In Our Time Page 3

  The most prominent surviving artefacts of these ‘arty Christian farmers’ are the stone monuments. Where the Irish and Northumbrian high crosses were, unsurprisingly, in the shape of crosses, the Picts chose giant slabs and cut their crosses onto them, leaving rectangles in the corners that could be decorated.

  KATHERINE FORSYTH: These are 6, 7, 8ft tall, beautifully decorated with very, very intricate geometric patterns, interlaced patterns. Some of the most complex and virtuoso displays of geometry are on Pictish stones. But also weird monsters attacking humans, which are probably quite sophisticated meditations on evil and death and Christian salvation and so on.

  There were also a lot of depictions of apparently secular scenes, with Pictish men and women in contemporary dress and on horseback. And, while Katherine Forsyth emphasised how similar the Picts were to other peoples in Europe, she noted that they did have a unique system of symbols that they carved on stones. Alex Woolf suggested there were thirty or forty of these, some of them very naturalistic with images such as bulls, wolves and eagles, and others with geometric patterns, which people sometimes speculate may be ordinary objects viewed from unusual angles.

  The Aberlemno Kirkyard cross-slab is one of five Pictish stones found in, or around, the village of Aberlemno in Scotland.

  ALEX WOOLF: The most likely thing is that they’re some sort of label, possibly a personal name, although it’s not writing in any normal sense. But they recur across the whole range of Pictland in this same very standardised format, with very little variation. My own view is that, unless we get some sort of Rosetta Stone text, we’re not going to ever know exactly.

  There are a number of reasons we don’t have surviving texts in Pictish, he added. One is that the Pictish territory was much smaller than the other nations. Another is that writing in vernacular languages was really only beginning to take off at about the time the Picts were disappearing, and most of the books produced at places like Portmahomack would probably have been in Latin. We may still have some of these books. There is a St John’s gospel book in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, that has an image of an eagle on it that looks exactly like the eagles from the Pictish symbols, so that book was probably a Latin gospel book made in a Pictish monastery. Alex Woolf suggested that, if we examine that book and one or two other books like that with image-enhancing technology, we might see little glosses in Pictish of a hard word explained or something similar.

  If ever there is to be more insight into the language of the Picts, it may emerge from excavations. At Rhynie, Gordon Noble has been digging at a site that was known to have Pictish symbol stones, and one was still standing in its original place, the Craw Stane, which has a salmon and a Pictish beast on it, a pair of symbols. In the 1970s, there was the discovery of the Rhynie Man, a full-length figure with big pointed teeth who was carrying an axe over his shoulder and was probably some kind of pagan god. Excavations from 2011 have shown that the stones were in a high-status settlement of the fourth to sixth centuries AD, with the unearthing of artefacts from the eastern Mediterranean, glass from western France, glass and metalwork from Anglo-Saxon England and objects that have even been depicted on the stones. For example, among the finds is an iron axe pin that is about 5 inches high and shows a little axe with a serpent biting on to it, very much like the sacrificial axe that the Rhynie Man holds.

  Moving on towards the ninth century, Melvyn looked for evidence for the demise of the Picts, asking whether the Vikings had a role.

  ALEX WOOLF: There’s a sustained series of military campaigns, major battles, the most important of which happens in 839 when the king of the Picts, his brother, and the king of the Gaels of Dalriada in Argyll are all killed, along with innumerable others. And this precipitates a major political upheaval in the kingship of the Picts.

  There were extensive Viking settlements in Pictland, in the Northern Isles, Caithness, Sutherland, the Western Isles and the western coast. These incursions had a knock-on effect, increasing the Gaelic influence moving from the west into Pictland. Gordon Noble referred to the archaeological records that show that promontory forts emerged in the third and fourth centuries that match the accounts of the activities of the Picts in that same late Roman period. By the end of the first millennium AD, many of these forts were being destroyed, and somehow the Pictish language also disappeared. In the Northern Isles, the Hebrides, and the north of the mainland, everyone seemed to be speaking Norse by the twelfth century. It is unclear how much of that was cultural mixing and how much was genocide, but, in the bulk of the Pictish territories, it was the Gaelic language that replaced Pictish. In the areas where Norse took over, no Pictish place names remain, whereas many of the settlement names of Gaelic Scotland were inherited through Pictish or from the Pictish times.

  ALEX WOOLF: The easiest ones to spot are the ones that begin with the word ‘aber’, which is the old British word for a river mouth, like you get in Aberystwyth in Wales, but you also get Aberdeen, Aberfeldy, Abernethy and so on. These names have survived Gaelicisation and that suggests there was much more interaction, there was much more continuity between the Pictish kingdom and the later kings of Scotland.

  The Picts were missed, after a while. Katherine Forsyth said that Henry of Huntingdon, writing in the eleventh century, read Bede and noticed the reference to Picts and asked where they had gone. In the same period, the writer of the history of the Norwegians, the Historia Norvegiae, noticed the souterrains or underground structures and surmised that these used to be where the Picts lived – they came out at night to build big towers and hid in the day.

  KATHERINE FORSYTH: They’re wondering about them and speculating and this is where we get these myths about the Picts as little people hiding away in their underground dwellings.

