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Appendix 7: Urien and
his Legends
Fabio P.
Barbieri
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In Book 7, chapter 4, I tried to
remove from the picture of British history the
supposed siege of Lindisfarne by a coalition of
northern chieftains. The glorious Urien
leads his coalition to victory against the Angles
till they are besieged in an island: at which
point, with final victory within their grasp, the
coalition collapses because the evil Morcant is
jealous of Urien! I find it incredible that
textbooks respected and deserving of respect,
such as for instance, Nora Chadwick's Celtic
Britain, take the legendary Nennian account
of Urien as the golden champion of British power,
betrayed by the Judas-like Morcant, with complete
seriousness, including the supposed siege of
Lindisfarne - a place that did not gain any
importance until decades after Urien's time.
Chadwick is simply haunted, consciously or not,
by the notion of the clash of British and
English, and must make the facts fit her theory.
Meirion Pennar, the latest translator, simply
cannot rid himself of the notion that Urien was a
hero of the struggle against the English, in
spite of having translated the damn things
himself; and the brilliant Molly Miller, in an
article otherwise radiant with learning, sense
and insight, just takes the
historicity of the "siege" for granted;
I suggest, with the greatest respect, that we
relegate it to the world of legends.
To begin with, it only mentions
persons known from other sources, which is
suspicious in itself; and it mentions them in
characters that are superficially similar, and
yet, to closer attention, thoroughly
contradictory to the data to be recovered from
better sources. Urien leads three other
kings, Gwallawg, Rhydderch and Morcant: Rhydderch
and Morcant are the Good and the Bad King in the
legend of St. Kentigern, and Gwallawg is the Gwledig
of Elemet in the historical Taliesin's poems
- as if a gwledig would resign command of
a major war to a mere teyrn such as the
historical Urien! As for Strathclyde, if -
as I think likely - there is any history in the
legend of Kentigern, then Morcant (Morken in the
Latin life of the saint by Jocelyn of Furness)
died before the young Rhydderch became king of
Stratchlyde. Rhydderch seems to have taken
part in the battle of Armderydd, which is
dateable to about 584, and by then he must
already have been a king; he died in 616, 30 or
more years later. If these data are
correct, he must have been quite young when he
won the kingship; and by then Morken must have
been already dead, since he died, according to
the Life of St.Kentigern, before the Saint was
driven into exile - from which Rhydderch recalled
him. On every account, the likelihood of
Morken/Morcant fighting side by side with
Rhydderch as confederate kings must rate at less
than zero. His traitorous role in the
coalition is clearly the counterpart of his
villainous role in the life of the Saint, and as
I regard the latter as the earlier legend of the
two – with probably at least one foot in
history – I consider his role in the Siege
of Metcaud derivative.
Besieging an evil invader in an
island till ruin befalls citizens and enemies
alike is an old feature of Celtic legend, found
in particular in the Irish story of the siege of
Conan's Tower, in which the Irish of Nemed's
people assault the tower of their Fomoire enemies
till both besiegers and besieged are overwhelmed
by the sea. But a considerably closer to
the tale of Urien is that of Vortimer, who drove
the English from Britain and besieged them in an
island three times, until he was treacherously
killed. The island where he is supposed to
have besieged them is said to be Thanet; but as
we have seen that the connection of the legendary
Hengist with Thanet depends on that of the
historical St.Augustine, there is no particular
need to believe that this identification is
primitive. On the other hand, Nennius does
mention a definitely legendary island in
connection with this legend, namely the supposed
home of the Saxons, insula Oghgul. No
such island ever existed; and given the parallel
of the siege of Conan's Tower, in which it was
the native Irish who sailed to besiege their
enemy, it does not seem unlikely that it was
originally insula Oghgul that Vortimer
besieged, until Thanet was intruded in Hengist's
legend, and Hengist's whole legend into
Vortigern's.
The moral of the story is clear -
rather too clear for real life: the British could
overwhelm the English as long as they kept
united; disunity and jealousy had doomed them.
But the North Britain it depicts is one in which
the class distinction between kings, very clear
in the historical Taliesin, have already broken
down, in which all kings are seen as equal and
every attempt to fight the national enemy must
take the form of a coalition between independent
and proud British monarchs with no duties to one
another or to higher authorities, in which,
indeed, the impossibility of a gwledig
like Gwallawg giving way to a teyrn like
the historical Urien is not felt at all - not
even to the extent that some story is concocted
to explain it away. In short, this account
preserves no memory whatever of the Gildasian
age; and that being the case, we can trust our
instinctive reaction that the whole story of a
coalition of four kings coming within an inch of
victory and failing because the worst of them was
jealous of the best, is not history but a fable
with a moral.
