Queen Tomnat

The documentary sources for early medieval Scotland represent the historical record of a patriarchal society and therefore mention few women. The small number of females whose existence was acknowledged by the annalists and chroniclers were usually of high status like the kings and clerics with whom they were associated as wives, mothers or sisters. In a previous post (Two Pictish Princesses) I turned the spotlight on an obscure royal lady called Eithne whose father ruled the Picts in the late 8th century. Here I draw attention to another woman of royal status, this time of Scottish rather than of Pictish origin.

My starting-point, as with Princess Eithne, is an entry in the Irish annals:

695  Tomnat, Ferchar’s wife, died.

This is the only mention of Tomnat so she is usually overlooked by historians and omitted from modern studies of the period. A clue to her identity, however, is provided by a later entry:

697  Ferchar Fota died.

The proximity of these two entries suggests that the Ferchar mentioned in each is the same man: Ferchar Fota (Ferchar the Tall), a powerful king and warlord of Dal Riada. Ferchar is an interesting figure because his career was played out against a backdrop of dynastic upheaval among the Scots. He rose to power as king of Cenel Loairn, one of the great royal kindreds of Argyll, whose heartland lay around the modern town of Oban. His ambitions led him to challenge Cenel nGabrain, the most powerful kindred, for paramount kingship over the whole of Dal Riada. A series of fierce battles was fought until, in 696, Ferchar defeated his rivals to attain overall sovereignty. His reign as over-king of the Scots was brief and within less than two years he was dead.

We should probably regard Tomnat as Ferchar Fota’s queen. An alternative view, namely that she was the wife of an earlier Ferchar who died in 651, requires that her death-notice in the annals is a misplaced entry that belongs in the middle of the century. There seems no justification in relocating her to this earlier generation. Identifying her husband as the great warlord of Cenel Loairn seems more logical, especially as Ferchar Fota’s importance in Dal Riadan politics may have attracted the annalists’ attention to other aspects of his life. His marriage may thus have been worthy of note and, when his wife died, news of her death would have reached the monastery on Iona where the annals were being compiled.

Sadly, Tomnat passed away a short time before her husband gained the over-kingship of Dal Riada so she missed her chance to be an early ‘Queen of Scots’. Nevertheless, she left a significant legacy to her people by bearing two mighty sons who grew up to be great war-leaders of Cenel Loairn in the early years of the 8th century. These men were Selbach and Ainfcellach, both of whom would eventually continue their father’s struggle against his Cenel nGabrain rivals. Their own sons, the grandchildren of Ferchar and Tomnat, carried the fight into the following generation before being finally overwhelmed in a disastrous conflict with the Picts.

 

The name Kirkintilloch

A few miles to the east of Glasgow stands the town of Kirkintilloch. At first sight the name of this place seems to be an example of the kirk- type found all over Scotland. Names prefixed by kirk(originally a Scandinavian word) usually mean “Church of…” and often contain the name of a saint, e.g. Kirkpatrick (Church of St Patrick) or Kirkbride (Church of St. Bridget). Closer inspection of Kirkintilloch reveals, however, that it is not in fact a kirk- name at all but instead provides a curious snapshot of early medieval history.

In one version of the ninth-century Welsh chronicle Historia Brittonum (The History of the Britons) the Antonine Wall is said to terminate in the west at Carpentaloch. This is the oldest form of Kirkintilloch and shows clearly that it does not belong among the typical kirk- names. It had a different origin that pre-dated the arrival of Scandinavian words as elements in Scottish nomenclature.

