After the Poetry, more history

While in other areas of Britain, some of the areas still have names belonging to the previous British tribes e.g. Gwynedd, Dyfed, Devon, Kent it is not clear how the land was divided following the collapse of the Roman Empire. The most likely scenario is of a break up into areas ruled by warlords. The area around Lothian had been the home of the Votadini and they gave their name to the later British kingdom of Gododdin. By the time we start getting saints lives - such as that of St Kentigern and references from the Welsh Triads the name is Lleuddiawn or Lothian - home of the eponymous King Lot, who appears in the Arthurian legends. He is Lleuddiawn Luydog "the Wealthy" king of Din Eidyn - Edinburgh and buried at Traprain Law.   [19]. The core of the kingdom of Strathclyde might be the previous territory of the Dumnonii and that of the Kingdom of Rheged - centred on Carlisle - that of the Carvetii, but we have no proof of this.

People have argued, often persuasively, that King Arthur belongs to this period and that he slowed the Saxon advance for a generation. A list of his battles is to be found in the Historian Brittonum.

The Historia talks about four kings who fought against the Anglo-Saxons in Northumbria. The first was Outigern (Eudeyrn in modern Welsh) who may be identical with Urien, Lord of Catterick and Rheged. The others were Rhydderch the Old (? of Al Clud), Gwallawg, of Elfed in modern Yorkshire - and cousin of Urien Rheged [20]and Morcant -( from Gododdin?)

Urien Rheged is said to have had the Anglo-Saxons besieged on the island of Lindisfarne (Metcaud in Old Welsh) for three days. He is also said to have been killed by Morcant, possibly a king of Strathclyde. Urien was killed in 574 or 585 [21]. His murderer is known by the as Llofan Llaf Difo - Llofan "of the destroying hand".

Rhydderch the Old may be Rhydderch ap Tudwal, in the Irish annals as Roderc son of Tothail, king of the Rock on the Clyde [11].

The Battle of Catraeth in around 600, is said to have been an attempt by the British kings to strike at the Anglo-Saxons in their colonies east of the Pennines, but it was a failure [15] .

In the early to mid 7th Century, Cadwallon, King of Gwynedd, whose kingdom had been overrun for a while by the Northumbrians, defeated the Northumbrians at the battle of Hatfield Chase near Doncaster. This had been until captured by Edwin part of the British kingdom of Meigen. At this battle, King Edwin was killed and the Northumbrian advance was checked. However, the Northumbrians under King (later Saint) Oswald, recovered and in turn killed Cadwallon at the Battle of Heavenfield on Hadrian's Wall in around 633 [10]. Prior to the battle, the British had advanced up from York to the Wall which they briefly recovered from the Northumbrians. The Northumbrian King Edwin had been baptised at York in 627. Evidence from the Anglo-Saxon conquest of Somerset and Devon is that as the Anglo-Saxon kings took control they granted land to their followers - this evidence for a similar process no longer exists in the North, but it is possible a similar process occurred [22]

Breeze discusses the story recorded in the Historia Brittonum, that Rhun.  son of Urien Rheged baptised the Northumbrian King Edwin in 627 and that Rhianfellt, daughter of Royth (son of Rhun), grandson of Urien Rheged became the second wife of the Northumbrian king Oswiu (who died in 670) [21]. Breeze argues that Royth was the last independent king of the British kingdom of Rheged. Breeze corrects the name Royth to modern Welsh Rhaith, which seems plausible.  Koch notes that Catterick by 627 was a Northumbrian Royal Vill [20] It remained a centre of Northumbrian christianity, where James the Deacon baptised people in the River Swale.

The British collapse allowed the Anglo-Saxons to advance west over the Pennines and North into Berwickshire and East Lothian, capturing Edinburgh in 638 [22]. St Cuthbert was able to visit Carlisle in 685. By 680 the Northumbrians ruled over Strathclyde and by 700 had reached Withorn [22].

