Hen Ogledd

Yr Hen Ogledd (Welsh pronunciation: [ər ˌheːn ˈɔɡlɛð]), meaning the Old North, is the historical region that was inhabited by the Brittonic people of sub-Roman Britain in the Early Middle Ages, now Northern England and the southern Scottish Lowlands, alongside the fellow Brittonic Celtic Kingdom of Elmet, in Yorkshire.

A number of important early Welsh texts were attributed to the Men of the North, such as Taliesin, Aneirin, Myrddin Wyllt, and the Cynfeirdd poets.

[citation needed] From a historical perspective, wars were frequently internecine, and Britons were aggressors as well as defenders, as was also true of the Angles, Picts, and Gaels.

[citation needed] However, those Welsh stories of the Hen Ogledd that tell of Britons fighting Anglians have a counterpart, told from the opposite side.

Áedán mac Gabráin of Dál Riata appears in the Bonedd Gwŷr y Gogledd, a genealogy among the pedigrees of the Men of the North.

[note 2] A primary royal court (Welsh: llys) would be maintained as a "capital", but it was not the bureaucratic administrative centre of modern society, nor the settlement or civitas of Roman rule.

As the ruler and protector of his kingdom, the king would maintain multiple courts throughout his territory, travelling among them to exercise his authority and to address the needs of his people, such as in the dispensing of justice.

This ancient method of dispensing justice survived as a part of royal procedure until the reforms of Henry II (reigned 1154–1189) modernised the administration of law.

[4] The cynfeirdd poetry is the largest source of information, and it is generally accepted that some part of the corpus was first composed in the Hen Ogledd.

[5] Cumbric gradually disappeared as the area was conquered by the Anglo-Saxons, and later the Scots and Norse, though it survived in the Kingdom of Strathclyde, centred at Alt Clut in what is now Dumbarton in Scotland.

It is unknown when Cumbric finally became extinct, but the series of counting systems of Brittonic origin recorded in Northern England since the 18th century have been proposed as evidence of a survival of elements of Cumbric;[5] though the view has been largely rejected on linguistic grounds, with evidence pointing to the fact that it was imported to England after the Old English era.

[8][9][10] It is derived from the Brittonic word combrogoi, which meant "fellow-countrymen", and it is worth noting in passing that its Breton counterpart kenvroiz still has this original meaning of "compatriots".

The word began to be used as an endonym by the Men of the North during the early 7th century (and possibly earlier),[11] and was used throughout the Middle Ages to describe the Kingdom of Strathclyde.

A listing of passages from the literary and historical sources, particularly relevant to the Hen Ogledd, can be found in Sir Edward Anwyl's article Wales and the Britons of the North.

Both the authors and their later transcribers sometimes displayed a partisanship that promoted their own interests, portraying their own agendas in a positive light, always on the side of justice and moral rectitude.

Brittonic place names in Scotland south of the Forth and Clyde, and in Cumberland and neighbouring counties, indicate areas of Hen Ogledd inhabited by Britons in the early Middle Ages.