If you're in a hole keep digging

Present day Priory and medieval ruins

The results are back. Our dig in the Glebe field on the seaward side of the Priory unearthed a huge number of animal bones: cows, deer, sheep, pigs, even chickens. (Blog 26/06/18)  Now we have the C14 dating outcome and there is no doubt we were digging a site from the 7th to 9th centuries, the time of the Anglo-Saxons and St Aebba.

https://digventures.com/coldingham-priory/timeline/diary/the-radiocarbon-dates-are-in/

Local tradition has it that her monastery was on the top of the Kirk Hill, part of the massive St Abbs Head though digs there have never unearthed any archaeological evidence.   There was an Iron Age fort there, probably the seat of the local chief possibly Colud or one of his line.

 As I said at the meeting prior to the dig, if you want to convert people to new religion, you don't ask them to walk four miles then climb a steep hill!

Kirk Hill - no place for a monastery

Aebba may well have been received at the Kirk Hill fort on her arrival as would be befitting for a Northumbrian princess and sister of the most powerful king in the area but when it came to establishing her monastery it would have been between the streams that run down the two sides of the village and at the ancient pagan holy site framed by them.

The story that she was seeking sanctuary and avoiding a forced marriage is not likely to have much substance either. If she were escaping from the Northumbrian court, she would have had to have settled a lot further away from the border than she did.  There must have been some conflation with a period in her early life when she did indeed have to flee to Dal Riada in the north-west during the dynastic struggles that resulted in the creation of Northumbria from the previous smaller kingdoms.

She was a strong woman, the sister of two kings and would have acted as an ambassador rather than a refugee.

Aebba's foundation was almost certainly overlaid by the subsequent 12th and, later 14th century buildings.

We were  digging in the area beside the encompassing vallum, the perimeter dyke or ditch that separated the sacred from the profane, the religious from the lay communities.

After geophysics scanning, four trenches were chosen by popular vote and we seem to have been lucky.

Trench Plan

 From the masses of bones in one trench, we seem to have hit the monastery abattoir and thus obtained good carbon dating material.

Hopefully funds can be found for other digs on the unexplored parts of the site.

We now have a vindication that our village is indeed the Urbs Coludi of Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum - The Ecclesiastical History of the English People.

Coludsbyrig. Colud's burgh or town hence Coldingham in the Anglo-Saxon tongue.

Pink moons and dark age bloggers

We all gathered in the Glebe field, the field that, in the past, provided grazing for the minister's horse. Amateur metal detector users under the guidance of a few experts. Why? Well, not to hunt for treasure, though everyone must have had a frisson of excitement as the detectors pinged a high note indicating something other than iron.

It was part of the continuing search for the site of the Anglo-Saxon church or monastery founded by Ebba, later Saint Ebba, sister of Oswy and Oswald, Anglo-Saxon kings of Northumbria.

The geophysical survey revealed interesting shapes beneath the surface of the field and dowsing seemed to agree with it.

The next stage would be a dig but, to get a grant for such a venture, community involvement had to be demonstrated hence the turn out for the metal detecting. Any finds that supported the theory would also be useful.

Some coins and a few buckles and artefacts were found, some of them medieval though nothing dramatic. My contribution was woeful - two aluminium cans and the iron bolt from a Victorian iron.

A .303 cartridge case and the copper ring from a canvas tent were reminders of the use of the field as a camp site for local Volunteers of the same vintage as my iron bolt and a toy gun that boys of all ages like to play soldiers.

The next night was spent watching the lunar eclipse and the pink moon. An event that won't occur again in my life time.

The Chronicon Scotorum and the Anglo Saxon Chronicle are really just Dark Age blogs with facts and opinions mixed in with speculation and rumours.

The Chronicum is an extensive list of battles and skirmishes as the Irish settlers -the Scotti - sought to establish their kingdom in Dal Riata and fought with the Britons, the Picts, the Cruithne as they would have called themselves, or sometimes amongst themselves for dominance as the early Irish church tried to establish its form of Christianity among the pagan tribes. The whole record is interspersed with Druidic bardic verse -

Cold is the wind across Ile

Which blows against the youth of Cenn-tire;

They will commit a cruel deed in consequence;

They will kill Mongan, son of Fiachna.

Cormac caem and Illand son of Fiachu die.Ronan, son of Tuathal died:—

The church of Cluain-Airthir to-day—

Illustrious the four on whom it closed:

Cormac the mild, who submitted to tribulations,

And Illann, son of Fiacha.

And the other pair,

To whom many territories were obedient—

Mongan, son of Fiachna Lurgan,

And Ronan, son of Tuathal.

Straight out of Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones or not?

There are occasional allusions to contemporary events other than the violent deaths of chieftains and their followers in what was the heroic age of warriors now so popular in fantasy games and films.

References are made to plagues and pestilences, to leprosy and the murrain of cattle and, to sadly evocative phrases such as" the mortality of children" - no doubt some childhood infection such as diphtheria or scarlet fever that continued to play sad havoc up until immunisation.

Ecclesiastical records such as the death of St Patrick in 489, the birth Colum Cille ( Columba) in 518 and his arrival on Iona in 563 A.D. and the apoointments and deaths of long forgotten bishops and abbots, are interspersed with increasing references to "the Saxons", obviously becoming a greater power as the might of Northumbria increased, but not a word about Ebba even a though her protector in her exile, Eochaid Bruie, is mentioned as is Bede
 Is that because St Ebba was not part of the Columban church , an Anglo-Saxon? She was the daughter of a king and the sister of two others...  yet no mention.

The weather is reported in almost mundane terms - the sea floods of 720 when there was " a rainy summer". How many of those have we had since then?

Celestial events, however, bring out the poet in the chronicler -

A thin and tremulous cloud in the shape of a rainbow appeared at the fourth vigil of night on the fifth feria preceding Easter, extending from east to west through a clear sky.

The moon became the colour of blood

Annal 674 AD

"The moon was as though drenched with blood."
 Simeon of Durham.

Refers to a lunar eclipse of 23 November AD 755, when the eclipsed Moon occulted Jupiter.

An Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that on January 24, 734 CE, "the Moon was as if it had been sprinkled with blood"

Times may change and we live in a scientific age and explanations of such phenomena are available to all. We no longer see them as portents or omens but they still imbue us with a feeling of wonder sufficient to get us out of bed to witness them for ourselves.

The monks and nuns the Anglo-Saxon community in what is now the glebe field would have been amazed like us to see the colour of the moon change as it was eclipsed. Times change but people don't and the celestial cycle certainly doesn't.