THE EARLY HISTORY OF BARLICK (13)

[Stanley]

THE EARLY HISTORY OF BARLICK (13)

16 December 2001

What about Pagan worship and rituals at the beginning of the fifth century? Just for once we can be absolutely certain about this. Paganism was alive and well, it wasn’t finally subdued by organised Christianity until the 7th century. Even then the new religion came under sporadic attack from the Pagan Danes and it wasn’t until they were finally converted in the 11th century that all danger was removed. The question is, what effect did this have on the ground in a small village like Barlick.
One thing is certain, the core beliefs of an ethnic group or community can't be completely changed overnight. The impression I always got when I was taught history at school was that what happened was that as soon as word of Christianity reached a place everyone flocked to be baptised and the old religions were cast aside. The reason we were taught this is that the history of these times was written and re-written by Roman Catholic monks who had an axe to grind. At the time they were writing Paganism and heresy were still seen as a threat and they were marketing their brand of religion by stressing its power to convert. If truth is to be told the last vestiges of Paganism lasted much longer than this.
We will look at this in greater depth later on but here are two facts for you. Oxen were sacrificed in a neo-Pagan ritual in honour of Christian saints until quite recently. The last sacrifice to Saint Benyo at Clynogg Faur in Wales was in 1589 and in Wester Ross in Scotland, an ox was sacrificed annually to Saint Maelrubna until 1678. Both these saints were early Celtic and based on Pagan deities. Both rituals were stopped by reforming churchmen. Leaving aside modern Paganism and the Druid revivals it would be a brave person who stated that Paganism was dead even in the 21st century.
All right, this is getting in front of our story but the point I want to make is that in terms of Barlick we have to assume that even when Christianity reached us Paganism would have survived. I have a strong conviction that Christ would simply be accepted as yet another cult deity and incorporated into the old belief structures. It would take the discipline of the organised Roman Church to force it underground and this didn’t really happen for another 500 years.
So, sometime between 400 and 500AD we can safely assume that Barlick was seeing some fundamental changes. We have already remarked on the ‘Great Exodus’ during which many Romano-Celts left Britain for the Lower Seine. At the same time, there was a mass migration from the south west and Wales to Armorica (Brittany). So many Celts went that they swamped the original population and this explains why to this day there is such a strong link including a common language between the West Country and Brittany.
Another event far away in Rome was to trigger further migrations. In 455 Rome was sacked by the Vandals and the Western Empire disintegrated. Europe became unstable and this was one of the factors which triggered the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain. I mentioned earlier that the Dal Riata of Ireland (the Scotti) had attempted an invasion of the west coast of Britain but were repulsed by the western Celts and their Saxon mercenaries. In the latter half of the 5th century the Dal Riata tried again, this time they invaded what we now call Argyll (Ar Gael which meant The Land of the Gaels or Irish). They drove out the Picts and founded the kingdom of Dalriada which eventually became what we now know as Scotland when Kenneth Mac Alpin, King of the Dalriada from 840 to 857, Lord of Kintyre, seized Pictland and imposed a hereditary monarchy calling it Scotia. He brought a stone from Ireland and installed it in the church at Scone as a coronation stone, the Stone of Destiny. Eventually their tribal homeland in Ireland was overrun, the Stone of Destiny became the last vestige of their Irish roots and Caledonia became their permanent home.
While all these tides of invasion and conquest were going on we mustn’t forget that the Anglo Saxon invasion was spreading across Britain. Many Celts retreated before the oncoming tide and by 600AD Cornwall, Wales, Cumbria and Strathclyde were their final refuge. In 603 a praise poem by Cadwallon a Welsh poet included a new word to describe the land of the Cumrogi or Cumrogh, this was the word the western Celts used to describe themselves and meant ‘fellow citizens’ or ‘compatriots’. The word was Cymru and is now the Welsh name for Wales and the basis of our modern word Cumbria. The modern term ‘Welsh’ was introduced by the Saxons who called them ‘Welsch’ or ‘strangers’.
I have only described the main tides of war and migration. There were many more significant feuds and conflicts but it would take too much time to describe them. The bottom line is that the whole of mainland Britannica and Caledonia was in flux and in this chaos we can see the beginnings of the modern divisions of England, Scotland and Wales. What concerns us is how Barlick was getting on through all this turmoil.
This time I’m not too sure that Barlick escaped the disturbances because of it’s remote location. This was a time of armed struggle across the North and eventually resulted in the amalgamation of all the former tribal lands in the kingdom of Northumbria. The conflict was essentially between the Celts of the West and the Saxon incursion from the East. The battle line gradually moved across the country until by about 630 the Saxons reached the west coast on the Fylde. There must have been significant troop movements for over 100 years and one of the obvious routes from the west to the east would have been up the Ribble valley and across the hills towards our old friend, the Aire Gap at Kildwick, the most northerly low level crossing of the Pennines. Topography doesn't change and it makes durable evidence.