No poem of Taliesin even hints
that Urien ever took part in coalitions against
the English, and in fact the only coalition he
might possibly have joined - and it was not a
success - was with one individual called Ulph -
obviously a Teuton of some sort - against
the kingdom of Alclud (Strathclyde) - where both
Morcant and Rhydderch reigned! In point of
fact, this suggests a reason for the rise of this
legend: quite simply, to claim the poetic
heritage of Taliesin and the enduring fame of
Urien for an alliance with Strathclyde, against
the English. As for Urien, he was made the
hero of the fable, quite simply, because he was
known to have been a great king and a great
warrior; and he was known to have been a great
king and a great warrior because the songs of
Taliesin made him so – and they had done it
so well that even now, at the dawn of the
twenty-first century, their power can still be
felt like a distant trumpet. But neither
Urien, nor any of the other three famous kings he
is supposed to have led to the siege of Metcaud
(Lindisfarne), can have done what they are said
to have done: the contradictions are blatant; and
for that matter, is it possible that Lindisfarne
could have played such a part, when it did not
become a place of any importance until St.Aidan -
following Irish precedent - chose it to establish
his monastery?
In fact, there are no less than
four or five separate and incompatible legends of
the hero's wars and death: one or two, as
everyone knows, in the Arthurian cycle; one in
the Llywarch Hen cycle, which, as N.J.A.Williams
has pointed out, shows signs of having
been as omnivorous in its time as the Arthurian;
one, probably of Welsh origin, that made him the
victim of two well-known heroes, Clytno Eidyn and
Dyfynnwawl mab Mynedawc Eidyn; and the one of
decidedly northern (Strathclyde Welsh) origin,
which made him the victim of the jealous Morgan
as he was about to eliminate the English of the
north from northern history altogether. Through
all this there run a thread of mythology, not
clearly assigned to any particular legend, in
which Urien becomes the lover of Modron or Matrona,
an acknowledged goddess; Owain is the incarnation
of her son Mabon or Apollo Maponos; and
Urien himself is slain by Llovan Llawdyvro,
who sounds suspiciously like the supreme Celtic
pagan god Lleu Llawgyffes, at Aber Lleu,
the river-mouth of Lleu. Clearly, everyone
had a different idea of who or what Urien was,
what he did, and why he died.
Finally, there is the small matter
of his death. By the time of Dadolwch
Urien, the old man was unable to pick up his
weapons and fight, and was having to endure his
own sons throwing hazel sticks at him. Yet
every legend of his death we have makes him a
vigorous warrior at the height of his powers,
either killed by known champions or murdered by
stealth by a jealous rival. And there are,
as we have seen, no less than four. The
attempt to bring together the best-known two -
his killing Morcanto destinante in
Nennius, and his death at Llovan Llawdyfro's hand
at Aber Lleu - by making Llovan the henchman of
Morcant, and identifying the supposed river Lleu
with a Northumbrian stream near Lindisfarne,
falls apart for a number of reasons: first, it
tries, without any evidence, to identify Llovan
with the unnamed murderous cousin of the Llyvarch
Hen poems; who, second, has little or nothing to
do with the figure of Lleu, the divine avenger
and supreme god - true, he is an avenger, but the
tragic and unhallowed vengeance so well teased
out of the Llywarch Hen poems by N.J.Williams is
as far as possible from the splendid and glorious
figure of celestial heroism I have shown Lleu to
be; and third, it ignores
the existence of another version, in which Urien
was killed by the historical figures Cynon mab
Clytno Eidyn and Dyfynnwawl mab Mynedawc Eidyn.
This last fact is important because, by showing
that (to quote Williams, who saw the importance
of this): "...it would appear that as late
as the fifteenth century [when the Peniarth text
of the Triads was written down] the identity of
the killers of Urien had not yet been definitely
settled". This removes any reason to
try and harmonize the Morgan and Llovan stories
(which, in point of fact, have nothing in
common), since he only reason to try to harmonize
the various “deaths of Urien” was if we
had any reason to believe that a standard account
of Urien's death existed, and that what we have
are either variants or fragments; but what
Williams has shown (though, alas, he does not
seem to have seen the full implications of his
argument) is that no such thing existed, and that
any death legend could and did get attached to
Urien.
