Finding Rosa Mingaye, Cumbrian Artist

By Dr John Little

Like all English historical fiction authors my writing deals with a mixture of reality and truth, of actual and dreams; of fiction and fact. It is my wish to make it so that my reader may, in the style of Leopold von Ranke, walk in the shoes of dead men and women, even for just an instant. This desire is shared by every writer of historical fiction. Last year I lit upon the figure of Dr William Perry Briggs, a Cumbrian doctor who somehow found himself tending wounded Turks at the town of Plevna during a murderous siege in one of the major wars of the nineteenth century; the Russo-Turkish conflict of 1877-8. It seemed an interesting adventure story and so I set out to write it, and found that the borderline between researching for historical fiction, and unearthing unknown history is a very fine one.

Of course, any adventure has to have a back story or two; the protagonist must have a family, friends, motives, a background of some sort and some personal details. I found that Briggs married a woman called Rosa, and that he thought she was three years older than him. She was, in fact nearly eight years older. Of itself that detail is fairly quotidian for the day; many people faked their ages, particularly on marriage certificates. Rosa’s gravestone claims a birth date of 1853, whereas the census of 1851 reveals that she was born in 1849; her husband was born in 1856.  

So far, so not very exceptional, but it was enough to spark an interest in finding more. Her father was Joseph Richardson, and her brother was Augustine; both men were well known artists, and the brother in particular was renowned for stained glass windows in churches, some of which survive today. For some reason unknown, both men were using ‘Mingaye’ as their professional name; it had been the surname of Joseph’s dead wife. They were not alone in this, for Rosa was also signing ‘Mingaye’ on her own work.

Rosa Mingaye has been long forgotten, yet as I wish to demonstrate, she was an artist of flair, great talent and an extremely fine water colourist. In her day she was celebrated, and though her works sell for small amounts today, I believe that in real terms they sold for far more when she was making her living from them. Women artists are all too often airbrushed from history, and my research for my novel led me to one who deserves to be known. I have not found her name on any of the long lists of Victorian artists that may be found on the internet; perhaps it is time to revise them.

I believe that the above painting is the River Thames, near Oxford, where Rosa lived and worked before her marriage. Her work seems to comprise landscape scenes, but also some rural buildings. Human figures appear as above, small and in the distance. I am led to think that she was working to please a market of well do do town dwellers who wished to adorn their walls with such things, not only for decorative purposes, but to show their wealth. Iffley Mill (below) stood on the River Thames; it was destroyed by fire early in the twentieth century.

Rosa's work seems to comprise landscape scenes, but also some rural buildings. Human figures appear as above, small and in the distance. I am led to think that she was working to please a market of well to do town dwellers who wished to adorn their walls with such things, not only for decorative purposes, but to show their wealth.

Her work was displayed across the country; this one is from a gallery in Norwich; the spelling of her name may be put down to the reporter.

Not all of her paintings are extant. To judge from the contemporary description of this one (below) from Manchester, it was worth seeing.

She continued her career after her marriage where she and William Briggs lived in the small Cumbrian town of Aspatria. It is not very far from the English Lake district, and of course the area became her studio. These are studies of Derwentwater.

That I have come across this undoubtedly talented, but unknown English water-colourist of the nineteenth century, is an accident of writing fiction. 

Rosa Mingaye was not a fiction and it may be that a serious art historian with access to more resources than I can command, may be able to find more about this artist. It is a basic understanding of feminism, and of plain common sense, that men and women are of equal dignity. This artist deserves a place, even just a mention, in the pantheon of nineteenth century water-colour painters. Neglect, surely, is not an option.

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Dr John Little spent almost forty years teaching in various schools in London and the South East. He was head of History at Meopham School and Rochester Independent College. He gained the first History PhD  awarded in the University of Westminster. He has written ten books, mostly novels, and has settled into historical fiction as his favoured genre. His work is based on real evidence, people and events contained in plausible narratives. He also gives talks and presentations on the topics about which he writes. His novel about Dr Briggs featuring Rosa Mingaye, ‘Love and War - a Romance of Old Aspatria’ will be published early 2021, and although based on real people, and accurate in detail, it remains a fiction.

The Lost Boy

By Dr John Little

In 1907 the Lake District Fells of Cumberland and Westmorland were seen by travellers in much the same way as was Switzerland. It was a place remote and far from roads, dangerous and fraught with mystery. To visit the high passes and the mountaintops, most visitors who regarded themselves as intrepid, would engage the services of an expert local guide. A few individuals would take ropes, pitons and axes to climb crags and steep cliffs, but the only people who visited regularly were keepers, shepherds and huntsmen. Apart from these, a visitor to the high places could go for days without seeing a single soul. The valleys and lakes thronged with people visiting an area made famous by the romantic poets such as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey, but few of these tourists were bold enough to climb the fells. Even if they had, for much of the area they would have been trespassing on the property of great landowners such as the Curwens of Workington, or the Earl of Lonsdale at Greystoke castle.

