Europe · The successor kingdoms
Kingdom of Rheged
drawn on the map AD 592–646
Rheged was one of the kingdoms of the Hen Ogledd ("Old North"), the Brittonic-speaking region of what is now northern England and southern Scotland. Its precise extent is uncertain; later legend associates it with Carlisle (Roman Luguvalium), and N. J. Higham suggests it was "broadly conterminous with the earlier Civitas Carvetiorum."
- Shown on the map
- AD 592–646
- Peak area
- 12k km²
- Region
- Europe
Names and location
Rheged was one of the kingdoms of the Hen Ogledd ("Old North"), the Brittonic-speaking region of what is now northern England and southern Scotland. Its precise extent is uncertain; later legend associates it with Carlisle (Roman Luguvalium), and N. J. Higham suggests it was "broadly conterminous with the earlier Civitas Carvetiorum." Place-name evidence (e.g. Dunragit, possibly "fort of Rheged") suggests it may at times have included Dumfries and Galloway; the 2012 Galloway Picts Project excavation at Trusty's Hill, directed by Ronan Toolis and Dr Christopher Bowles (Scottish Borders Council Archaeologist), concluded that "Trusty's Hill was likely the royal seat of Rheged, a kingdom that had Galloway as its heartland" (published as Toolis & Bowles, The Lost Dark Age Kingdom of Rheged, Oxbow Books, 2017), reviving the possibility that its core lay in south-west Scotland rather than Cumbria.
Urien and the poetry
Rheged is famous chiefly through the praise-poetry of Taliesin to its greatest king, Urien (fl. c. 550–590) and his son Owain. Urien led an alliance of northern British kings (with Rhydderch Hen of Alt Clut, Gwallog and Morcant) against the Angles of Bernicia, and reportedly besieged them on the island of Lindisfarne (Metcaud) — before being assassinated at the instigation of a jealous ally (Morcant). Rheged's independence did not long survive; through the marriage of the Rheged princess Rhiainfellt to Oswiu, it was absorbed by Northumbria in the 7th century.
Source note
Rheged is a paradigm case of a kingdom known almost entirely through later heroic poetry (the Book of Taliesin, compiled in the 14th century) and genealogy; its history, geography and even its royal centre are reconstructed inferentially, and much remains conjectural.
Common questions
- What was the Kingdom of Rheged?
- Rheged was one of the kingdoms of the Hen Ogledd ("Old North"), the Brittonic-speaking region of what is now northern England and southern Scotland. Its precise extent is uncertain; later legend associates it with Carlisle (Roman Luguvalium), and N. J. Higham suggests it was "broadly conterminous with the earlier Civitas Carvetiorum."
- When is the Kingdom of Rheged shown on the map?
- The border data draws the Kingdom of Rheged AD 592–646. The source samples borders at fixed dates, so a span can begin late or run on past the end.
- How large was the Kingdom of Rheged?
- At its greatest extent drawn on this map, the Kingdom of Rheged covered about 12,000 km². That is the largest area the border data gives it across the years it is drawn, not necessarily its greatest extent in history.
Sources
This compendium cites its sources once for the whole document rather than per territory. Its bibliography names the English Wikipedia articles for each kingdom as the primary basis, with Encyclopædia Britannica, the World History Encyclopedia, national heritage bodies (Historic Environment Wales and Scotland, the Clwyd-Powys Archaeological Trust), museum sources and the Dictionary of Irish Biography, read against the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Bede and the Irish annals with their own biases. The article this entry is anchored on:
- Wikipedia — Rheged en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rheged
This entry was last updated .
This entry was researched and drafted with AI from the sources above, and has not been reviewed by a historian. How entries are made
Text available under CC BY-SA 4.0: reuse it with a credit to The World Through Time and a link to this page. Passages drawing on the Wikipedia articles listed above are also licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 by their contributors.
Border geometry for the map itself comes from Cliopatria v0.12 (Seshat Global History Databank, CC-BY-4.0).
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