Comet’s role in dating battle
SEVERAL years ago, Nasa – the National Aeronautics and Space Administration agency, in Washington DC – received an interesting request. Could it help to establish the precise date of an “important but little-known” thousand-year-old battle?
“They were thrilled to bits to help, and they put us on to a man named
Gary W Kronk, an expert in comets,” Clive Hallam-baker recalled yesterday, “and he said the only comet around that time was in the August of 1018.”
This tallied with a reference to a comet written by the English chronicler, Symeon of Durham, about the Battle of Carham, and thus fixed its date as 1018, instead of 1016, as some long believed.
The battle took place in late summer of 1018 on the south bank of the Tweed, at Carham, Northumberland, and began the process in which a border was established between the newly emerging kingdoms of Scotland and England.
Next month the millennial anniversary of the battle will be commemorated with a full weekend of events, including a re-enactment of the actual fighting. It is being staged by the Battlefields Trust in partnership with the Carham 1018 Society.
Mr Hallam-baker, a trustee of the Battlefields Trust and a committee member of the Society, told The Herald yesterday: “The Battle of Carham is remarkably unknown. Five years ago we had the 500th anniversary of Flodden, and a great fuss was made of that. That battle had a lot of blood and guts, and was nasty, but in the long term it didn’t make a lot of difference. The Scots took a psychological hammering from it but they recovered, and commerce continued.
“The Battle of Carham took place as England and Scotland were emerging into the nations we know today. It wasn’t between the English and the Scots; it was between Malcolm II, the king of Scots, and a Northumbrian force led by the Earl of Bamburgh, and Malcolm emerged triumphant.
“Though Malcolm was the king of Scots, that isn’t the same saying he was the king of Scotland. He was the king of Alba, which was the Highlands, and he had raised an army. In 1006 he had raided as far south as Durham, which he besieged before being driven off by Uhtred the Bold, who later became Earl of Northumbria.
“Twelve years later, Malcolm combined with a second army, from Strathclyde, led by Owain the Bald. Strathclyde at that time was a separate kingdom stretching a good deal eastwards and went down as far as the Lake District and Penrith.
“The Danes led by Canute [or Cnut] had invaded England in 1016 and got rid of all the Anglo-saxon earls, including Uhtred, and replaced them with his own. At Carham the Northumbrians were led by Uhtred’s weedy brother, Eadwulf Cudel – that last word means ‘cuttlefish’ or ‘coward’. “They were soundly beaten by the combined Scottish armies. But there is no account of the battle. Symeon implies the Northumbrians were slaughtered almost to a man. But that can’t be true. If Malcolm and Owain had had such a massive victory they would have ventured further south and taken more land, but that didn’t happen.
“Also, Eadwulf himself survived the battle. If it had been such a rout, he would have been killed. What we can say is the battle would have been short, sharp and bloody. The nearest thing we have to a description of it is the Bayeux Tapestry, which depicts the events leading up to the Battle of Hastings, and the actual battle in 1066.”
Mr Hallam-baker added: “Within a few decades of the Battle of Carham, and certainly within 100 years, we see castles being built on both sides of the Tweed. The Tweed became the de facto border, although it wouldn’t become the official border for another 200 years.
“Nevertheless, the battle set the border, and a border that has remained pretty much unchanged ever since.”
At the celebrations in Carham on July 7 and 8, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, at least 200 re-enactors from The Vikings, the UK’S largest Dark Ages re-enactment society, will assemble from all over the UK to restage the battle on both days. A living history village will display period crafts and lifestyles, and weapons and warfare techniques of the time will also be on show.
The Battle of Carham will be the subject of a book to be published in November by the Edinburgh imprint, John Donald.
According to material on the Birlinn website relating to The Battle Of Carham: A Thousand Years On, “very little” is known about the battle. “The outcome of the battle,” it adds, “was a victory for the Scots, seen by some as a pivotal event in the expansion of the Scottish kingdom, the demise of Northumbria and the Scottish conquest of ‘Lothian’. The battle also removed a potentially significant source of resistance to the recent conqueror of England, Cnut.”
The book, edited by Neil Mcguigan, a researcher, historian and lecturer, and Alex Woolf, a senior lecturer in history at St Andrews University, is a collection of essays “by a range of subject specialists” that “explores the battle in its context, bringing new understanding of this important and controversial historical event”.
Mr Hallam-baker said the aim now was to use the Carham anniversary to set up and promote a cross-border batttlefield trail for the economic benefit of both sides of the border.
A great fuss was made about marking the Battle of Flodden, yet it meant little. But the Battle of Carham set the border