Like the Picts and Vikings, the Britons played an important role in the shaping of Scottish history during the first millennium AD but their story is often neglected or ignored. This book redresses the balance by studying the northern Britons from the departure of Rome to the birth of medieval Scotland.

This book traces the history of relations between the kingdom of Strathclyde and Anglo-Saxon England in the Viking period of the ninth to eleventh centuries AD. It puts the spotlight on the North Britons or 'Cumbrians', an ancient people whose kings ruled from a power-base at Govan on the western side of present-day Glasgow. In the tenth century, these kings extended their rule southward from Clydesdale to the southern shore of the Solway Firth, bringing their language and culture to a region that had been in English hands for more than two hundred years. They played a key role in many of the...