The Kingdom and Name of Elmet

Abstract

'NORTHERN ENGLAND', we are told, 'retains an opacity during the early middle ages which is barely penetrable: the lives, group identities, cultural perspectives, economic activities and world pictures of the vast majority of its inhabitants are all but a closed book to us.' This is especially so of Elmet, which 'teeters into the light of historicity sometime between c. 616-33, only then to be taken into Edwin of Deira's direct rule'.l No doubt this is true. Yet para-historical techniques can sometimes recover the past, as all historians know. Anthropology, archaeology, comparative law, palaeography, place-name studies, and even micro botany and genetics come to mind here.2 This paper thus falls into two parts. The first approaches the material in a familiar way, setting out the standard historical sources for Elmet and what historians have made of them. But the second part uses less familiar techniques. It applies Celtic philology to suggest what the name of Elmet means, and to translate two Welsh poems (apparently of the late sixth century) on Gwallog, king of Elmet in the 580s. It is here, then, in using work by previous Celtic scholars, that we try to prise open a little that 'closed book' of Elmet. First, previous discussion of Elmet. The normal historical sources are meagre. They consist of two passages in Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica, an entry in Annales Cambriae, and a brief reference in Historia Brittonum. Bede says (n. xiv) that Paulinus built a church at Campodonuln, which was destroyed (with the royal dwelling beside it) by Penda (d. 656). Editors have taken this as a Roman site near Dewsbury, Yorkshire. Later kings replaced the palace with one in the region known as Loidis (= Leeds and its environs). But the stone altar survived the fire, and 'is still preserved in the monastery of the most reverend abbot and priest Thrythwulf, which is in the forest of Elmet.'3 Bede also writes (IV. xxiii) of a prophetic dream which Breguswith, mother of St Hilda (614-80), had 'while her husband Hereric was living in exile under the Britisl1 king Cerdic, where he was poisoned'.4 Many regard this Cerdic as I N. J. Higham, 'Britons in Northern England in the Early Middle Ages: Through a Thick Glass Darkly', Northern History, XXXVIII (2001),5, 16. 2 Cf. Walter Bodmer, 'The Genetics of Celtic Populations', Proceedings of the British Academy, LXXXII (1992), 37-57. 3 Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969), p. 189; English Historical Documents c. 500-1042, ed. Dorothy Whitelock, 2nd edn (1979), p. 673. 4 Colgrave and Mynors, Bede, p. 411; Whitelock, Documents, p. 722.