In 1907 the local carrier at Bampton was a man called Thomas Martindale, but although his family came from the village, he had settled with his wife and children in Penrith. Every day he took his horse and cart the ten miles or so from Penrith to Bampton and waited at the Mitre Inn for customers to collect their orders and take new ones. Needless to say, as a local man, he had family connections in Bampton, and towards the end of July 1907 he left his nine-year-old son, Thomas, with Mr John Bland of High Howe farm, as he later said, ‘for a holiday’. 

Mr Bland had sons of his own, one of whom was fifteen-year-old Vickers Tyson Bland, known by everyone as Tyson. The farm stood at the foot of the fells, with the heights of Bampton Common looming over it. From the tops of this vast fell, a path led to Kidsty pike and the heights of the High Street range.

On Monday 29 July someone, probably a local shepherd, brought news to Mr Bland that a pony was stuck in a pond up at White Bog, a marshy area, high up and about three miles away from the farm. What condition it was in was not reported, nor whose pony it was, but Mr Bland told Tyson to go up the fell and investigate it. This he did, and with him he took young Thomas, probably as a kind of adventure. When they reached the area of White Bog a whiteout came down as so often happens in the Lake District as cloud descended over the area. The two boys had no wish to go back down the mountain without fulfilling their mission, but they could see no further than a few yards. Tyson suggested that they split up so that their search area was wider, and keep in touch with each other by whistling every so often. For a while this worked, but then Tyson found the pool with a dead pony in it, and his attention was taken by it so completely that he forgot to whistle. By the time he remembered to whistle, Thomas had gone so far ahead that he was out of earshot and did not hear the older boy. Frantically Tyson searched as well as he could, shouting Thomas’s name, but gained no response. After some time searching, and probably in a great deal of panic, Tyson gave up and pelted back down the fell to the farm to raise the alarm.

Thomas Martindale had no food or water with him. He wore a thin summer jacket, a cloth cap, and breeches, whilst on his feet were a stout pair of wooden clogs, a form of footwear in no way suited to walking the high fells. Mr Bland, Tyson, and a couple of farm hands came up to White Moss and searched as well as they could, but though the cloud lifted and they could see across the marshy area, there was no sign of Thomas. It was as if he had vanished into thin air. Though they searched for hours there was no trace of him and they had to give up when darkness came. On the next day a party of twenty local men, along with Thomas’s father combed the area to no avail. Over the next few days large searches were gathered and the whole of Bampton Common, and large areas of the surrounding mountains were examined exhaustively.

The people searching for Thomas can have had no idea of what he had done, but from his own account, it is possible to follow his route fairly well on a local map. High up on the tops runs an ancient Roman road called High Street, which even goes across the mountain with that name. Once a walker is on the track, it is easy going- for a person in good boots. At several points on his journey Thomas had to make a decision on which way to turn, and in each case he went left. I cannot tell if Thomas was left handed, but a study from Stanford university indicates that left handed people are inclined to feel positive about things to the left, and right handed people the right, if a choice is given.

Whatever the reason for his choice, the very energetic Thomas walked fourteen miles after his disappearance and ended up that afternoon in the Kentmere valley (pictured above).

He had a conversation with a young man he found cutting bracken in a field, and was directed to the reservoir cottage at the head of the valley where Mr William Bland would give him food. It is a curious thing that Thomas was with a Bland when he got lost, and that the man who could have helped him also had that name but it is a common one in the area. Inexplicably Thomas did not ask the man for help but for directions back to Bampton. Mr Bland was busy at the time, but gave directions nonetheless and showed Thomas that the way home was back up the way he had come and pointed to the path to the Nan Bield pass. Why he did not give more help made him the subject of some criticism in the newspapers subsequently, but in his defence it must be remembered that he gave exactly what was asked for. This is what one might expect from a man with a literal mind. Thanking him, the boy wearily dragged himself up to the pass, about two thousand feet up, and found a hold in a crag where he settled down and went to sleep for the night.

By Friday the story of the missing boy had made more than a local ripple. The story had been syndicated across the country and when the Saturday newspapers came out, Thomas was national news.  All searching was in vain and he had been without food for four days. Even larger numbers of people turned out to comb the fells but there was no trace. Thomas had come to the top of Nan Bield pass and missed the right hand turn that would have taken him down towards home. Where the path joined High Street, he had turned left where he might have gone right, and spent the second night in another cleft in the rocks. He was a town boy in unsuitable footwear. He would have stiff legs from his walk of the day before, and his feet would be swollen and in a dreadful state. This accounts for his failure to go very far on his second day of being lost. On his second night, as he lay in the cleft, a lamb came into where he was, and snuggled up to him, keeping him warm. 

