McGuigan Neil - The Battle of Carham

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by

John Donald, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

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ISBN: 978 1 910900 24 6

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Neil McGuigan

The Evidence of the Earliest Charters

Dauvit Broun

Philip Dunshea

Fiona Edmonds

Understanding the Dominion of Uhtred

Neil McGuigan

David Petts

Victoria Thompson

David A. Woodman

Alex Woolf

Dauvit Broun is Professor of Scottish History at the University of Glasgow.

Philip Dunshea previously lectured in Celtic History at the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, University of Cambridge.

Fiona Edmonds is Director of the Regional Heritage Centre and Lecturer in Regional History at Lancaster University, as well as Director of the Victoria County History of Cumbria.

Neil McGuigan completed his doctorate in 2015 at the University of St Andrews, where he regularly teaches.

David Petts is an Associate Professor in the Department of Archaeology, Durham University.

Victoria Thompson is an independent scholar specialising in early medieval sculpture and mortuary behaviour.

David A. Woodman is Fellow in History and Senior Tutor at Robinson College, Cambridge.

Alex Woolf is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of St Andrews.

This volume was conceived in April 2014, in the aftermath of a conference commemorating the millennium of the battle of Clontarf. The scale of academic and popular participation in this event at Trinity College, Dublin was, to say the least, impressive. With the millennium of an analogous Scottish battle four years away (or so it was believed), it struck us that we as historians of Viking-Age Scotland and Northumbria had a duty to come up with some sort of commemoration. The battle of Carham, of course, has never quite captured the popular imagination in Scotland or northern England like Clontarf in Ireland. Nevertheless, turn to any general history of Scotland (or Northumbria indeed), and the chances are good that you will find the battle of Carham occupying a similar coming-of-age role in Scotlands past. Carham has featured centrally in how the history of Scotland has been told by modern historians because it is one of the few things we can plausibly relate to the mysterious process of Scottish expansion beyond the Forth and into Anglo-Saxon territory of Northumbria in the period between the tenth and twelfth centuries. The outcome of this process, in turn, facilitated an expansion of what it meant to be Scottish, led to the ethnogenesis of the familiar Late Medieval and Early Modern Scottish Lowlander, and gave Scotland its familiar complexion as a territorial unit.

As some of the contributions in this volume suggest, when subjected to scrutiny the significance of the battle of Carham itself becomes less apparent. Much like a low-resolution photograph, the picture blurs when one zooms in on the fine detail. Yet, the importance of the developments that Carham has come to represent remains undeniable. Lack of reliable evidence provides one of the reasons the process is still quite poorly understood, but the problem has been compounded by the fact that the Northern English realm ruled from Bamburgh, the northern Northumbrian polity that stretched from the Forth to the Tyne, the region in which the battle took place, has tended not to attract as much interest from modern scholarship as its neighbours; i.e., Strathclyde, the Scottish kingdom and the Vikings of southern Northumbria. Whereas modern scholarship has lifted these topics out of the illusory certainty provided by John of Fordun and the Icelandic sagas, by contrast, uncritical readings of extremely problematic twelfth-century material tend still to be relied upon whenever northern Northumbria emerges in passing. Things are changing, and all of the contributions in this text play a part in improving understanding of the region.

The volume provides an introduction to the problems associated with the battle itself, identifying its participants and dating the event. The precise location of the battle itself is not known, and no archaeology has ever been connected to the conflict with any authority. This volume does not, and probably could not, offer any study of the weapons or tactics used in the battle itself. However, as David Pettss offering demonstrates, a great deal of insight can be achieved through comparative scholarship as well as understanding of the archaeology and the landscape. Likewise, Victoria Thompsons new look at the sculpture of the Tweed basin in the era of the battle opens up another way of understanding the region, and recognising its importance and vitality. The contributions of the editors seek to understand the Bamburgh realm itself, and its political structures, secular and ecclesiastical, in more detail. The process by which a large part of the former Bamburgh realm was absorbed into Scotland, in the three centuries after Carham, is examined in Dauvit Brouns contribution. So important was this process that one power centre in the region south of the Forth eventually emerged as Scotlands capital. Philip Dunshea looks at early Edinburgh and how the fortress was perceived in the critical centuries around the battle, particularly among the Britons. Sticking with the Britons, Fiona Edmonds offers an understanding of the battle from the point of view of Bamburghs main British neighbour, Strathclyde. Finally, one of the key sources for the battle, the twelfth-century chronicle compilation known as Historia Regum, provides the object of David Woodmans study.

The chapters of this volume reflect the interests of the scholars who were generous enough to lend their efforts to this commemoration. The editors would like to express their gratitude to all the contributors. Thanks are also due to Professor Thomas Owen Clancy, and to the publishers and to the work, patience and effort of Nicola Wood and Mairi Sutherland.

Neil McGuigan