Who stole 500 years of Cumbrian history - and why?
Cumbrian school pupils learn about Anglo-Saxons, Tudors and Nazis - but not that their homeland was an independent Celtic kingdom for 500 years. Has there been a cover up? Yes!
Anyone who has lived in Cumbria for any length of time knows it is very different from the rest of Britain. But it is not easy at first to put your finger on exactly why.
Although you would not know it by reading standard textbooks, Cumbria resisted takeover attempts by the English empire for five hundred years after the Romans left in 410. Against the odds, Cumbria remained a separate kingdom with its own language, tax system, culture and institutions for half a millennium.
But why, you may ask, is Cumbria’s previous life as a separate country not better known? The answer is: it has been edited out.
Ever since the Napoleonic wars, the business of mainstream British history has been to tell the triumphant story of Britain’s rise to greatness. Anything that did not contribute to the picture of Britain as one nation and Britons as culturally unified was consigned to the dustbin. Events in the so-called regions were deemed fit only for cameo appearances in the narrative, and only if they sustained the party line.
The result of this drive for nationalistic conformity is that Cumbrians don’t know who they really are. The Government’s National Curriculum ensures that primary school pupils are taught about Anglo-Saxons, Tudors and Nazis, but not that Cumbria has a separate history as a Celtic kingdom.
Yet, despite being fed someone else’s history many locals still leave school feeling more Cumbrian than English. So, why is the notion of Cumbrian-ness still so tenacious?
Strangely enough, one of the strongest clues to how long a place called Cumbria has existed comes in a popular folk tale. For hundreds of years, tourists have been told that the pile of stones in the middle of the road between Grasmere and Thirlmere marks the grave of Dunmail, the last Cumbrian king.
There, in 945 AD, this king, whose Celtic name was Dyfnwal ab Owain, was supposedly killed by the Saxon English King Edmund I. Prisoners of war were ordered to pile stones up to mark his grave.
Less romantic historians say the heap of rocks simply marks the border between Westmorland and Cumberland. Yet folktales are not entirely fictional. They were a means by which illiterate people preserved important chunks of history. There was indeed a battle then. It did not necessarily take place at the raise.
Dunmail lost, but he was not killed. He is reputed to have survived and died on a pilgrimage to Rome 30 years later. But he suffered a major demotion. Edmund handed the overlordship of Cumbria to the Scottish king Malcolm I. This Scottish claim to Cumbria would remain ambiguous and cause trouble for the next thousand years.
Anyway, 945 is the date when “the Lost Kingdom” in my book’s title was lost.
But, for our purposes, the real point of the Dunmail legend is it tells us the kingdom of Cumbria survived for 535 years after the Romans quit Britain. That’s half the period the British monarchy claims to have existed. It is not an insignificant amount of time - and yet this fact does not feature in any readily accessible histories.
So, here is a quick summary of what happened during the five hundred years of the Cumbrian kingdom’s existence:
Following the chaotic exit of the Romans there was a period when petty warlords ravaged the north. This confusion eventually resolved itself into the rise of Rheged which reached the peak of its power in 595 under its renowned King Urien. After his assasination, there was a largely failed attempt by the Anglo Saxon kingdom of Northumbria to absorb Rheged. This incursion collapsed after two hundred years when Danish Vikings conquered the Anglo-Saxon capital at York.
Then the ambitious kingdom of Wessex, notably under its aggressive king Athelstan, Alfred the Great’s grandson, tried repeatedly to subjugate the Cumbrian Kingdom. This culminated in a pyrrhic victory for Athelstan at the almighty battle of Brunanburh in 937 which left Cumbria battered but still independent.
Even William the Conqueror was unable to take Cumbria and the territory remained outside the Domesday book in 1086. Cumbria became the last piece of territory to be forced into England by William’s son Henry I in 1098. Thus, Cumbria had longer than any other component of England to forge a separate identity and that distinctiveness still affects how the people see themselves today.
This history comes in stark contrast to the popular quip that that Cumbria was created by a bureaucrat’s pen in 1974. That is when Edward Heath launched a deeply unpopular reorganisation of local government creating the county from territory of the historic counties of Cumberland, Westmorland, Lancashire north of The Sands and a small part of Yorkshire. Despite that fiasco, the geographical expression that we know as Cumbria is 1,000 years old. The truth is that the first official reference to Cumbra-land or, in Latin, Cumbria, appeared in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the main historical record of the period, in 945. It is a compelling fact that Cumbria and the Cumbrians survive today when other Dark Age kingdoms such as Elmet, Lindsey, Mercia and Hwicce, for example, have disappeared and terms such as Angle, Saxon and Jute have been swallowed up by the English identity.