If large forces were using this route this would bring them perilously close to Barlick and on balance it is almost certain that we were affected at this time. At the least a bit of plunder and pillage could have been involved at worst complete destruction. On the whole I don’t think it got this bad because going back to Hugh of Kirkstall again it is difficult to imagine that a village destroyed in the sixth or seventh century could have had ‘an ancient church’ 300 years later. However, even if there was no disturbance at all these were dangerous times and all the normal mechanisms of trade and travel must have been badly affected.
A good measure of how insecure life was during these times is the effect it had on the Christian church. We have already noted that by the fourth century the church was organised enough to have Bishops and send them to conferences abroad. The Celtic church had always been regarded as orthodox even though it had its own liturgy and customs but in 413 it produced a major heresy which shook the Christian world. We know that a son of a Romano-British family called Pelagius who may have been Scottish was well-educated and travelled widely. He resided for a time in Rome, Egypt and Palestine and eventually died in the Orient. He preached against the doctrine of Original Sin and started a controversy that was to rumble on for centuries in the church. One of the hot beds of this heresy was the church in Wales and in 429 this was seen as serious enough for the orthodox British bishops to appeal to the church in Gaul for help. The bishops of Gaul, encouraged by Pope Celestine I sent Bishop Germanus to combat the problem. This created some interesting problems for Vortigern because at a time when he was having to deal with Scotti invading from Ireland and the wiles of his Saxon mercenaries he was forced to try to resolve the conflicting demands of the Church of Rome, the Celtic Church and the Pagans. Then as now, religion was becoming enmeshed in politics!
I can hear you saying what's this got to do with Barlick? At the time, perhaps not a great deal but this dispute was a clear sign of what was to come, conflict between the Celtic Church and Rome and in the end this was to directly affect Barlick. The general insecurity was forcing a change in the way the church organised itself, in real life the clerics felt under attack from the rump of Paganism, disputes inside the church and the general ebb and flow of war, rape and pillage. Their reaction was to retreat into closed communities and it is around this time we see the first monastic institutions in places like Iona, Jarrow and many other centres scattered through the land. For centuries to come these were to be the centres of learning and spirituality in a sea of barbarism and military conquest. We shall look at this later but the way it affected Barlick in the end was that we got our own monastery and conflict between Celtic Christianity and the power of Rome that was to cause nothing but trouble.
What about ordinary life in Barlick? Let’s set a date of 600 on our snapshot. Leaving aside the effects of the troubles Barlick was quite capable of supporting itself. The settlement would have grown and assumed an air of being something more like our understanding of a village. The Saxon Bernulf had settled here and so there would have been new building. The houses would be more substantial, timber framed with wattle and daub infill and thatched roofs. There were no chimneys, simply a hole in the thatch above the hearth for smoke to escape. Animals were housed under the same roof as the humans but penned off separately. The floors were of beaten earth and there may have been some rudimentary partitioning to afford privacy, the beginnings of what we would call rooms. There were no windows, any ventilation holes in the walls were covered with skins or wooden shutters.
The business of the village was agriculture and stock-rearing, by this time they had all the domestic animals we have today. All the land was free apart from the fields which had been enclosed so there was plenty of fish, fowl and small animals to hunt. Gathering wild fruits was still an important part of the diet but increasingly individual plants were brought back to the farmstead and cultivated to improve the quality and save time out in the fields. Blackberries, crab apple trees and perhaps even wild roses (the hips and haws were a valuable source of vitamins) were planted. This was the genesis of the English Rose Garden!
Many old tools would still be in use but iron was cheap enough now to be affordable in places as poor as Barlick. Axes, bill-hooks, reaping hooks and knives would be vastly improved and this meant faster working and higher standards of craftsmanship in building and carpentry. It is easy to imagine a man making his wife a kist, a cradle or even a wooden bed. The fifth century equivalent of the flat pack kitchen or bedroom had arrived! Simple things like doors would cease to be an impossible luxury and who knows, wooden toys for the children and cooking implements for the housewife. There would still be some personal ornaments and household valuables, in dangerous times these would be buried for safety this is why modern archaeologists and metal detector users continually come across forgotten hoards. I’m hesitating to say that life was comfortable, by our standards it certainly wasn't, but given freedom from outside interference Barlick wouldn’t be the worst place in the world to live at the end of the fifth century.

16 December 2001