Carpentaloch can be broken down as caer-pen-tulach, a hybrid name formed from Brittonic and Gaelic words and meaning “Fort at the head of the hills”. This form must have originated at a time when Strathclyde, the last surviving kingdom of the North Britons, was absorbing an influx of Gaelic-speaking immigrants of Scottish or Norse-Scottish ancestry. Such a hybrid place-name can only have been formed after 870, when Strathclyde was ravaged by Vikings and brought within their sphere of colonisation. Prior to this time Brittonic speech held sway and Gaelic terms such as tulach (hill) were absent from the area’s etymology. The original form of Kirkintilloch may thus have been Caer-pen-bryn or something broadly similar. Eventually, long after bryn was replaced by tulach, the Brittonic word pen (head) was altered to cenn which has the same meaning in Gaelic. This change will have occurred when the ancient speech of the Britons was in terminal decline, probably in the decades after 1018 when Strathclyde’s last native king died in battle. By c.1300, when the town of Kerkintalloch was first recorded in Scottish landholding documents, only the prefix caer (fort) remained to indicate that the original inhabitants were speakers of a language that had long since faded away.

Reference: W.J. Watson, The history of the Celtic place-names of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1926), p.348.

 

The four women of Durham

De Obsessione Dunelmensis (‘Of The Siege Of Durham’) is a 12th century account of hostilities between England and Scotland at the dawn of the second millennium. It was written by an Englishman, possibly Symeon of Durham, and describes an assault launched by the Scots king Malcolm II. The event was noted briefly by the Irish annalists…

1006: A battle between the men of Alba and the Saxons. And the rout was upon the Scots, and they left behind them a slaughter of their good men.

The bane of the Scottish army in this battle was a young English earl called Uhtred, son-in-law of the bishop of Durham. Gathering an army from Northumbria and Yorkshire he fell upon the besiegers and lifted their blockade of the town. The Scots suffered extremely heavy casualties and were forced to flee, their king barely escaping with his life. After the slaughter a grim fate awaited a number of Malcolm’s warriors, even as their bodies lay dead on the battlefield. De Obsessione Dunelmensis gives the gruesome details, telling how Earl Uhtred

“caused to be carried to Durham the best-looking heads of the slain, ornamented with braided locks as was the fashion of the time, and after they had been washed by four women – to each of whom he gave a cow for their trouble – he caused these heads to be fixed upon stakes and placed around the walls”

Just as the lifeless Scottish heads were selected on the basis of their good looks, so the four Durham women were presumably chosen by virtue of their lack of squeamishness. A strong stomach would indeed have been a desirable quality, unless Uhtred’s promise of cattle provided a sufficient incentive to volunteer for the messy task.

Nine men in a boat

In 973, according to the 12th century chronicler John of Worcester, the English king Edgar received oaths of fealty from eight vassals in a ceremony on the River Dee. The eight were powerful kings and warlords from Celtic territory in the North and West. They included Cinaed II, king of Scots, Malcolm, king of the Strathclyde Britons, Malcolm’s father Dyfnwal and the Viking chieftain Magnus Haraldsson. The rest of the group are less easy to identify but presumably comprised a selection of rulers from Scotland and Wales. Later traditions identified one of these as Scandinavian and a couple more as Welsh. All eight travelled to Chester to meet Edgar, a young West Saxon king renowned for his wisdom and piety. He was known also for his willingness to use diplomacy rather than war to achieve his aims.

The earliest reference to the event precedes John of Worcester by two hundred years and is found in Aelfric’s Life of St Swithin (written c.996). After Aelfric’s time the original story gathered various accretions, including some of doubtful value, to become the version used by John and other English writers. In the late 12th century the monks of Melrose Abbey drew on John’s version to give their own account of what had happened at Chester in 973. The following extract from the Melrose chronicle is an English translation based on the one published in Anderson’s Early sources of Scottish history. It takes up the narrative during the fourteenth year of Edgar’s reign when he was aged 30.

“Some time afterwards, after sailing round northern Britain with a huge fleet, he landed at the city of Chester; and eight under-kings met him, as he commanded them, and swore that they would stand by him as vassals, both on land and on sea: namely Cinaed, king of Scots; Malcolm, king of the Cumbrians; Magnus, king of very many islands; and another five – Dyfnwal, Sigfrith, Hywel, Iago, Ulkil. With these one day he entered a boat and, placing them at the oars, he himself took the rudder’s helm and skilfully steered along the course of the River Dee, and sailed from the palace to the monastery of St John the Baptist, the whole crowd of earls and nobles accompanying him in similar craft. And after praying there he returned to the palace with the same pomp, and as he entered it he is related to have said to the nobles that only thus could any of his successors boast of being king of England, by obtaining a display of such honours and the submission of so many kings.”