On Thursday he strayed into the fells above Troutbeck and found a remote shepherd’s hut. At least it had a roof and he spent the next two nights there.  It is highly likely, as this author knows from experience, that his feet would make any walking an agonising torture; they would be swollen and eventually his toenails would start to come off. After four days in summer heat with only water and no food it is also possible that he would have been feeling the onset of salt deficiency, along with the prickly heat, cramps, shivering and nausea that go with it. The stage was set for tragedy.

However, on Saturday morning Thomas heard the lowing of cattle and reasoned that they must come from a nearby farm so with a supreme effort he staggered down the hill and found the cows. There he was discovered by the son of the farmer at Troutbeck Farm and his ordeal was over. At midnight on Sunday his father arrived to take him home and father and son boarded the Ambleside to Penrith coach. The passengers got very excited when they realised who he was, for they had all read their newspapers. The coach stopped for photographs and at Glenridding an enthusiastic crowd gathered and cheered him on his way. The news was telegraphed ahead to Penrith, where the coach was met by another cheering crowd. They hailed him the ‘hero of the fells’ and his photograph appeared in newspapers and sold as a celebrated postcard; he had become a national figure.

That might have been the end of Thomas’s adventures but ten years later he was called on to serve in the British army and was posted to Iraq, then called Mesopotamia. Nothing is known of what he did there, but it seemed plausible that he might have got lost again, this time in the desert. Using the war diary of his regiment revealed where he was on the same dates as his adventure ten years previously.

Thomas reflects so very well the millions of ordinary boys of his generation who cannot have imagined when they grew up in their northern backstreet that they would be called upon to serve in the trenches, or the deserts of Iraq. Tommy Martindale is a good representative of his age.

Thomas became a signalman on the railways, just outside Penrith. He was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1932. No other vehicle was involved, no one saw it and one theory was that he ran onto a hedge while looking back to see if his brother was following. Had he been wearing a crash helmet it is likely that he would have lived. A month after his death his brother died in a similar accident not far away. Tyson Bland also served in the war, in the Border Regiment. He survived the war also, married, had a family, and his descendants live in the Penrith area to this day, as do those of Thomas’s siblings. 

The Hero of the Fells - The Lost Boy

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Dr John Little spent almost forty years teaching in various schools in London and the South East. He was head of History at Meopham School and Rochester Independent College. He gained the first History PhD  awarded in the University of Westminster.

He has written ten books, mostly novels, and has settled into historical fiction as his favoured genre. His work is based on real evidence, people and events contained in plausible narratives. He also gives talks and presentations on the topics about which he writes.

The Lost Boy was published in August 2020

The Testimony of Sal Madge

by Dr John Little

The town of Whitehaven in Cumbria has a rich history and in it may be found local ‘characters’ who were famous, infamous or notorious, though quite why they were is no longer remembered in much detail. ‘Laal Piano’ Bobby McGhee was three feet tall and played the piano in pubs; he was much loved by children. Duck Foot Charlie Smith lost a foot in the navy and earned a living as a hobbler, tying up ships. Geordie Mitchell slept in a wheelbarrow and ‘Leatherlugs’, a seller of reddening and sill (used for doorsteps) was used by mothers to  deter misbehaviour by threatening them that Leatherlugs would ‘get’ them if they did not behave. Among the number of the local colourful characters was one woman and she stands out among them by a very long way.

Sarah Madgin, known as Sal Madge, was born in 1841 and as may be seen, she was of singular appearance for her time. In the twenty-first century the discussion of gender and the various lives lived by people who no longer conform to traditional male/ female stereotypes is commonplace.

By and large this was not so in the nineteenth century when people were regarded as male or female by most of the population and any deviation from this was regarded as monstrous. Male homosexuality was met with severe penalties and the fate of Oscar Wilde is the best known example of what could be meted out to any who transgressed the social ‘norms’ of Victorian Britain.

There were exceptions of course and lately there has been a popular television series called Gentleman Jack which is based on the diaries of Anne Lister, a wealthy Yorkshirewoman who had a string of passionate affairs with women in the early part of the century. She documented them well in her diaries which were disguised in code, an understandable caution, though lesbianism was not a criminal offence. The Ladies of Llangollen were a well born pair of ladies who lived together in Wales and numbered some very well known people among their friends, not least of which was the Duke of Wellington.

