King Aidan Edhan SCOTS DALRIADA

   Ancestral File Number: 8HRV-08. User ID: 19828304543744.

   General Notes:

King of SCOTTISH DALRIADA Reigned 574-608.

BOOKS
Barber Grandparents: 125 Kings,143 Generations, Ted Butler Bernard and Gertrude Barber Bernard, 1978, McKinney TX, p67: "203A Aidan, (S of 191, F of 213); living in 605."

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1981, Macropaedia, Vol III, p233, Britain and Ireland History of: "The Scots, from Dalriada in northern Ireland, colonized the Argyll area, probably in the late 5th century. Their continuing connection with Ireland was a source of strength to them, and Scots and Irish Gaelic (Goidelic Celtic languages) did not become distinct from one another until the late Middle Ages. Scottish Dalriada soon extended its cultural as well as its military sway east and south, though one of its greatest kings, Aidan, was, in 603, defeated by the Angles as Degsastan near the later Scottish border...
"...St Columba who founded his monastery at Iona, an island of the Inner Hebrides in 565, is believed to have been influential in coverting the Picts, and he certainly did much to support the Scots King Aidan politically.
"St Aidan [not the King] brought the Celtic Church to Northumbria in the 630's, establishing his monastery at Lindifarne. At the Synod of Whitby in 664 the king of Northumbria had to decide between the Celtic and the Roman styles ofChristianity: he chose the latter..."

Micropaedia, Vol I, p158, Aidan: "Died Abt 608, King of Dalriada in Scotland."

Roman Britain and Early England 55BC-871AD Peter Hunter Blair 1963 The Norton Library History of England p166: "...In 603 Aethelfrith, king of Northumbria, [last of the pagan kings of Bernicia, reigned Abt 593-616] won a major victory over Aedan, king of the Scots..."
p190: "...The first of the two great military victories won by Aethelfrith and recorded by Bedewas achieved in 603 at Degsastan, a place still renowned in Bede's lifetime, but now lost. Aethelfrith's opponent on this occasion was Aedan, king of the Scots of Dalraiada which lay on the mainland and among the islands to the north and westof the British kingdom of Strathclyde. Its capital was Dunadd in the Moss of Crinan, a rock stronghold resembling similar natural frotresses at Dumbarton, Edinburgh and Bamburgh. The origin of the kingdom of Dalriada, itself the embryo of the kingdom of Scotland, lay in the settlements of comparatively small groups of Scots who had crosses from north-eastern Ireland towards the middle of the fifth century. Aedan himself succeeded to the kingdom Abt 574, at about the same time as theBritish rulers of Strathclyde and Rheged were besieging the English of Bernicia in Lindisfarne. Perhaps it was partly as a result of the British preoccupation in this area, together with their disastrous defeat of Catraeth, that Aedan was enabled to enlarge his kingdom eastwards across the mainland of Scotland a little to the north of the Antonine Wall. This direct conflict between the Scots of Dalriada and the English of Bernicia, between whom there lay a wide expanse of British territory, is not easily explained unless upon the supposition that Aedan's easterly advance had coincided with a northerly advance by Aethelfrith towards Lothian.
"The significance of Aethelfrith's victory a Degsastan was that it eliminatedthe Scots as possible contenders for supremacy in northern Britain for a long time to come. From that day to this, wrote Bede, in 731, no king of Scots ever dared to wage war against the English..."

The Formation of England 550-1042 HPR Finberg 1974 Paladin p24: "...Alarmed by Aethelfrith's successes, Aidan, king of the Scottish Dalriada, attacked him at the head of a large army, but Aethelfrith routed him at Degsastan, a place not certainly identifiable but evidently in Anglian territory. This put an end to any threat from Dalriada..." p29: "...Columba himself had `ordained' Aidan as king of the Scottish Dalriada. The ceremony consisted in the laying-on of hands, not necessarily by a bishop, for Columba was a priest-abbot, not a bishop, and it was accompanied by the recital of a set form of blessing. This is the earliest mention in British history of a liturgical rite for the inauguration of a monarch. There was no crowning, and nothing is said of anointing. These features would be added later, to persist into the twentieth century..." p14: "...Argyll and the adjoining isles had been settled at an unknown date by colonists from Dalriada in the north of Antrim, to form a Scottish kingdom of Dalriada.In 563 St Columba established amonastery on the island of Iona, with far-reaching consequences for the political, and still more the religious, life of the north. Finally, the wild tribes of Caledonia whom the Romans called Picts, perhaps because they painted or tattooed their bodies, occupied the whole of the land-mass between the Forth and the Pentland Firth...
"...The population of the island was already mixed. All along the western seaboard, not only in Dalriada but also in Dyfed and Dumnonia, Irish colonists had settled in appreciable numbers..."

ANCESTRAL FILE
Ancestral File Ver 4.10 8HRV-08 Born Abt ?381 Died Abt 608 (?227 yo), EBMicro Aidan King of DALRIADA in Scotland Died 608, RB&EE Aedan King of the Scots of Dalriada.

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