Fighting talk

Robert Dunn (Letters, 18 August) hopes that certain aspects of Scottish history will be listed as worthy of celebration in the proposed festival of Scottish history (your report, 18 August), mentioning three such events.

One of those he lists is the Battle of Carham, which he attributes to 1018, saying: “The Anglo-Danes finally lost their claim to the land between the Tweed and the Forth”, and describes it as being “as significant as the Battle of Bannockburn”.

While I would not wish to diminish the importance of the Battle of Carham, having carried out academic research on it, I should point out that it was not a battle which captured the area Mr Dunn describes.

Equally, the English army against which the Scots and Strathclyde armies fought was probably made up of the local “fierd”, or levy. It was not an invading army as was the case at Bannockburn, to which he compared it.

In fact, the area he describes (called “Lothian” in texts from the Middle Ages) was granted to the Scots king by King Edgar “The Pacific” at Chester in 973. Most medieval historians now accept this.

The battle itself, I argue, probably took place in 1016, not 1018. It was fought by joint Scottish and Strathclyde armies under the kings of each kingdom and it took place while the English throne was being fought over by Æthelred and Cnut.

Clearly, as the battle was fought on the south side of the Tweed, on much the same field as Flodden was fought on around 500 years later, the Scots and Strathclyde armies were on the offensive.

Their attack may well have been revenge for the way an earlier Scottish army had been defeated at Durham (in 1006) resulting in the heads of the Scots dead being displayed outside the city, stuck on stakes, which must have greatly offended Scots Christian views.

Equally, it could have been a gesture of defiance at demands by Æthelred for tax as King Malcolm’s overlord. As it is likely that Lothian was granted to Scotland on certain conditions (such as military support), the English king may have felt that he had ultimate ownership of the land.

However, after half a century of Scottish occupation of the land, such agreements would have been long forgotten in Scots minds and would probably be unrecorded in the Scots kingdom at that time. Malcolm’s action, therefore, is of importance in Scots history, as it sealed Scots ownership of Lothian, although it was already de facto, if not de jure, in place.

Andrew HN Gray

Craiglea Drive

Edinburgh