Sal Madge had hair which was cut short at the back and longer at the sides. Her dark blonde hair was always covered with a working man’s peaked cap. Her face was pugnacious and masculine and even now gives the clear impression that she was not someone to mess with. Her upper body was clothed as a man with a male style jacket, a waistcoat and a neckerchief. When sitting she was often taken for a man, yet below the waist she always wore a skirt, but given what she did for a living it was probably a regrettable looking garment. There used to be a saying in the district if you were unwashed, you were ‘as black as Sal Madge.’ For over fifty years Sal worked as a wagoner on a wagon railway, driving huge horses pulling cartloads of coal from where it was mined, to the top of an inclined plane where it was lowered down to the docks and shipped all over the world. 

Sal with horse and her dog Flirt

It was very much a man’s job; hard, tough and in all weathers, all year round. Her personality matched the job for she associated with her best friends who were all pitmen. She drank, played cards, and if anyone attempted violence upon her they would probably lose for she could fist fight as well as any man. She arm-wrestled, drank pints, smoked a pipe, chewed baccy and could throw men at Cumberland wrestling.

It’s tempting to wonder why she did not just live her life as a man since she took on many of what we today would call male privileges and held them against all comers. However if was not practical; she lived in a close knit community and was accepted with a lot of local respect. If she had started calling herself Bill or Ted then among a deeply divided working class community, strong in both Catholicism and Orange Lodge, then she might have met with a degree of resistance.

In the same measure it can be argued that her job leading horses along a railway in winter gales and rain might have been warmer in trousers; I have seen discussions as to why she kept to a skirt but I fancy the answer is a simple one. People working out of doors have to pee. It’s easy for a man, but a woman in trousers has to take them down and squat. Somewhere in the works of James Joyce is a description of a market woman in Dublin standing over a drain-hole with her legs apart and hitching her skirt up to her knees; she then leaned slightly forward and pissed straight down into the drain. It may be that this was once a common feature of working women’s lives that has simply been lost from folk memory since long skirts were abandoned as everyday wear in the early twentieth century.

It is very tempting sometimes to make of people what they are not. Sal Madge is in the census records all through from 1841 to 1891 and in many entries she is living in a house belonging to a woman; sometimes a woman who has been widowed and has children. It is entirely possible that Sal was a lesbian, but there is not a shred of proof of that. In my treatment of her sexuality I have considered her looks, her nature, her strength of character and her considerable ability to stand up for herself. I think it very likely that she looked at the way in which many of the women in her community had to live their lives, and decided that it was not for her. Childbirth, abuse, drudgery and inferior status were not something that she wanted anything to do with. It was clear to her that her world was run by men and they had privilege; she took some of it for herself and woe betide anyone who tried to take it from her. She had a reputation of using her strength to enforce her will; if she decided that to live as a woman was not her thing and that she would live as she pleased, then she probably had little interest in the whole ‘sex’ thing. In my book I have restricted myself to hints without being too definite as to her thoughts on sex. It’s in my mind that if the subject had come up, she would have told the person questioning to mind their own business and if they had persisted they might have got a thump. My Sal more or less says that, and I would think it disrespectful to do more on the matter.

The overarching question about her is to why her memory has survived  in the way it has. If she had been just another local ‘character’, half man, half woman, like something in a Victorian freak show, then she would not have been remembered with the respect and affection that she was held in during and after her lifetime. Part of her local fame may lie in the abundant charitable activity that she engaged in, collecting money for local good causes for she seems to have thrown herself into the life of her community and liked to do good. Another part of it is undoubtedly her membership of the local Rocket Brigade, a life saving organization which fired rockets carrying lines out to ships wrecked on the coast. They saved many lives and Sal Madge drove their wagon so was subject to call out when the two cannon by the harbour sounded out an alarm across the town. There is however more than this to her legend.

Sal about to lead the Rocket troop on a parade

It is rare in historical research that we find the proverbial ‘smoking gun’ that apparently explains things but I believe that I have found the answer to why Sal Madge has such a high status memory in the local community. Without giving any spoilers I discovered that Sal Madge did something rather heroic in the summer of 1887 and it is my thought that her actions elevated her from local colour to local heroine. The actual events themselves have been forgotten, lost in the minds of succeeding generations but when people speak admiringly of Sal Madge being ‘hard as nails’ there is a solid base of evidence for that opinion. It involves an incident that might have seen her receiving an award for bravery in other circumstances, a court case that caught national attention and a level of esteem that caused hundreds of people to drop what they were doing after she died just to attend her funeral. That the esteem survives is witnessed by the fact that her home town raised money for her to have a gravestone back in the 1990s and when that was smashed by vandals a few years ago, to repeat the process and give her a new stone. That sort of regard comes not from duty but genuine affection.

There is more to it that that of course; she is almost an emblem of the town as it was; working class, dirty, smoky and smelly, hard working, hard drinking, salt of the earth, strong of mind and body and no side to her at all. It is easy to see why Whitehaven remains proud of her; so they should be.

