History of Edinburgh

[citation needed] When the Romans arrived in the Lothian area towards the end of the 1st century AD, they discovered a Celtic Brythonic tribe whose name they recorded as the Votadini.

Around the year 600, Welsh tradition records that Mynyddog Mwynfawr, the Brythonic ruler of the kingdom of Gododdin, assembled a force within the vicinity of Edinburgh to oppose Germanic settlers to the south.

[13] While history records little about Northumbrian Edinburgh, the English chronicler Symeon of Durham, writing in c. 1130 and copying from earlier texts, mentioned a church at Edwinesburch in AD 854 which came under the authority of the Bishop of Lindisfarne.

Seven years later, in 934, the Annals of Clonmacnoise record that Æthelstan, who spent much time stamping his authority upon the north, ravaged Scotland to Edinburgh but that he was forced to depart without any great victory.

[27] While Malcolm Canmore (r.1058–1093) kept his court and residence at Dunfermline, north of the Forth, he began spending more time at Edinburgh where he built a chapel for his wife Margaret to carry out her devotions.

[41] Despite wholesale destruction reported by contemporaries at the time of the Hertford Raid in 1544, the town slowly recovered with its population of merchant burgesses and craftsmen continuing to serve the needs of the royal court and nobility.

[42] Incorporated trades were cordiners (shoemakers), hatmakers, websters (weavers), hammermen (smiths and lorimers, i.e. leather workers), skinners, fleshers (butchers), coopers, wrights, masons, waulkers (fullers), tailors, barber-surgeons, baxters (bakers), and candlemakers.

Protestant nobles and churchmen fearing that her personal faith and claim to the English throne, if successful, might lead eventually to a return to Catholicism remained implacably hostile to her rule.

Although she was initially welcomed by the general population,[48] the tragic chain of events that unfolded during her residence at Holyrood Palace, including the murders of her secretary David Rizzio and consort Henry Darnley, reached a crisis point which resulted in her forced abdication in 1567.

Through his preaching at St. Giles calling for her execution as an adulteress and murderess[49] one of the town's Protestant ministers John Knox inflamed popular opinion against Mary.

After her arrest at Carberry she was detained briefly in the town provost's house on the present-day site of the Edinburgh City Chambers before being incarcerated in Lochleven Castle.

The civil war that followed her escape from imprisonment, defeat at Langside and flight to England ended with the final surrender of her remaining loyal supporters in the "Lang Siege" of Edinburgh Castle in 1573.

[citation needed] Thomas Aikenhead, the son of a surgeon in the city, aged 18, was indicted for blasphemy by order of the Privy Council for calling the New Testament "The History of the Imposter Christ"; he was hanged in 1696, the last person to be executed for heresy in Britain.

An attempt by a predominantly royalist Scottish army to turn the tables on the Commonwealth by invading England in the following year failed when Cromwell inflicted a final defeat on the Scots at the Battle of Worcester.

[73]One historian has ventured to suggest that Edinburgh's living arrangements may themselves have played a part in engendering the spirit of social inquiry associated with the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment: "Its tall lands (tenements) housed a cross-section of the entire society, nobles, judges and caddies rubbing shoulders with each other on the common stair.

[76] In Edinburgh, the Town Council, keen to emulate Georgian London, stimulate prosperity and re-affirm its belief in the Union, initiated city improvements and expansion north and south of the castle.

[77] Although the idea of a northwards expansion had been first mooted around 1680, during the Duke of York's residence at Holyrood, the immediate catalyst for change was a decision by the Convention of Royal Burghs in 1752 to propose improvements to the capital for the benefit of commerce.

[78] The Convention issued a pamphlet entitled Proposals for carrying on certain Public Works in the City of Edinburgh, believed to have been authored by the classical scholar Sir Gilbert Elliot and heavily influenced by the ideas of Lord Provost George Drummond.

Elliot described the existing town as follows, Placed upon a ridge of a hill, it admits but of one good street, running from east to west, and even this is tolerably accessible only from one quarter.

[79]The proposals for improvement envisaged the building of a new Exchange for merchants (now the City Chambers), new law courts and an advocates' library, expansion north and southwards, and the draining of the Nor Loch.

This migration changed the social character of Edinburgh, which Robert Chambers, writing in the 1820s, described as a kind of double city—first, an ancient and picturesque hill-built one, occupied chiefly by the humbler classes; and second, an elegant modern one, of much regularity of aspect, and possessed almost as exclusively by the more refined portion of society.

Observing conditions there in the 1770s, a widely travelled English visitor already reported that, "No people in the World undergo greater hardships, or live in a worse degree of wretchedness and poverty, than the lower classes here.

Lawyers, Presbyterian divines, professors, medical men and architects, formed a new intellectual middle-class elite that dominated the city and facilitated the Scottish Enlightenment.

Franklin, who was hosted by his close friend David Hume, concluded that the University possessed "a set of truly great men, Professors of Several Branches of Knowledge, as have ever appeared in any age or country.

[98] Thomas Jefferson, writing to the philosopher Dugald Stewart in June 1789, declared that, as far as science was concerned, "no place in the world can pretend to a competition with Edinburgh".

[102] Although Edinburgh's traditional industries of printing, brewing and distilling continued to grow in the 19th century and were joined by new firms in rubber, engineering, and pharmaceuticals, there was little industrialisation compared with other cities in Britain.

In the meantime the Old Town continued to decay into an increasingly dilapidated, overcrowded slum with high mortality rates,[105] and was practically segregated socially from the rest of the city.

The articles examined a wide range of social problems including poverty, alcoholism, illiteracy, sanitation, working conditions, crime, and mental illness.

The port of Leith was hit on 22 July 1940 when a 1000 lb bomb fell on the Albert Dock, though it is unclear whether the originally intended target had been the well-defended Rosyth Dockyard.

Bombs were dropped on at least 11 other occasions between June 1940 and July 1942 in what appear to have been opportunistic attacks by bombers jettisoning their remaining load while returning from the main target (e.g. Clydebank or Belfast).