  GORDON NOBLE: In the sixteenth century, there are these fantastic etchings of the Picts by John White. And he’s depicting the Picts as these incredible savages and he’s basically saying to the Elizabethan court that we shouldn’t be scared of the Native Americans because in our past we’ve got even more savage communities.

  Steadily, though, Melvyn’s guests said, there is more evidence coming forward about the Picts to replace the myths. There has always been interest in the Picts, Gordon Noble added, but now the scholarship is really beginning to help illuminate this period of Scottish history.

  As the live programme came to an end, to the unusual sound of audience applause, Melvyn took questions from the students there who were carrying out their own research into the Picts, which may lead to new revelations. These questions ranged from where Melvyn’s guests thought the investigations would be going (archaeology was the answer), whether Argyll was a Pict territory (there was a lot of going back and forth to Ireland from Argyll, hard to separate them), whether the recent discovery of a stone engraved with a Pictish naked man was connected to Rhynie (very similar, and the butt of the spear was similar to that described by Roman writers, which was helpful), why the term Pict stopped being used (maybe it was not a vernacular word and went out of use as Latin did), where the Picts were from if not Scythia (being a Pict was an identity not a people, like the Victorians were not a people distinct from the Georgians), what genetics tell us (we don’t really know enough, but so far the people tested in former Pictland have the same genetic signature as would be found in Iron Age Scotland and Britain), what the Picts thought of being described by their tattoos (these tattoos were cultural attributes that lots of barbarians had, but, over time, the Picts were the ones who were left still doing it), what we know of their everyday life (not enough, more excavations please), what new, big excavations might reveal (Dunkeld, which Bede said was the centre of the southern Picts, is already very promising – and we should excavate places adjacent to the big collections of the Christian stone sculptures), whether the sculptures are religious artefacts or artistic expressions (both – these are not exclusive terms), and what relationship the Picts had with the rest of Scotland (some shared kingships and artistic motifs, plus
links to Anglo-Saxons, including requests for Northumbrian stonemasons). Then, after more applause, Melvyn and his guests slipped quietly off for tea, an hour after they had started this live discussion in front of an audience at the Memorial Chapel, taking the chaplain, Stuart MacQuarrie, with them.

  THE TRIAL OF CHARLES I

  In defending the killing of a king, the poet and republican John Milton declared:

  If men within themselves would be governed by reason, and not generally give up their understanding to a double-tyranny: of custom from without, and blind affections from within; they would discern better what it is to favour and uphold a tyrant of a nation.

  Milton’s tyrant was Charles I, executed for treason in 1649. The events of his trial saw a drama of ideas about kingship, parliament, law and power, set amid political confusion and the bloody aftermath and rupture of civil war. And despite Milton’s claims, whether Charles was justly killed or the victim of a messy coup is still debated 370 years after his death.

  With Melvyn to discuss the trial of Charles I were: Justin Champion, professor of the history of early modern ideas and honorary fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London; Diane Purkiss, professor of English literature at the University of Oxford; and David Wootton, professor of history at the University of York.

  A painting depicting King Charles I of England being led to his execution.

  The trial started on 20 January 1649, when Charles I was brought into Westminster Hall under armed guard to face his accusers. He had fought and lost in civil wars with parliamentary forces, first from 1642 to 1645 and then in 1648, with royalists at Pontefract Castle holding out until March 1649. Justin Champion set the scene – a bustling public space ordinarily full of shops and booths but cleared out for this event. There was a real anxiety that Charles would try to escape, or that there would be a military attack by his supporters. The prosecutors had been thinking about the ceremony that would accompany the lord president, John Bradshaw, as he walked in, and whether he would have a mace or a sword of state. Charles was not given special prominence and was almost hidden in a crowd of 4,000 to 5,000 onlookers, some shouting ‘God save the king’ and others ‘Justice, justice’.

  JUSTIN CHAMPION: [Charles] is only allowed to come in with three servants, he doesn’t have any legal counsel; he has his back to the audience. He is very, very, confused. This is somebody who is used to being treated with regal majesty. In front of him there are sixty-seven commissioners; many of them he won’t recognise at all.

  Many of the legal officers are lost to history. As well as John Bradshaw, there were John Cook, a lawyer, Isaac Dorislaus, who was a Dutch historian, and a man called John Ask, about whom nothing is known. The charges were based on the premise that the House of Commons had represented the sovereignty of the people and that Charles I was a tyrant, a traitor and a murderer.

  JUSTIN CHAMPION: He is a ‘public enemy’ – a wonderful phrase – to the Commonwealth of England. And, in essence, he is put on trial both for war crimes and for treason against the people. He has, in again their own phrase, ‘exercised unlimited tyrannous will, against the liberties and privileges of the people’.

  The commissioners were spending a lot of time trying to work out what the precise charge would be, improvising as they went along. Charles, meanwhile, was asking why they were trying him and in whose name, calling them ‘a rump’. As Diane Purkiss explained, he called them a rump because of Colonel Pride’s purge the previous autumn of every MP who was liable to want to continue to try to talk with Charles, to try to reach a negotiated deal with him. After the Restoration, they would be known as the Rump Parliament, closely associated with Cromwell’s New Model Army, which was the driver behind the will to try the king at all, and particularly the will to find him guilty as a murderer and traitor.