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Dr John Little spent almost forty years teaching in various schools in London and the South East. He was head of History at Meopham School and Rochester Independent College. He gained the first History PhD  awarded in the University of Westminster.

He has written nine books, mostly novels, and has settled into historical fiction as his favoured genre. His work is based on real evidence, people and events contained in plausible narratives. He also gives talks and presentations on the topics about which he writes. On 30th January 2020 his book about Sal Madge was published.

Britons, Fellow-Countrymen, Foreigners – “For Wales, see Britannia”

By Gareth Griffith

At the start of his book, Rebirth of a Nation: Wales 1880-1980, Kenneth O Morgan commented that, “for Wales, see England,” was the notorious entry in the 1888 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. For Morgan, the entry “encapsulated all the humiliation and the patronizing indifference which helped to launch the modern nationalist movement in the principality…” (OUP, 1982, p 3) The irony is palpable: an encyclopaedia of “Britannica” had expropriated the name the Welsh had for centuries used to define themselves  and their country, only for the same encyclopaedia to obliterate the identity of Wales by subsuming it under the heading of “England.”

Public Domain Image

The story had a long trajectory. We can take a few steps back to the 15th century. In the epilogue to The Age of Conquest: Wales 1063-1415, RR Davies reflected on the condition of Wales following the collapse of the revolt of Owain Glyn Dŵr, by which time the prospect of establishing a native, unitary Welsh polity was lost. According to Davies, “Wales had been reduced to a ‘land’ (terra Wallie), an annex of the kingdom of England.” (OUP, p 464) Davies noted, too, that the status of Wales as a “separate nation” was raised at the Council of Constance in 1417. There the English spokesmen asserted that, ecclesiastically and politically, Wales had been effectively incorporated into England. The assertion was accompanied by the claim “that England was to be equated with Britain (‘inclyta nation Anglicana alias Brytannica’).” Why not? After all, if history tells us anything it is that the winners get to call the shots; they’re the ones that do the name-calling. In 1417, it was a thousand years since the Roman legions had left Britain and here was the final chapter in the resistance of the Britons, one that ended with the transfer of that name to their ancient enemies. As RR Davies wrote, with a heavy heart no doubt:

“So had the English appropriated the mythology of an unitary empire of Britain, which had for so long been a source of memories, inspiration, and hope for the Welsh.” (p 464) 

In the opening chapter of the book, Davies had discussed the importance of their British heritage to the people of Wales in the Middle Ages, writing that:

“An even more powerful ingredient in the chemistry of national unity was pride in a common descent from the Britons of old. It was as Britons, Brytaniaid, that the Welsh normally described themselves until the later twelfth century; ‘Britain’ was the title they gave to their country.” (p 16) 

It was a case of – ‘for Wales, see Britannia.”

The works by KO Morgan and RR Davies are two volumes in the Oxford University Press’ series on the history Wales, published in reverse chronological order. The third volume – Wales and the Britons, 350-1064 by TM Charles-Edwards - was published in 2013. It opens with a short essay on name-calling and related matters. The question he confronts is how the Wales and the Welsh of the medieval period, from the fall of the Roman Empire to the twelfth century, identified themselves and how were they identified by others? What names were used and what did they mean in geographical terms?

In the fifth century and for many centuries after there was no Wales to speak of, only a patchwork of small kingdoms; but there were Britons and Cymry (or Kymry) and Wielisc, the name in Old English for the Welsh. Likewise, in the early period there were no Bretons in Brittany or Cumbrians in Cumbria. According to Charles-Edwards, “Breton in English is a late import from the French where it can mean either Britons or Bretons…”; and, although the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in the tenth century used Cumbras for the Cumbrians, it had “no relevance to how the Welsh or the Cumbrians saw themselves.”

As Charles-Edwards rightly states, “it would be fatal to import later senses into earlier periods as if they were as valid for, say, the seventh century as they were for the tenth or as they are for the twenty-first.” His argument is that, for the whole of the period up to 1064, “the modern historian must maintain the distinction between modern terminology and the terms used at the time.”
(OUP, 2013, pp 1-2)

The same can be said to apply to the modern writer of historical fiction. Getting it right can be tricky. If a character in a novel set in the seventh century looked out from today’s Bristol over at what is now South Wales, what would they have called the land they were looking at? How should today’s Brittany be referred to in a novel of the same period? Little Britain would be an anachronism, not to mention a source of mild amusement for fans of the BBC comedy of the same name.

