Page:The dialect of the southern counties of Scotland - Murray - 1873.djvu/22

8 sieges of the generation that followed in the poems of the other three northern bards.

The Arthur period was over when Ida, the son of Eoppa, whom all accounts agree in denominating the first local ruler of the Northan-hymbrian Angles came to the throne in 547, a century after the arrival of the Saxons in Kent, and half a century after the "two ealdormen," Cerdic and Cymric, landed at Cerdices-ore, to found the West-Saxon kingdom. According to Welsh accounts, Ida, named by the Britons, Flamddwyn, the Flame-bearer, formed an alliance with one of the British chiefs, Culvynawyd Prydain, the son of Gorion, marrying his daughter, Bun or Bebban, distinguished in the Triads as one of the three shameless wives of Britain, and execrated by Aneurin in the Gododin as Bun Bradwenn, Bun the fair traitress. In honour of his wife, Ida conferred upon the place where he fixed his residence the name of Bibban-burh, the modern Bamborough, and long the most important fortress of Northumbria. He fought with the Britons in many battles, until his career was cut short and himself slain in 560 by Owain, son of Urien, prince of Reged, as sung by Taliesin in the Maronad Owen Mab Urien. It was apparently during the reign of his successors that the famous battle of Cattraeth or Caltraeth was fought, commemorated by Aneurin in the poem of the Gododin. On that occasion the entire British forces of the old province of Valentia were drawn up to defend a pass or position, apparently at one end of the northern wall, against the united attack of the Angles of Deifr and Bryneich, and the Picts. After seven days fighting, the Britons, who spent the intervals in mead-drinking and revelry, were, on account of their inebriation, defeated with terrific slaughter, so that out of 363 chiefs who wore the golden torque and led their men to battle, only three survived the fatal day, one of them being Aneurin himself, son of the prince of Cwm Cawlwyd, in Strathclyde. This great victory confirmed the power of the Angles in the east, as far north as the Forth, the Britons either becoming slaves, escaping to join the larger body of their countrymen in Wales, or retreating to the west, where British power made a stand for a while, and formed itself into a doubtfully independent kingdom, known as Cumbria, or Strath clyde and Reged, the capital of which was the fortress of Alclwyd, or Petra Cloithe, the Rock of Clyde, known also to the Scoto-Irish as Dun-breton, the fort of the Britons, now modernized into Dumbarton. The battle of Caltraeth is placed by Villemarque about 578, by Mr. Skene in 596. It is somewhat curious that no direct record of an event which figures so prominently in early Cymric literature, should be found in the Anglo-saxon writers; however, the date 596 falls under the reign of the Northumbrian Æthelfrid, who, according to Beda, "ravaged the Britons more than all the princes of the Angles. For he conquered more territories from them,