edinburgh-1951/-03_034

Transcription

INTRODUCTION
TO THE INVENTORY OF THE ANCIENT AND HISTORICAL MONUMENTS OF THE CITY OF EDINBURGH

1. The City and its setting. 2. History:- A. The Burgh of Edinburgh (i) to the 15th century - merchants
and craftsmen; (ii) to the Union of the Crowns ; (iii) between the Unions ; (iv) the Augustan Age. B. The
Burgh of Canongate. C. Leith. D. Portsburgh. E. The Baronies. F. The Town mills. 3. The Town walls.
4. Domestic building from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. 5. Wells and water-supply. 6. The development
of the New Town.

1. THE CITY AND ITS SETTING
The rock of Edinburgh has no doubt been occupied
as a fortress from very early times, but it can
first be identified in the Brythonic form of Dineidin
in the old Welsh poem, the Gododdin of Aneurin,
dating from the end of the sixth century.1 The
Pictish symbol-stone (p.215) found near the Well-
House Tower, in Princes Street Gardens, belongs
approximately to this period. The name became,
in Gaelic, Dùn-éideann or "Dunedene", which in
English is "Edineburg,"2 where Din, Dùn and
Burg all have the same meaning of a fortress.
The second element in the name is probably the
name of the district within which the Dark-Age fort
of Din Eidyn lay. The suggestion from the twelfth-
century forms Edwinesburgh (Symeon of Durham)
and Edwinesburgensis, the latter an adjectival use
in the Holyrood foundation-charter, of a derivation
from Edwin, the great Northumbrian king (617-33)
can be disregarded, as nothing is known of any
specific connection with that king. In the Pictish
Chronicle the place is called oppidum Eden, oppidum
being in this chronicle the usual rendering of Dun,3
and it is said to have been vacated by the Angles
in the reign if Indulph (Indolb) and left to the
Scots under that King. This surrender probably
first opened the way to the infiltration of Gaelic
settlers who have left their place-names in or about
Edinburgh as in the eastern Lowland shires, names
such as Braid, Corstorhine, Dalry, Craiglockhart,
Drumsheugh or Drumselch, Dunsapie, and Glen-
corse.4 Macbeth of Liberton was a prominent figure
in the time of David I. The Gaelic conquest
of Lothian had been assured by the victory of Malcolm
II at Carham on the Tweed in 1018 and Dunedin
had ceased to be a Border fortress. Its character
as a fortress, however, was still expressed in its name,
and to the Norman immigrants it became Castrum
Puellarum, "The Maidens' Castle" - a name very
widely distributed but ot yet convincingly explained.5

But if the meaning of its ancient name is now
doubtful, the site of Edinburgh has a geographical
position which fully accounts for its importance in
the Dark Ages. Among the numerous hill-forts of
that period in the region, Edinburgh alone commands
the point where the Roman route from the South
reached the Firth of Forth. Here is, then, the
appropriate point of concentration for trade and
political influence, however irregular the one or
shadowy the other, in an age when these things were
inevitably centered in a chieftain's stronghold. The
same factor guaranteed the site's future. The
situation was bound to attract the Angles, whose
realm of Bernicia was ruled from a coastal fastness
and owed its cohesion to a combined use of the
North Sea and the arterial land-route provided by
Dere Street, the Roman road from Tees to Forth.
The Normans, whose eye for a commanding situation
was even keener, must have been no less alive to the
happy conjunction of advantages. Thus, it is the

1 Ifor Williams, Canu Aneirin (1938, 1. II58; Antiquity,
xiii (1939), pp. 25-34; ibid., xvi (1942), p. 237-57.
2 Watson, The History of the Celtic Place-names of Scotland,
pp. 40-1. 3 Skene, Celtic Scotland, i. p. 365. 4 Watson,
op.cit., pp. 143-5.
5 Watson, (op.cit.,pp 150, 342), accepts one of the tradi-
tional explanations. But see also Wheeler, Maiden Castle,
Dorset, pp 8 ff.; also Loomis, Arthurian Tradition and
Chrétien de Troyes, pp. 108 ff.

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