The Coeling: Narrative and Identity in North Britain and Wales AD 580–950

Abstract

An examination of the Cambro-Latin sources associated with the ‘Coeling’ lineages in the Harleian genealogies (HG VIII–XII and XIX) underscores the need to take a revised view of the geopolitics of the Hadrianic Frontier region across the sixth and seventh centuries. The Northumbrian conquests of the early seventh century may have been a more gradual, diplomatic process than was imagined by later sources, including Bede and Historia Brittonum. Similarly, the hegemony of Rheged, the dynasty of Urien and the ‘Anglian Wars’ of the late sixth-century may have received undue emphasis by these sources. Finally, the Coeling dynasty itself emerges as a retrospective fabrication, whose component groupings appear to have been genealogically and even culturally unrelated in the first instance. We find a hint of this diversity in the onomastic character of each of the lineages, as well as the conflicting dynastic and geopolitical emphases implicit in this early material. The distinct and heterogeneous character of these Cambro-Latin sources are best accounted for in terms of genuine connections to the North, which appear to have converged and syncretised in the surviving text compilations from early medieval Wales. The same tendencies are apparent in the vernacular hengerdd material and saga englynion concerned with Urien and his contemporaries which, we conclude, were probably mediated through the same lines of communication.