Kingdom of Gododdin

Origins

Gododdin was the post-Roman kingdom of the Votadini, whose name became Guotodin and then Gododdin in Welsh. Its centre was Din Eidyn, the rock of Edinburgh, and it stretched across Lothian and the eastern Borders. Welsh tradition also linked the district of Manaw Gododdin, around the head of the Forth, with Cunedda, legendary founder of the Kingdom of Gwynedd.

Rule and society

The kingdom is best known from Y Gododdin, attributed to the poet Aneirin, which mourns a war band feasted for a year by Mynyddog Mwynfawr at Din Eidyn and then slaughtered at Catraeth, usually identified as Catterick, around 600. The poem portrays an aristocratic warrior society bound by loyalty, mead and gifts. Hillforts such as Traprain Law and Edinburgh Castle Rock were key centres.

Decline and legacy

The Anglian kingdom of Bernicia, later Northumbria, expanded northward in the 7th century. Irish annals record the siege of Etin in 638, generally taken as the Northumbrian capture of Edinburgh. Lothian remained English until it passed to the Scottish kings in the 10th and 11th centuries.

Few sources survive for this state; details are uncertain.