At the Battle of Nechtansmere in 685 however, the Northumbrians were checked by the Picts, but they still retained control over their territories in the south of Scotland and Cumberland.

 The Northumbrians annexed Kyle in 750 and captured Dumbarton in 756 in alliance with the Picts [8][22]

By comparison, there is no material evidence of Anglo-Saxons at St Albans until the early 600s. Ethelwerd  tells us that after the battle of Deorhamme in 577, the Anglo-Saxons took the British cities of Gloucester, Cirencester and Bath. Devon came under Anglo-Saxon control by the 700s. Cornwall's bishop did not come under the control of an English bishop until 870 [10], though the Cornish language survived much longer than Cumbric - no doubt due to the formalisation of the border at the Tamar, as the border with Wales had been formalised at Offa's Dyke around 680 [23]. If the Anglo-Saxons further south ran out of appetite for further expansion, that was not true in our area and no formal border was drawn with the Cumbrian Britons; This may be why their British identity did not survive as long here as in Wales, Cornwall or Brittany.

Before the Northumbrian conquest in our region, there were separate British kingdoms. Only the Kingdom of Strathclyde with its capital at the Rock on the Clyde at Dumbarton survived in any sense. The Britons themselves remained although Anglo-Saxon influence was strong and many of them must have given up their language to speak English, as the Britons further east had done. When British power returned in the form of the Kingdom of Cumbria, it was not to a wholly monoglot British population, but to an area that had varying pockets of Anglo-Saxon settlement. In some places, English must have become the primary language of the people during the Northumbrian occupation, but the British language, or Brittonic, or Cumbric did not die out until later.

The history of the British language follows the political fortunes of its speakers. British was a Celtic tongue very closely related to Gaulish and the Continental Celtic languages (Caesar tells us this) and also to Irish - though perhaps not as closely as to Gaulish (experts disagree).  There may well have already been a split between the Romanised British of those south of  the Antonine Wall and the Pictish speech north of it, though it is likely that it was a patchwork of mutually intelligible dialects from Cornwall to Caithness - much as the local dialects of Germanic speech across the German and Dutch borders or from Spain and Catalonia through the Occitan region to Northern Italy.

As the areas of British speech were split up by wedges of Anglo-Saxon control, the British language developed into different dialects. Those Britons who migrated to Brittany, spoke Brezhoneg, those in the South West originally spoke Brethonek but then began calling their language Kernowek or Cornish. Those in the West changed the name of their language from Brythoneg to Cymraeg - the language of the Cymry. We do not know what the Cumbrians called their speech, but Kenneth Jackson coined the term Cumbric [4]. Edmonson notes that eventually everyone came to call the Cumbrians by a version of Cymry - for example Cuimrich in Gaelic, Cumbraland in English , Kumrar in Norse [7]. Everyone except the other Cymry - the Welsh - who continued to call them Cludwys "People of the Clyde" - though the poem Armes Prydein welcomes the Cludwys as well as the Cornish to join them to oust the Anglo-Saxons. Edmondson's explanation is that the Welsh couldn't call the Northern Britons Cymry because they were just some Cymry [7]. This would be in the same way that Welsh writers couldn't  define the men of Gwynedd or Gwent just by the name Cymry; they needed to be more specific. As Woolf says, for the Welsh (unlike for the English) it wasn't the ethnicity but the location of the Cumbrians that was their primary defining feature, so instead of calling them Cymry, which the Welsh may have taken as read, they called them Cludwys, as they would refer to the people of Gwent as Gwenhwys. Woolf speculates that had a Northumbrian met someone from Wales, he may have identified him too as "Cumbrian".

There is also a note in the book edited by John T. Koch, that there is some research that says the Britons had a common literary language up until around 1000. This means a common orthography and I think some of the spellings of the kings of Strathclyde and the 11th Century Dunegal Lord of Nithsdale suggest this common orthography was maintained in Cumbria. We don't know this of course and it would suggest there were continued cultural links between the Britons even after large parts of the island were under English control and settlement [24].