The broader point is that, for the early medieval period, Wales was part of a larger whole, the land of the Britons. In this light, Charles-Edwards comments that the idea of Britannia varied, depending on context and circumstance. For Asser, writing at the end of the ninth century it had a “double sense”, either the entire island which the Britons had long conceived of as their own, or as the land we now refer to as Wales. Britannia is also ambiguous in early Breton sources: “it may be the island from which they had migrated; but it may also be Brittany.” (p 1)

Attribution Link

As time passed, the geographical extent of that land changed, expanding occasionally, shrinking more often before the incursions of the Anglo-Saxons to the East, the Gaels in the North and West and later the Vikings and the Normans from every conceivable direction. For Gildas, writing in the mid-sixth century, at its most extensive the whole of the island of Britain belonged to the Britons. But that vision was to contract. Charles-Edwards directs out attention to the Welsh poem of the tenth century, Armes Prydein, which contains the phrase “from Manaw to Llydaw” – in modern terms “from Clackmannanshire to Brittany.” He says the poem “was thinking of the lands which ought to be British, because it recalled a time when they had been British.” (p 3) That is to say that in AD 600, or thereabouts, the land of the Britons – Britannia – had extended from around Sterling in Scotland down almost as far as the Loire in France. By the tenth century, that same geographical region was the Britannia of the imagination. Taking all its improbable and impractical elements into account, of Armes Prydein, Charles-Edwards commented:

“Yet, the visionary element is very strong: the argument is ultimately about the right to all of Britain south of the Forth; the objection was not just to an English empire but to England as such. The Cymry were the Palestinians of early medieval Britain.” (Wales and the Britons, 350-1064, p 535) 

No less complicated is the development of the language used to express these shifting realities. On one side of the language barrier, the Anglo-Saxon name to denote the native population of the island – “Wielisc” or “Welsh”, is often said to derive from “a variant on the standard Germanic label for foreigner…” (see for example Norman Davies, Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe, Allen Lane, 2011, p 79) Another interpretation is that “Welsh” meant “not so much foreigners as peoples who had been Romanized…” (John Davies, A History of Wales, Penguin Books, 2007, p 69): that is to say, “all the people who had been part of the Roman Empire.” (Wales and the Britons, 350-1064, p 1) Whether one meaning precludes another is not clear to me. At the very least, it seems unlikely that the original meaning would have been maintained in the vernacular across the years of “intimate hostility” between the Britons and the Anglo-Saxons. (Wales and the Britons, 350-1064, p 402) Probably, “foreigner” is not too wide of the mark. At any rate, the idea that the Welsh had become foreigners in their own land is hard to shake off; popular imagination clings to it, as firmly today as in the Middle Ages.

Statue of Owain Glyndwr - Pulic Domain image

Turning to the other side of the language barrier, the historian John Davies has traced the first usage of the word Cymry to a praise poem probably written in 633, in which the poet was referring to the country rather than the people (“Ar wynep Kumry Cadwallawn was”), a country that would have
referred to the Old North as well as Wales. He contends that the word Cymry evolved from the Brythonic word Combrogi, meaning fellow-countrymen and that “its adoption suggests a deepening self-awareness among the Britons.” He goes on to say:

“Although the author of Armes Prydein (c 930) used the word Cymry or Cymro fifteen times, it only gradually came to oust the word Brython. That was the favourite word of the author of Brut y Tywysogyon; his entry for 1116 is the first to mention the Cymry and it was not until the years after 1100 that Cymry became as usual as Brythoniaid in the work of the poets.” (A History of Wales, Penguin Books, 2007, p 69) 

It seems the Welsh of the twelfth century were down-sizing at long last, re-configuring the world of their imagination to conform to prevailing political reality in the Norman age. According to KO Morgan, by Victorian times that process had resulted in a view of Wales, from the perspective of their “Teutonic” neighbours, as a mere “geographical expression”, as a land that “belonged to prehistory.” (p 3) But then, the title to Morgan’s book, Rebirth of a Nation, suggests that if Wales and the Welsh – Britons, fellow-countrymen, foreigners – were down, still they were not out. The imagination continues to work on political reality, seeking to shape what is to what might be; as RR Davies wrote: “The memories of a conquered people are long indeed.” (p 388)

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Gareth Griffith was born in Penmaenmawr, North Wales, and now lives in Sydney, Australia with his wife Sue. His career has encompassed teaching, research and writing, including many years working as the manager of research for the parliament of New South Wales. These days, when Gareth isn’t writing, he enjoys reading, music, dark Scandi film and TV, and Dark Age Britain. Although Gareth left Wales at the age of twelve, Wales never left him, and its landscape and history loom large in his imagination and his storytelling.

Find Gareth on his website: https://garethgriffithauthor.com/
and on Twitter: @garethgriffith_

On the Trail of Dunmail

By Annie Whitehead

The pass of Dunmail Raise connects Grasmere and Thirlmere, and it’s said that the cairn on the roadside there is the burial place of Dunmail, last king of the Cumbrians, killed in battle in 945. It recently occurred to me, that having a history degree, and being the author of two novels set in the 10thc, I ought to know about said battle. And yet I didn’t.

