Edinburg Edinburgh

Early history[edit]

Edinburgh, showing Arthur's Seat, one of the earliest known sites of human habitation in the area
The earliest known human habitation in the Edinburgh area was at Cramond, where evidence was found of a Mesolithic camp site dated to c. 8500 BC.^[39] Traces of later Bronze Age and Iron Age settlements have been found on Castle Rock, Arthur's Seat, Craiglockhart Hill and the Pentland Hills.^[40]
When the Romans arrived in Lothian at the end of the 1st century AD, they found a Brittonic Celtic tribe whose name they recorded as the Votadini.^[41] The Votadini transitioned into the Gododdin kingdom in the Early Middle Ages, with Eidyn serving as one of the kingdom's districts. During this period, the Castle Rock site, thought to have been the stronghold of Din Eidyn, emerged as the kingdom's major centre.^[42] The medieval poem Y Gododdin describes a war band from across the Brittonic world who gathered in Eidyn before a fateful raid; this may describe a historical event around AD 600.^[43][44][45]
In 638, the Gododdin stronghold was besieged by forces loyal to King Oswald of Northumbria, and around this time control of Lothian passed to the Angles. Their influence continued for the next three centuries until around 950, when, during the reign of Indulf, son of Constantine II, the "burh" (fortress), named in the 10th-century Pictish Chronicle as oppidum Eden,^[46] was abandoned to the Scots. It thenceforth remained, for the most part, under their jurisdiction.^[47]
The royal burgh was founded by King David I in the early 12th century on land belonging to the Crown, though the date of its charter is unknown.^[48] The first documentary evidence of the medieval burgh is a royal charter, c. 1124–1127, by King David I granting a toft in burgo meo de Edenesburg to the Priory of Dunfermline.^[49] Edinburgh was largely in English hands from 1291 to 1314 and from 1333 to 1341, during the Wars of Scottish Independence. When the English invaded Scotland in 1298, King Edward I chose not to enter the English controlled town of Edinburgh but passed by with his army.^[50]
In the middle of the 14th century, the French chronicler Jean Froissart described it as the capital of Scotland (c. 1365), and James III (1451–88) referred to it in the 15th century as "the principal burgh of our kingdom".^[51] Despite the destruction caused by an English assault in 1544, the town slowly recovered,^[52] and was at the centre of events in the 16th-century Scottish Reformation^[53] and 17th-century Wars of the Covenant.^[54] In 1582, Edinburgh's town council was given a royal charter by King James VI permitting the establishment of a university;^[55] founded as Tounis College, the institution developed into the University of Edinburgh, which contributed to Edinburgh growing intellectual importance.^[56]