The above account portrays the ceremony on the Dee as a ritual of homage by under-kings to a dominant overlord. Modern historians have tended to share this viewpoint, seeing the boat journey as evidence of Edgar’s supremacy in areas far beyond his native Wessex. It is not, however, the only possible interpretation. An alternative view disregards much of the account as 12th century propaganda and instead sees the royal gathering as an assembly of ambitious rivals seeking peaceful solutions to their differences. Such high-level assemblies, where important political issues were discussed, required an appropriate setting and were often conducted on frontier rivers regarded as neutral zones. The Dee was a suitable choice of venue, being a major waterway of the Anglo-Welsh border as well as lying close to the boundary between the English lowlands and the Celtic-Scandinavian North. The journey along the river from palace to monastery is usually understood as eight sub-kings hauling the oars to symbolise fealty to an over-king steering the boat. The alternative view sees the journey as a symbol of peace and co-operation between powerful rulers, each of whom helped to propel the vessel. In this scenario the nine kings can be imagined as a kind of “team” comprising eight members who hauled the oars while the ninth – their English host – held the rudder. Being a man of small stature and puny physique (which allegedly amused Cinaed of Scotland) Edgar was ideally suited for the role of coxswain. In the context of this alternative interpretation, which sees the event of 973 as a diplomatic meeting rather than as a ritual of submission, it is perhaps no coincidence that Edgar’s usual epithet is “the Peacable”.

 

References:

Alan Orr Anderson (ed.) Early sources of Scottish history. Volume 1 (Edinburgh, 1922), pp.478-9

Julia Barrow, ‘Chester’s earliest regatta? Edgar’s Dee-rowing revisited’ Early Medieval Europe 10 (2001), pp.81-93

Two Pictish princesses

In recent years a major archaeological project has unearthed evidence of an important Pictish monastery at Portmahomack in Easter Ross. The story of the site can be seen in the nearby Tarbat Discovery Centre and in Martin Carver’s book about the excavations (see reference below).

Visitors to the Discovery Centre are greeted by the life-size bronze image of a Pictish princess. Here she is….

  

Whenever I look at this evocative sculpture I consider how little we really know about Pictish noblewomen, many of whom were the wives, sisters, mothers and daughters of great warrior-kings. As a supporter of the matrilinear theory of Pictish royal succession I find it regrettable that the historical significance of these women was disregarded by the contemporary sources. Regrettable, yes, but not altogether surprising: such disregard was the norm in societies where literacy and the recording of history were controlled by patriarchal elites. Indeed, females of the Pictish royal kindreds would have been astonished if their names and deeds had appeared in contemporary chronicles.

Our main documentary sources for Pictish history are Bede and the Irish annals. Bede mentions Pictish royal women in passing but does not refer to any of them individually. To locate a specific female Pict we have to turn to the annals, where we find the following entry:

AD 778: Eithne, daughter of Cinadhon, died.

The name Eithne has a proud heritage. It was borne by a pagan lady whom Saint Patrick converted to Christianity and also by the mother of Saint Columba. These two women were Irish princesses and both were later elevated to sainthood. A famous bearer of the name today is the musician Eithne Brennan who uses the phonetic spelling Enya for the benefit of non-Gaelic speakers such as myself. But who was the Eithne of 778? Why is she the only Pictish woman named by the annalists?

The first question can be answered by going back three years to an earlier entry:

AD 775: The death of Cinadhon, king of the Picts.

In the Welsh Annals and in the Pictish king-list Cinadhon is called Ciniod, a variant of the name Cinaed (Kenneth). He is usually regarded as the Cinadhon mentioned in 778. His daughter Eithne was therefore a Pictish princess. She may have borne a Gaelic name because of her ancestry: her paternal grandfather was an exiled Scot from the Lorn dynasty of Argyll.