I set off to find out about Dunmail, and his father, Owain the Giant.

The Giant's Grave

First stop - the Giant’s Grave at St Andrew’s Church in Penrith, purportedly the final resting place of Owain. I was hoping to find some literature about the grave, but a lovely young couple was getting married when I arrived, and I reached my first ‘dead-end’ on the trail. So I moved off in search of Tarn Wadling, on the High Hesket to Armathwaite road. Legend has it that, nearby, Owain the Giant cast a spell on King Arthur. There was bound to be a clue here, surely? Well, after asking several people and being attacked by a swarm of horse-flies, I eventually found Tarn Wadling Wood, but of the tarn itself, long-since drained, there was no visible trace.

Inside Tarn Wadling Wood

Then it was on to the famous Dunmail Raise. That cairn looks suspiciously modern, to me, but never mind. I decided to test out another bit of the legend, which is that two of the slain Dunmail’s warriors carried his crown to Grisedale Tarn and threw it in the water, running to escape the approaching army. Hmm. Have you tried running up to Grisedale Tarn? (Admittedly, I’m no fell runner, nor am I a seasoned medieval warrior!) I will say that the capricious Cumbrian weather provided me with a mystical moment; it was a misty, mizzly morning and by the time I’d climbed up to where the landscape flattens out a little, I could only see about 20ft ahead. I’d no idea how close I was to the water, until the clag suddenly lifted and the tarn appeared, right in front of me. Unfortunately, though there was a sudden beam of sunlight, no hand rose out of the water brandishing Dunmail’s crown.

The 'clag' lifts

So it was now a question of hitting the books and historical sources. Let’s deal with Owain first: what we do know is that he was King Owen of Strathclyde from c.925-37 and was present at Eamont Bridge when the Scots agreed to stop supporting the Vikings against the English kings of Wessex. He broke that treaty in 934, and again at the Battle of Brunanburh in 937. There’s no further mention of him so it’s possible, even likely, that he perished in that battle.

Sometimes he’s called King of Strathclyde, sometimes King of the Cumbrians. Debate continues as to whether those two names were completely interchangeable. But if there’s a distinction to be drawn, it might prove useful later in this search.

Next on the book trail was Dunmail, and I started by looking in Gamble’s Lake District Place-Names. “Dunmail Raise: here, according to tradition, is the grave of Dunmail, one of the last kings of Strathclyde, allegedly killed in battle against Edmund, King of the Saxons in 945. In fact, Dunmail survived the battle and died in Rome 30 years later." (My italics).

Well, I remembered this chap, from my second novel, which features a scene in which King Edgar is rowed along the River Dee at Chester in 973 and paid homage by 6-8 kings. One of them, Donald (Dyfnwal), took his leave to abdicate and go on pilgrimage to Rome. I’ll come back to that later ...

So, where did these ‘rumours’ start? Roger of Wendover, writing in the 13thc, says: (AD 946) “King Edmund ... ravaged the whole of Cumberland, and put out the eyes of the two sons of Dunmail, king of that province.”

Richard Oram, a specialist on Scottish medieval history says, “Certainly, Dyfnwal (Dunmail) is reported to have travelled to Rome, where he became a priest and died in 975. The background to his resignation in 973 may have been the killing in 971 of Cullen, king of the Scots, by Rhydderch, son of King Dyfnwal.”

Something didn’t quite add up. Let’s go back to that ship on the Dee and try to find out who was on it.

You’ll remember I mentioned that there were 6-8 kings; nobody can be sure of the number, nor who was there. The historian Sir Frank Stenton identified, among others,
Malcolm of Strathclyde (975-97) and Dufnal (Dyfnwal/Dunmail), his father, and Roger of Wendover names Malcolm of the Cumbrians, but no Dyfnwal/Dunmail. John of Worcester, writing in the 12thc, named Malcolm ‘rex Cumbrorum’ and “five others” - among them, Dufnal.

So, even though not all the sources say that Dufnal/Dunmail was there, they all agree that Malcolm, his son, was. So, if Dunmail’s sons were blinded to stop them claiming the throne, how come one of them managed to kill Cullen in a revenge attack, and the other ended up being recognised as a king?

I’d come to the end of the trail; Dunmail was not killed in any battle, nor were his sons blinded. He retired to go on pilgrimage and died 30 years after the supposed battle commemorated at Dunmail Raise. The legend had no basis whatsoever.

Near the top of the rise

Still, I wanted to check one more source, a book mentioned by one of the other authors as having some information which might be relevant. It was Phythian-Adam’s Land of the Cumbrians.

