JOHN RHYS

CELTIC BRITAIN

The Kymry

We must now say a few words about the other Cambria or Cumbria, for in point of origin we have but one and the same word in both forms. Kambria was regularly used for Wales by such writers as Giraldus in the twelfth century...The fashion was not yet established of distinguishing between Cambria and Cumbria as we do....Joceline, who wrote his life of St. Kentigern in the twelfth century, speaks of the land of the Northern Kymry or Cumbria, as Cambria,....Soit may be supposed that both countries of the Kymry were for some time called Cambria and Cumbria indifferently.....in the language of the Saxon Chronicle, it became Cumerland or Cumberland, and also Cumbraland - the land, as it were, of the Cumbras, the Cumbri or Kymry.

Hitherto Carlisle had no doubt been far the most important town of these Northern Cumbrians; but, in consequence of a great battle fought by their princes with one another in the year 573, that city found much of its importance shifted to a more northerly point...... the prince who issued victorious... was Rhydderch: he thereupon fixed his headquarters on a rock in the Clyde, called in Welsh Alclud....., but the Goidels called it Dunbrettan or the fortress of the Brythons, which has prevailed in the slightly modified form of Dumbarton. The Cumbrians north of the Solway became independent, and had kings of their own again, ....a Welsh tradition that the Cumbrians whorefused to submit to the English were received by the King of Gwynedd into the part of North Wales lying between the Dee and the Clwyd, from which they are represented as driving out some English settlers who had established themselves there. Harassed and weakened on all sides, the Cumbrians ceased to have kings of their own race in the early part of the tenth century, when a Scottish line of princes established itself at Alclyde; and in 946 the kingdom was conquered by the English king Edmund who bestowed the whole of it from the neighbourhood of the Derwent to the Clyde on the Scottish king Maelcoluim or Malcolm. So Cumbria became... an appanage of the Scottish crown, which led to various complications between the English and Scots for a considerable time afterwards. William the Red made the southern part of Cumbria, including the city of Carlisle, an earldom for one of his barons. Thus it came to pass that the name of Cumberland has ever since had its home on the English side of the border, while the northern portion, of which the basin of the Clyde formed such an important part, is spoken of in the Saxon Chronicle as that of the Strathclyde Welshmen. It may here be added that this last was still more closely joined to the Scottish crown when David became king in 1124; but its people, who formed a distinct battalion of Cumbrians and Teviotdale men in the Scottish army at the battle of the Standard in 1130, preserved their Kymric characteristics long afterwards. How late the Welsh language lingered between the Mersey and the Clyde we have no means of discovering, but to judge from a passage in the Welsh Triads, it may be surmised to have been spoken as late as the fourteenth century in the district of Carnoban, wherever between Leeds and Dumbarton that may turn out to have been.