Kingship of Strathclyde

The list of the kings of Strathclyde concerns the kings of Alt Clut, later Strathclyde, a Brythonic kingdom in what is now western Scotland.

The kingdom was ruled from Dumbarton Rock, Alt Clut, the Brythonic name of the rock, until around 870 when the rock was captured and sacked by Norse-Gaels from the kingdom of Dublin after a four-month siege. Thereafter the centre of the kingdom moved to Govan, previously a religious centre. The kingdom is also known as Cumbria after 870, and indeed may have ruled parts of the modern English region of Cumbria in the 10th and 11th centuries. In the 11th century the kingdom of Alba conquered Strathclyde. It remained a distinctive area, with different laws, using the Cumbric language alongside Gaelic, until the 12th century.

Various authorities have suggested a king-list as follows:

The sources for this king-list are problematic. The earliest source is Adomnán's Life of Saint Columba, which refers to Roderc son of Tothail as reigning in the Rock of Clyde—almost certainly Dumbarton Rock. It is known that Roderc (or Riderc) was a contemporary of Columba, but the date of his death, dependent on the 12th-century Life of Kentigern and an entry in the Annales Cambriae an.CLX+9 Conthigirni obitus...., is unreliable.

The next earliest source is the so-called Iona Chronicle, compiled c. 650–750, deduced from Scottish entries in the Chronicle of Ireland which were later copied into the Annals of Tigernach (AT) and the Annals of Ulster (AU). This preserves information for kings of Alclut from the mid-7th to the mid-8th century, beginning with Gure(i)t regis Alo Cluathe (AU), Domnall mac Auin (AT,AU) Bili mac Elphine (AT,AU) and Taudar mac Bile (AT), were all noted as 'kings of Alclut'. In addition to this, we have a poem preserved in the 10th-century Life of Adomnán which refers to Brude, king of the Picts, as being the son of Bile, king of Alclut.

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