In it I found: “Dunmail/Dyfnwal/Donald - possibly the son of Owain, and the king of the Cumbrians who escorted Saint Catroe in c.941 ... dispossessed in 945 of Cumberland by Edmund who blinded two of his sons in order to destroy their claims to the throne ... Described variously as both king of the Britons and king of Strathclyde in 975 when he died on pilgrimage, he rowed Edgar on the Dee in 973 as a king on the same occasion as his son Malcolm was described specifically as King of the Cumbrians.”

Well, that seemed to confirm everything I’d managed to discover. But, who was Saint Catroe? If I could find him, then I could perhaps find a direct reference to Dunmail in 941, just four years before he was supposedly killed in battle and his crown thrown into the tarn.

I found the link. Saint Catroe was persuaded by visions to go on pilgrimage and was escorted part of the way by his cousin, Dunmail/Donald, son of Áed. What? Not the son of Owen/Owain?

I found the answer in my Dictionary of Dark Age Britain: two entries, one atop the other:

Donald, son of Áed, (king c. 940-3) is Dunmail, Catroe’s kinsman, whose sons were blinded.
Donald, Owen’s son, (king c. 962-975) whose son Rhydderch slayed Cullen, went to Rome, having abdicated in favour of his other son, Malcolm.

So there were, in fact, two Dunmails. And that is where we should leave it. Because, it just might mean that our Dunmail did not, after all, die on pilgrimage, but sleeps in his cairn, ready one day to rise up again …

The cairn at the foot of Dunmail Raise

(All photographs property of the author. Illustration - public domain)

~~~~~~~~~~

Annie Whitehead is an author and historian, and a member of the Royal Historical Society. She has written three award-winning novels set in Anglo-Saxon Mercia. Her history of Mercia, from Penda the pagan king to the last brave stand of the earl of Mercia against the Conqueror, Mercia: The Rise and Fall of a Kingdom, will be published by Amberley on 15 September
2018.
Buy Alvar the Kingmaker
Buy To Be A Queen
A version of this article originally appeared in the April 2016 issue of Cumbria Magazine
Read a Blog piece about what went on behind the scenes during the research for this article.

The Corpse Road

by Deborah Swift

Now it is the time of night,
That the graves all gaping wide,
Every one lets forth his sprite,
In the church-way paths to glide

Puck - A Midsummer Night's Dream

When I was out walking last week I was travelling what is known as a 'coffin route or 'corpse road.'

So what exactly is a 'corpse road'?

In the Middle Ages there were only a few mother churches in England that held burial rights. This meant that when someone died, the corpse had to be transported long distances, sometimes through difficult terrain. Because of the landscape, often a corpse had to be carried miles by the bearers unless the deceased was rich and had left instructions for a horse-drawn bier.

The Fairy Steps, Beetham, a narrow passageway
where coffins were carried to the top of the hill

One well-known funeral way is the one that runs from Rydal to the church in Ambleside in the Lake District where you can still see a coffin stone on which the coffin was placed while the parishioners rested.

Many of the corpse roads are now long gone, but there are clues in the names of footpaths and fields. Fields crossed by church-way paths often had names like "Church-way" or "Kirk-way Field". 

Where I was walking the coffin had to be carried up the side of a limestone rock face known locally as 'the Fairy Steps' because there was no burial ground in Arnside and the coffin had to be carried over the marshes to nearby Beetham.

The coffins were hoisted over the limestone cliffs using metal rings embedded in the rock. In 1866, the church at Arnside was consecrated, and the walk between Arnside and Beetham was no longer necessary.

St Michael's Church, Beetham

I'll digress a little to show you a few pictures of Beetham church, which is a beautiful historic building dating back to Saxon times, with these lovely medieval-style carvings above the door.

The church was also besieged by Parliamentarians in the Civil War in 1647, where local landowners tombs were desecrated by having the heads removed from the statues.

Desecrated tombs

Stained glass window dedicated to Charles I
Beetham Church

But to return to corpse roads - There was much superstition associated with the coffin route. For example, the feet of the corpse had to be be kept pointing away from the family home on its journey to the cemetery, to prevent the deceased wanting to walk back home.

To prevent the dead returning, the route often went over bridges or stepping stones across running water which it was believed spirits would not be able to cross. Sometimes it led over stiles or through various other hazardous locations, such as The Fairy Steps. This was supposed to deter the ghosts from wandering. Ghosts and spirits were an accepted part of everyday life right up until the 20th century. 

The corpse light, the supposed soul of the dead, was supposed to linger on these roads, and there were many accounts of people seeing them.

~~~~~~~~~~~~
Deborah Swift is the author of several historical novels.  To read more about her, please visit her website  www.deborahswift.blogspot.com

And to find out more about her books:
The Lady's Slipper
The Gilded Lily
A Divided Inheritance (Oct 2013)