The second question is less easy to answer. Why did the Irish annalists mention Princess Eithne alone of her countrywomen? The Picts had no ruling queens so she was certainly not mentioned because of some Boudicca-like achievement on the battlefield. She might have been the mother of a renowned king but so were other Pictish women and this would not have been enough to get her noticed by the annalists. Perhaps a solution can be found by considering the primary purpose of the annals?

First and foremost, the annalists were keen to record important events affecting the great monasteries of Ireland and North Britain. They were accustomed to noting secular items such as major battles and the deaths of kings but they themselves were monks and their primary interests were therefore ecclesiastical. They rarely mentioned women but those whom they did identify by name were usually noted in religious contexts. An example is Kentigerna, daughter of an Irish king, who went to Scotland and who eventually became a devout Christian hermit on an island in Loch Lomond. The annalists noted her death in 734 and later Scottish tradition made her a saint. Could the Pictish princess Eithne have followed a similar path of religious devotion, perhaps as a nun renowned for her piety, and been accorded the honour of an obituary notice in the annals?

Book reference: Martin Carver, Portmahomack: Monastery of the Picts (Edinburgh, 2008)

Rheged’s exiled warband?

The Irish annals include the following entries dealing with conflict in northern Ireland during the late 7th and early 8th centuries:

682: The battle of Ráith Mór Maigi Lini against the Britons, in which Cathasach son of Mael Dúin, king of the Cruithin, fell, and Ultán son of Dícuill.

697: Britons and Ulaid wasted Mag Muirtheimne.

702: Írgalach grandson of Conaing was killed by Britons in Inis Mac Nesáin.

709: The battle of Selg in Fortuatha Laigen against the Uí Cheinnselaig, in which fell two sons of Cellach of Cuala, Fiachra and Fiannamail, and Luirg with Cellach’s Britons.

* * * *

Who were these ‘Britons’ and where did they come from? Why were they involved in the wars of Ireland?

The Irish annals of this period were written at the Hebridean monastery of Iona by monks who were, in many cases, themselves of Irish origin. It would appear from the above entries that an indication of where the British warbands came from was regarded by these monks as unnecessary. Perhaps they felt that they had already provided this information by describing the warbands as ‘Britons’? In the period 682-709 there was indeed only one North British kingdom capable of waging war in Ireland. This was Strathclyde, the last surviving realm of the Gwyr y Gogledd (‘The Men of the North’), with its chief royal citadel at Dumbarton Rock. The Clyde Britons had seen their compatriots fall one-by-one to the inexorable advance of English Northumbria. By c.670 the Northumbrian kings held sway over large tracts of what is now southern Scotland, having conquered major British realms such as Rheged and Gododdin. Some measure of imperium or overkingship was exercised over Strathclyde by the English king Oswiu (died 670) and by his son Ecgfrith (died 685) but the Dumbarton dynasty endured throughout this troubled period and in fact outlived the Northumbrian royal house by more than a hundred years.

Given Strathclyde’s status as the only functioning political entity of the northern Britons between 682 and 709 we might logically deduce that the warbands who campaigned in Ireland came from this kingdom. The annalists on Iona would have felt little need to call them anything other than ‘Britons’ because it would be generally assumed that they came from Strathclyde. Any Scot, Pict, Irishman or Englishman of the late 7th century would have known that the Dumbarton kings were the only Britons who still commanded armies in the North.