It is therefore not surprising that in 1978, William Rollinson wrote in A History of Cumberland and Westmorland: “It has been said that Cumbria is more of a country than a county and there is a degree of truth in this.”
Whitehall is also vaguely aware of Cumbria’s ancient roots as an independent entity. The last time the Government considered breaking Cumbria up was in 1995. The civil servant in charge of the review was Dr Mark Sandford. He is now a member of the House of Commons Research Unit.
Dr Sandford noted that other counties created in 1974 - Humberside, Cleveland, and Avon - had to be abolished because the residents felt no affinity for them. They had no local roots. But Cumbria survived the cull because it was surprisingly popular with the Cumbrian people. Sandford said the affinity of locals to their county required an explanation. He speculated that this might be because a place called Cumbria existed between the eighth and twelfth centuries. But he took his research no further. Government policy continued to treat Cumbria either as an appendage of Manchester or Newcastle Upon Tyne, not as a place in itself.
Other experts have looked for reasons why Cumbria and the Cumbrian sense of identity endured through the centuries. The University of Leicester historian Charles Pythian-Adams suggested that a key factor was the mountains.
He pointed to the location of Ambleside. The town sits beneath a rugged range of fells that rises to 3,000 feet and extends westward to the Pennines. This, for a very long time, was the northern frontier of England, beyond which even the Domesday Book could not reach.
Above this protective barrier, Pythian Adams suggested, there was a “core Cumbrian area”. This consisted of the lowlands north and south of the Solway (including a chunk of present day Scotland), the valley of the River Eden and the eastern flank of the Lakeland dome. These areas were the key to Cumbria’s ethnic identity and sovereignty. Any outsiders wishing to take over Cumbria had to dominate these areas - a difficult thing to do given the massive mountain barrier in the way.
The people living above the mountain barrier called their homeland “the land of the Cumbrians.” They named themselves the Cymry, or Cumber, ancient Celtic words meaning “fellow-countrymen”.
The term Cumber is derived from a much older concept,“Combrogi” which meant “compatriots”. The term has roots that a go back at least to 1,300 BC. It is a big word. It expresses the idea of a nation.
So, we are talking about a community that has existed, not since 1974, but for far more than a thousand years.
Yet mainstream histories such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica persist in telling us that, for instance, Carlisle began as a Roman town called Luguvalium. This is a very odd claim because Luguvalium is not a Latin name. It is a Romanised version of a Celtic name, Caer Luel, which means "wall[ed town] of Lugus”.
Lugus was a hugely powerful Celtic deity, a god built along the lines of Thor or Zeus, and like them he hurled thunderbolts. Lugus was a key god for the Brigantes, the largest and most numerous coalition of Celtic tribes in post Roman Britain. Their territory spanned the north of England from coast to coast. One part of the coalition was the smaller Carvetii tribe, which occupied the area we now know as Cumbria.
The most persuasive evidence that the Celts were in Carlisle before the Romans comes from the work of Bradford University Professor of Archaeology Mike McCarthy. His team found plough marks under the Lanes shopping centre. They featured a distinctively Celtic style nine-inch seed drill and they went in a different direction to Roman plough marks.
McCarthy deduced from this that the Celts grew crops to supply a Celtic fortress that existed before the Romans arrived.
Archaeological evidence is piling up that says the Celtic Cumbrians have been living where they are for a very long time indeed. For example, A DNA survey conducted jointly by Oxford University and the Wellcome Trust discovered that two-thirds of Cumbrians were from the same families that lived there in the heyday of Rheged, in 600 AD.
The Cumbrians have survived because their history has very deep roots. To find out more, get my book.
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This is a short extract from a new book called Secrets of the Lost Kingdom. You can buy it at The New Bookshop, Main Street, Cockermouth, at the Moon & Sixpence cafe in Cockermouth and Keswick, Bookends in Keswick and Carlisle, and Sam Read in Grasmere.
You can also order by post instantly here:
https://www.fletcherchristianbooks.com/product/secrets-of-the-lost-kingdom
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