Battle of Carham
Who Fought
History & Significance
The Battle of Carham was fought between the English ruler of Bamburgh and the king of Scotland in alliance with the Cumbrians. The encounter took place in the 1010s, most likely 1018 (or perhaps 1016), at Carham on Tweed in what is now Northumberland, England. Uhtred, son of Waltheof of Bamburgh (or his brother Eadwulf Cudel), fought the combined forces of Malcolm II of Scotland and Owen the Bald, king of the Cumbrians (or Strathclyde). The result of the battle was a victory for the Scots and Cumbrians.
There are no strictly contemporary sources for the battle, with it going unnoticed in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Historians know of the event primarily because of historical material assembled at Durham in the twelfth century, though the battle is also noted in one Scottish king-list.
In Libellus de exordio, the Benedictine monk Symeon of Durham writing c.1110 recounted a certain famosum bellum, 'infamous battle', of 1018 where a 'countless multitude of Scots' defeated the Northumbrians, causing the contemporary bishop [of St Cuthbert] to die of grief. The same writer was responsible for an entry (under 1018) in the Annals of Lindisfarne and Durham, written c.1100, where were are told that 18 priests fell in the carnage.
The encounter is described, in the 1120s, as ingens bellum inter Anglos et Scottos, 'a massive battle between the English and the Scots', located apud Carrum, 'at Carham', in Anglo-Latin annals known as Historia Regum (and related/derived form like Roger of Howden). We also have a notice of a 'great battle' (magnum bellum) added to a Scottish king-list annotating the reign of Máel Coluim mac Cinaeda, or Malcolm II; king-lists were an evolving tradition from the tenth to fourteenth centuries, and the Carham notice seems to have been added to a surviving recension in the reign of the Scottish king William, grandson of David I (1165–1214).
Relatedly, in the work attributed to the fourteenth-century historian John of Fordun (the basis of which was a thirteenth-century chronicle narrative), we are told how Malcolm II defeated Earl Uhtred while plundering Cumbria, the encounter taking place at Burgum (perhaps Burgh-by-Sands); although not a clear direct reference to any set-piece at Carham, earlier material about the battle may lie behind this notice.
The Durham sources provide 1018 as the date for the battle, with Historia Regum explicitly naming Earl Uhtred as the leader of the [Northumbrian] English. However, in the near contemporary Anglo-Saxon Chronicle the death of Earl Uhtred is noted two years earlier, leading historians like Plummer and Stenton to re-date the battle to that year, 1016. Previous solutions to this problem had retained 1018 as the year, but with the proposal that the ruler of Bamburgh was Eadwulf Cudel, Uhtred's brother and successor.
The ground they fought on
The site of Battle of Carham lies on Inverclyde Group, bedrock that formed in the Osagean. The rock here is sandstone, siltstone and mudstone.
Frequently Asked Questions
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- Battle of Carham · Wikidata
- Battle_of_Carham · Wikipedia