved in this one, shows how messy the whole business of Scotland's formation was, and how
ridiculous it is for people to talk about Scottish 'ethnicity'. I'll be honest, I'm not even sure how
many of the people who talk like that are even Scottish. My point is that over a 500 year period,
the territory and ethnicity of Northumbrians, the people north of the Humber, had been changing;
Angles replace Britons, Vikings replaced Angles, and of course they would intermingle, and they
would have a bit of 'how's your father'. You know what those Vikings are like. The Picts and
the Scots had also been consolidated, so when ... I tell you what, let me take you to one last place.
This is Carham. It feels like a quintessentially quaint, little English village, and it is but only
just. You see this is the River Tweed. The north side of that is Scotland. This is somewhere else
entirely. If you watch my video about the quirks of the Scotland/England border, the village of
Wark that I mentioned, is less than two miles in that direction, but in 1018 this River Tweed wasn't
a border. This side of the river was Northumbria that we've been talking about, but so was the north
side. Now there are some sources that suggest that Scottish control had been creeping further south,
but whether or not that was the case, 1018 seems just about as definitive as snatched sentences
from possibly erroneous copies of conflicting ancient annals, where contradictory sources can be.
Two armies met here at Carham. Malcolm the Second of Scotland came south, accompanied by Owen the Bald,
the King of the Strathclyde Britons, that we've mentioned in another episode.
The other Anglo-Danish-Northumbrian army, they came north under Uhtred of Bamburgh. If there had been
any doubt before, there was no doubt by the end of the battle. Everything north of the river was
Scottish. The people north of the River Tweed had been Britons, then Angles of Bernicia and then a
kind of Anglian/Viking mix, from now on they'd be Scottish Borderers. If you want to hear more
about the different peoples who made Scotland, then there will be a link to another video
coming up now on screen. In the meantime, tha mi an dochas gum bith lath math leibh. Tiorridh an drasda.