Some historians, however, prefer an alternative explanation for the presence of North British warriors in Ireland by seeing them as “part of the exiled warband of Rheged” (Smyth 1984, p.26). According to this theory, the English conquest of Rheged left its military forces leaderless and penniless, driving them “to seek their fortune at the courts of Irish kings always in need of warriors for their own incessant warfare” (ibid.). Why these men should travel to Ireland rather than seek gainful employment in Britain is explained in simple economic terms: Irish kings apparently had the ability to “more richly reward them for their services” (Evans 1997, p.110). At this point it might be useful to note that there is no reference to Rheged in the Irish annals, not even in entries relating to the late 6th century when its kings reached the zenith of their power. The monks of Iona who wrote the earliest annals retrospectively were probably aware of Rheged’s existence through their contacts with Northumbrian monasteries but they chose not to mention the kingdom. By contrast they mentioned Strathclyde many times, usually by reference to the royal citadel at Dumbarton. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Strathclyde was the only British territory in which Iona had any interest.

I have always been puzzled by the ‘Rheged mercenaries in Ireland’ theory. Why was it devised at all, and what purpose does it serve? The history of Rheged is mysterious enough without complicating it even further. Instead of weaving imaginative sagas around fragmentary information presented by medieval texts we should examine the fragments more closely to see what they say about the political biases of monastic writers and their secular patrons. By looking at the Irish annals from Iona’s viewpoint we might find ourselves better equipped to understand what role the annalists assigned to the Strathclyde Britons in the late 7th century. This kind of approach was adopted by James Fraser during an insightful study of secular and ecclesiastical contacts between Scots and Britons. Fraser examined the annals of 682 to 709 in the context of Iona’s political loyalties and offered a plausible hypothesis to explain the presence of Strathclyde warbands in Ireland. He envisaged a period of close co-operation between the Clyde kings and a royal dynasty of Scots in nearby CowaI, a relationship which produced “a tendency to share enemies and allies” (Fraser 2005, 109). Among the Cowal dynasty’s rivals were the Scots of Kintyre who, for more than a hundred years, had been in a symbiotic relationship with Iona. Fraser suggested that the Cowal Scots received strong military support from Dumbarton in pursuit of dynastic interests in Ireland. This led to Britons fighting alongside Cowal’s Irish allies against other Irish factions allied to Kintyre. The activities of these Britons were duly noted by the annalists because the interests of Iona’s patrons – the royal kindreds of Kintyre – were affected by the course of events. I will not delve any further into the complex web of 7th century politics – this post is long enough already – but Fraser’s article is certainly worth reading. The main point I wish to make here is that the idea of Rheged’s exiled warriors campaigning in Ireland does not stand up to scrutiny. The annals of 682 to 709 surely refer to the political affiliations and military obligations of the Strathclyde kings.

Alfred Smyth, Warlords and holy men: Scotland AD 80-1000 (Edinburgh, 1984)

Stephen Evans, The lords of battle: image & reality of the comitatus in Dark Age Britain (Woodbridge, 1997)

James E. Fraser, ‘Strangers on the Clyde: Cenel Comgaill, Clyde Rock and the bishops of Kingarth’. Innes Review 56 (2005), pp.102-20.

* I am grateful to Michelle of Heavenfield for drawing my attention to James Fraser’s article soon after it appeared in print.

Scottish Origins: Myths and Misconceptions

One of the most important papers of recent years is Ewan Campbell’s ‘Were the Scots Irish?’, published in the journal Antiquity in 2001. Campbell questions the scholarly consensus which envisages migrants from Antrim establishing an Irish colony in northwest Britain sometime around AD 500. The migration hypothesis has long been accepted as the correct view of Scottish origins, partly because it explains why the inhabitants of Argyll spoke Gaelic – the language of Ireland – at a time when everyone else in North Britain spoke a Brittonic language (i.e. British/Cumbric in the Lowlands and Pictish in the Highlands). Migration from Ireland was also mentioned by Bede in 731 when he referred to the origins of Dal Riada, the kingdom of the early Scots. In the 10th century the kings of the Scots produced a similar “foundation legend” which traced their lineage back to Irish ancestors who came to Argyll as conquerors.