Let us put it this way. Wales
knew a number of legend cycles and legendary
figures: the Arthurian cycle, the Llywarch Hen
cycle, the legends of the Gododdin and the other
Men of the North, and a number of stories
connected with recognizable pagan gods and heroes
(such as the Mabinogi). Urien has a
death-story connected with a god, Lleu. He
has two death-stories connected with the men of
the North, that of Morcant at isle of Metcaud,
and that of Cynon mab Clytno Eidyn and Dyfynnwawl
mab Mynedawc Eidyn. He has one death story
in the Llywarch Hen cycle. He has at least
two death stories connected with the Arthurian
cycle - either as a hermit, or at the last
battle, Camelot. (Some Arthurian
texts also connect him with the great dynasty of
the Grail, a most Arthurian concern.) In
other words: every legend cycle worth speaking of
has appropriated Urien; and every death story of
Urien we have relates to the concerns of the
cycle itself - i.e. is most likely to be
mythological.
This is scarcely novel. In
the Arthurian cycle we even have a mythological
story applied to two quite different, unrelated
and uncontemporaneous historical heroes: the tale
of marriage gone wrong and heroic resolve
attributed on the continent to Erec (that
is Waroch, the sixth-century founder of
one of the Breton kingdoms in Armorica) and in
Wales to Geraint ap Erbin, king of Devon
(died in battle, 711). I do not think that
the fact that Geraint was commemorated in a
contemporary praise poem - which also calls
Geraint's troops "soldiers of the Emperor
Arthur" - is unrelated to this. My
view is simple: praise poems for historical
figures outlive the memory of their deeds (in so
far as they are historical, that is, in so far as
they are true), so that at some point in history
the bards of Wales, Strathclyde and Brittany find
themselves with a heritage of great songs in
praise of people of whom, apart from the poems,
they knew nothing: and they applied to them some
of a store of traditional plots and story ideas.
We have seen that Celtic authors were not shy of
applying to historical figures such as
Vitalinus/Vortigern, Germanus of Auxerre and
Patrick one of a certain amount of stock plots.
The difference between the use of Vitalinus,
Germanus and Patrick and that of Geraint and
Waroch is that while the reason for the use of a
particular interpretative legend in the former's
case is obvious, it is not terribly clear why the
story of Enid's troubled marriage should have
been attached to either of the latter. But
there is no reason to doubt that pre-existing
stories could be deliberately attached to the
names of great heroes of the past.
If we had the sense to go purely
by Taliesin's own poems, we would regard Urien as
a big, brave northern raider who fought battles
as far as Catterick and Ayr (Aeron) and led an
unsuccessful assault against Strathclyde, but
who, on the other hand, managed to repel any
assault aimed at his own territory of Rheged, and
inflicted a notably bloody nose to the king of a
stronger territory - Fflammddwyn, lord of Lloegr
- who had demanded tokens of submission which the
independent-minded and swaggering Urien and his
equally bloody-minded son Owain were not minded
to give. They seem to have clashed more
than once, and the matter was apparently settled
when Owain killed Fflammddwyn in battle and
destroyed his host. By this time, Urien was
probably old and unable to fight for himself, and
his sons showed him no respect. A hero by
the name Owain is subsequently mentioned among
the heroic retinue of the great king Gwallawg,
which may mean that he had found it either
politic or unavoidable to submit to the army and
fleet of the powerful gwledig of Elmet;
Owain then died - probably not in battle, and
probably still quite young - and the last we hear
of it is Taliesin's prayer that God should take
care of his soul.
Only one of the nine poems
dedicated to praising Urien and Owain has
anything to do with fighting the English, and
what it describes is no more than a raid. Elsewhere
there is an unclear mention in Rheged arise
in which the English seem to appear - under
someone called Ulph - as Urien's own allies in
the unsuccessful raid on Strathclyde, where they
apparently rescue the army of Rheged from
complete destruction. A brief mention of
Fflammddwyn protecting them manages,
extraordinarily, to metamorphosize into a
description of Fflammddwyn himself as an
Englishman in every scholar I have read. To
be fair, Fflammddwyn is the lord of Lloegr, which
in later Welsh certainly is the name for England;
but there is nothing in the poem itself to
demonstrate that this obviously originally Welsh
name had already been transferred to the
territory of the Saxons. Indeed, the
impression that Taliesin's words leave on me is
that Urien has made Fflammddwyn's
"protection" of the English a casus
belli against this lord, who - by one of
those enchanting coincidences that lend so much
point to the old gibe about patriotism being the
last refuge of a scoundrel - also clearly had a
claim for hostages and tribute over Urien
himself. How pleasant and useful that Urien
should be able to claim that his probably
legitimate overlord had disgraced himself by
protecting the English!