  DIANE PURKISS: Not everybody on the radical fringe actually wanted Charles tried. John Lilburne, the leading Leveller, didn’t want Charles tried; he really wanted to save Charles. There is a lot of bobbing and weaving to try to come up with something that will stick and will work and will pay off what the army has come to see as this enormous blood price that has to be laid at somebody’s door. The mentality is not unlike the post-First World War wish to hang the Kaiser.

  Those who had been purged included those who had stood up to Charles before but now represented moderate Protestant opinion. There was Denzil Holles, who was one of those who tried to arrest Charles in parliament in 1642; there was John Clotworthy, a violent Presbyterian iconoclast. William Prynne was another, famous for having his ears cut off in the pillory, and Robert Harley, the man who actually cancelled Christmas. They were strongly Protestant, but were now seen as too moderate, and the trial was proceeding without unanimity.

  DIANE PURKISS: Royalists, and there are still many of those, are unenthusiastic, but there is no sense that the will of the people of England is being either expressed or thwarted by the trial. There isn’t a single will by this stage, there are factions, there are divisions. And you can’t really resolve that into ‘everybody is against the trial, everybody is for it’.

  Melvyn asked whether there was, effectively, a military junta here, and David Wootton agreed. It was a show trial. When Lady Fairfax, disguised, called out in protest, for shame, the troops levelled their muskets at her and their officer threatened to fire. It was a very intimidating presence, and the troops were there to quell the spectators as well as to ensure that Charles didn’t escape. This was nothing like a normal English trial, which enforced the king’s justice in front of a jury on the basis of the known law of the land. The charges were improvised, but we might be forgiven for thinking there was an inevitability to the process.

  DAVID WOOTTON: This is something historians currently disagree about. My view of this is straightforward: if you put someone on trial for treason, and that’s one of the charges, there is only one known outcome to a treason trial. Anybody who goes in front of a court charged with treason ends up dead.

  Injecting some doubt, Justin Champion cautioned that we do not really know the inside workings of the trial process, only the public side. Within the Painted Chamber, part of the medieval Palace of Westminster between the House of Lords and the River Thames, where the commissioners worked out their plans, different people turned up every day, making different pitches for what they should do the following day. Any plan was compromised by Charles’s refusal to plead, challenging the authority of the court, and the rump, head on.

  JUSTIN CHAMPION: They are claiming that they represent popular sovereignty and Charles is claiming that he represents the liberty of every single man in the land.

  MELVYN BRAGG: Because he says: ‘If you can do this to me, you can do this to anybody. So I am representing the people of England.’

  JUSTIN CHAMPION: Absolutely. It is a wonderful performance, and even though there is some evidence that the lord commissioners thought about what they would do if Charles refused to acknowledge their authority, they are thrown into chaos.

  Ordinarily in trials, there was a contingency for those who refused to plead, and that was to be crushed between two stones until the accused changed his mind. Where the likely sentence was death, the advantage of withholding a plea was that there was no finding of guilt and so the accused’s children could inherit.

  DAVID WOOTTON: Properly, under English law, Charles, by refusing to plea, should be crushed to death. They don’t want to torture the king in public, that’s the last thing they want to do, so they are constantly scurrying back to their room saying: ‘What are we going to do now?’

  That may have been the legal conundrum, but there was an alternative purpose to the trial, as Diane Purkiss argued. This was to represent the House of Commons as the voice of the people, allowing the depositions of twenty-three people about the atrocities committed by royalist forces, putting those grievances before Charles. While denying the authority of the court, Charles did not address the question of whether he was the enemy of the people.


  DIANE PURKISS: They are trying to lay down that it’s they, the House of Commons, who are sovereign; and Charles says, ‘Okay, I’m not going to answer your charges, because you are just a rump, but if you reconvene a proper parliament, I will answer to that proper parliament.’ And that really is very intelligent, because it sees off their representational campaign, which, to them, I think, is the nub of the matter.

  It was difficult to establish that the royalists had carried out any atrocities on the king’s orders, so the weightiest claim was that Charles had declared war on his own people. Justin Champion added that Charles was presented as a man of blood, who drove war on, and that the routine violence was the king’s fault, even if there were relatively few atrocities compared to the wars that had been raging across Europe or the conflicts that would follow in Ireland or Scotland.

  MELVYN BRAGG: Diane, you were shaking your head, violently.

  DIANE PURKISS: I was, because I don’t think people knew that at the time; they had all been reading the newspapers, and every single newspaper that comes out in London, parliamentarian, or royalist, from Oxford is all about atrocities. I don’t think the people in London in 1649 knew that atrocities were uncommon, I think they thought that they were incredibly common.

  The commissioners were unsure how to underpin the charges. As David Wootton said, the real charge against Charles was that he was responsible for plotting the second civil war while he was under army captivity, arranging for the Scots to invade England, but they chose to try him for the first civil war as well, and debated whether to try him for killing his father, something he had not actually done.