As an archaeologist Campbell wonders why Argyll yields no material evidence of the alleged migration. If the Scots had arrived from Ireland in large numbers we would expect them to build dwellings of similar types to the ones they left behind. No such evidence has been found, nor do the place-names of Argyll suggest that a mass of Gaelic-speaking immigrants supplanted an indigenous Pictish or British population. It is usual for traces of an earlier language to be visible among place-names coined in the speech of an invader but the Argyll names are so thoroughly Gaelic that they actually appear to be indigenous. Some historians believe that the Scots came to Britain as a small, elite group of kings and aristocrats. This could possibly explain the lack of archaeological evidence for a mass-migration but, as Campbell points out, high-status foreigners would have imposed the trappings of their own culture on the native elites whom they conquered or absorbed. We should therefore expect the decorated brooch – the ubiquitous badge of high-status among early medieval cultures – to show Irish characteristics whenever an example is unearthed in the archaeology of Argyll. Again, no such evidence is forthcoming: the brooches worn by the early Scots are of recognizably British rather than of Irish design.

What, then, of the foundation legend mentioned by Bede? Surely his testimony – having been written in the 8th century – must count for something? Campbell makes a strong case for believing that Bede was merely stating the earliest form of an origin-story that the Scots would later richly embellish in the 10th century. Such tales were very common in early medieval Europe and were often concocted as political propaganda to create suitably dramatic origins for dominant royal dynasties.

As an alternative hypothesis Campbell envisages no migration from Ireland to Argyll other than a cultural one arising from social and economic links across the narrow seas between the two areas. These links led to the adoption of Gaelic as the common language of trade and social interaction but, although the people of Argyll became Gaelic-speakers, their distinctive regional identity was strong enough to preserve their indigenous culture in the face of Irish influences. Campbell suggests that the linguistic shift from Brittonic to Gaelic was achieved during the pre-Roman Iron Age. Thus, when Roman writers spoke of the Scotti (Scots) of Ireland they were probably referring collectively to all Gaelic speakers – including the Scots of Argyll.

This is only a brief summary of Campbell’s paper. I find his alternative view of Scottish origins convincing and compelling. It will not persuade everyone to change their views but it issues a bold challenge to conventional wisdom and cannot be ignored.

Ewan Campbell, ‘Were the Scots Irish?’ Antiquity 75 (2001) pp.285-92.

Saint Ninian

The Scottish journal Innes Review is a rich treasure-trove of information on early medieval studies. Many of its articles feature research at the cutting edge of scholarship, written by authors who are not afraid of upsetting some long-established applecarts.

One article that springs to mind is a detailed study of Ninian by Thomas Owen Clancy, who proposes that this controversial saint should be identified as the sixth-century cleric Finnian of Movilla. Clancy constructs a picture of Finnian as a Briton who founded churches and monasteries in Ireland and Scotland, the most famous of these being at Whithorn in Galloway. The original British form of the saint’s name was Uinniau which became Finnian among speakers of Irish Gaelic. Clancy suggests that the name was further amended by English clerics at Whithorn in the eighth century, who devised the “literary” form Ninian in order to promote the site as a cult centre through the medium of hagiography.

The traditional or conventional view of Ninian is that he founded Whithorn in the fifth century and undertook missionary work further north in Pictland. Clancy exposes the flaws in this view and pushes Ninian/Uinniau into the mid-500s, to a time that provides a better fit with Whithorn’s archaeology. Mysterious old tales of Irish monks studying there during the sixth century thus find a plausible context, as too does the reference to the British king Tudwal who might have been the attested Strathclyde ruler Tudwal of Dumbarton (c.560). In fact, even a brief perusal of Clancy’s argument is likely to make anyone question the notion of a fifth-century Ninian. Having read John MacQueen’s seminal study Saint Nynia and having noted the more recent work of Alan Macquarrie and Dauvit Broun I now believe that the matter of Ninian is finally settled. Clancy’s article offers a “best fit” for this enigmatic figure’s place in history.

Thomas Owen Clancy, ‘The real Saint Ninian’. Innes Review 52 (2001), pp.1-28.

John MacQueen, St Nynia. Revised edition (Edinburgh: 1990).

Dauvit Broun, ‘The literary record of St Nynia: fact and fiction?’ Innes Review 42 (1991), pp.143-50.