In the same sprit, it is only in
this poem that Taliesin's Owain makes any claim
to noble descent; a generic claim on the distant
and prestigious Coel, ancestor of everyone with
claim to Gododdin blood. This claim gave
pedigree writers trouble. Molly Miller
makes some deadly observations: "The
pedigree of Urien stands apart...[the evidence
suggests] that he was made king by the warband
[that is, that he was in no sense born from noble
ancestors such as Coel]... Urien's immediate
ancestors do nothing but acquire the epithets of ragged,
lean and dismal" - which strongly
suggests that he was understood to be from very
inferior forebears, later artificially connected
with the majestic lineages of Coel and Cunedda.
It is significant that never, in all his oceans
of praise, does the historical Taliesin say a
word about the forebears of Urien and Owain,
except here; whereas he is full of appreciation
for the royal forebears of Cynan Gawryn of Powys
and for the father of his other maecenas,
Gwallawg son of Lleenawg. This strongly
suggests that Urien was a nobody who had carved
his way to a lordship. The point of it
being Owain - rather than his father - who
publicly claims Coeling descent (there must have
been a few stifled gasps among his own followers,
and open laughter in the enemy ranks), is that by
the time this happened, Urien had adult sons -
not one, but many - capable of fighting, and,
according to Taliesin, of fighting well: in other
words, his succession, however he had established
his throne, was assured. Now the issue
became one of claiming equal rank with the other
lords of the area; and that was done by a rather
fantastic claim of Coeling lineage.
We have seen what Gildasian
Britain thought of jumped-up nobodies carving
their way through the world with fire and sword;
and Urien clearly was one such. In which
case, there are exactly two chances that the
rank-conscious lords of the Welsh would ever have
accepted him as supreme commander in a war
against the English: fat and slim. If there
is one great patriotic deed which he may quite
possibly be ascribed, it is not the mythical
siege of Lindisfarne, but the expulsion or
submission of the west Wigtownshire Irish. If
we do not believe in the myth of Urien as
national war-leader fighting the English all over
north Britain, then there is no particular reason
to place Rheged - as people still try to do - in
the area of Carlisle, or even of Rochdale; and
that being the case, the claim for the area
around Dunragit - obviously Dun Reged, the
fortress-capital of Rheged, like Dumbarton is the
fortress-capital of the Britons (of Strathclyde)
and Dunkeld of the Caledonians - becomes
irresistible. Archaeology tells us that
this area was, until well into the sixth century,
settled by a small but solid Irish community that
left a considerable amount of Gaelic place-names
and even one recognizably Irish monastic
enclosure. This little settlement vanished
without leaving written trace. Within a few
decades at most, we find Rheged ran by a
Welsh-speaking warrior chieftain with no
illustrious antecedents and every sign of having
fought his way up from nowhere, already ageing
and even white-haired, though still vigorous,
when the great poet who was to make his name
immortal made his way to him.
Two and two have a habit of making
four, when there is no extra digit to confuse the
calculations: thus, while we cannot be sure that
Urien had first made his reputation and his
fortune by destroying the independence of the
Galloway Irish, it certainly seems less unlikely
than the evident legends still peddled as history
in respectable textbooks under the dominant idea
that, just because the English conquest appears
to us today as the chief event of later
sixth-century British history, therefore it must
have left a correspondingly large mark on
contemporary documents and correspondingly
dominated contemporary minds. Facts deny
the first theory; and the notion that the arrival
of the barbarians meant more to a cateran like
Urien than, say, his determination not to submit
to Strathclyde or "Lloegr" - wherever
that was - overlordship, simply seems to me to
ignore everything we know about brave bandits of
his kind.
Notes
History
of Britain, 407-597 is copyright © 2002, Fabio
P. Barbieri. Used with permission.
Comments
to: Fabio P.
Barbieri
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