Alan Macquarrie, ‘The date of St Ninian’s mission: a reappraisal’. Records of the Scottish Church History Society 23 (1987), pp.1-25.

Alan Macquarrie, The saints of Scotland: essays in Scottish church history, AD 450-1093 (Edinburgh: 1997).

King Arthur

Many people think Arthur was a historical figure of the fifth or sixth centuries. This is not a view I share, which is why I generally leave Arthur aside when discussing early medieval topics. My own view is the one encapsulated by Oliver Padel in 1994, when he examined the key question: Did Arthur exist? Padel suggested that Arthur originated in legend as “a pan-Brittonic figure of local wonder-tales” like the mythical Irish hero Fionn (Finn Mac Cool). The two figures share much in common: both appear in tales of magical beings and places; both were associated with mysterious prehistoric monuments; both were portrayed as saviours of their homelands. Padel argues that just as Fionn made the transition from Irish legends to Irish historical texts, so Arthur made the same transition in a British context, becoming a key figure in pseudo-history as well as remaining an important character of folklore. Hence the list of Arthur’s battles in the Historia Brittonum of c.830, and hence his appearance in the Welsh Annals, while a parallel tradition continued to weave him into tales such as Culhwch and Olwen. But there was no real Arthur, according to Padel, unless the legendary figure was created partly out of a folk-memory of the Roman centurion Lucius Artorius Castus (who led an army from Britain to Gaul in c.200).

Views such as the one expressed by Padel are obviously unpopular with supporters of the Historical Arthur but, when the early medieval sources are examined, the absence of this enigmatic figure is very noticeable. Neither Bede nor Gildas mention him, so why should we regard him as important?

Oliver Padel, ‘The nature of Arthur’. Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 27 (1994), pp.1-31

The Siege of Edinburgh?

A well-known entry in the Irish Annals gives the following information for AD 638: obsesio etin. This means “the siege of Etin” and is usually seen as a reference to an otherwise undocumented attack on Edinburgh. In the early medieval period Edinburgh was the chief citadel of the Britons of Gododdin who called it Din Eidin. In Irish this name would normally appear as Eitin which corresponds closely to the annalists’ Etin. The timescale seems to fit with our knowledge of what was happening in southern Scotland at that time: the English of Northumbria, led by King Oswald, were steadily encroaching on British territory. A Northumbrian siege of Edinburgh would therefore seem consistent with a major inroad by Oswald’s army into the heartland of Gododdin. In 1959 Kenneth Jackson took this idea further by suggesting that the annal for 638 represents not only an English siege of Din Eidin but also the final phase in the conquest of Gododdin. Many writers have followed this line of thought in subsequent studies of seventh century history.

Like other isolated snippets of data relating to this period the “siege of Edinburgh in 638″ has evolved from a plausible explanation of an obscure annal into a rather large factoid (i.e. a fact-shaped object). This is why so many books and articles dealing with Oswald or Gododdin say that the kingdom fell under English control in 638 without warning the reader that this “fact” is no more than a guess. In a paper of 1989 David Dumville drew attention to what he called the “enthusiasm and historical mileage” generated by this annal but he is one of the few writers to counsel a cautious approach to its testimony. He was right to do so. The words obsesio etin may indeed preserve a genuine record of the collapse of Gododdin but equally they might refer to a wholly unrelated event at a place called Etin somewhere else in the British Isles. Writers of Scottish or Northumbrian history books should therefore sound a note of caution when their narrative reaches the late 630s, if only to remind their readers that the picture is not as clear-cut as we might wish it to be.

Kenneth Jackson, ‘Edinburgh and the Anglian occupation of Lothian’, pp.35-42 in Peter Clemoes (ed.) The Anglo-Saxons: some aspects of their history and culture presented to Bruce Dickins (London: 1959).

David Dumville, ‘The origins of Northumbria: some aspects of the British background’, pp.213-22 in Steven Bassett (ed.) The origins of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms (Leicester: 1989).