the blood of the Trojans. In Albanye (now called
Scotland) he edified the Castell of Alclude, which
is Dumbreyton j he made the Castell of Maydens,
now called Edinburgh; he also made the Castell
.of Banburgh, in the twenty-third year of his reign.?
All these events occurred, according to Stow, in
the year 989 beJore Christ ; and the information is
quite as veracious as much else that has been
written concerning the remote history of Scotland.
From sources that can scarcely be doabted, a
? fortress of some kind upon the rock would seem to
have been occupied by the Picts, from whom it
was captured in 452 by the Saxons of Northumbria
under Octa and Ebusa; and from that time
down to the reign of Malcolm 11. its history
exhibits but a constant struggle for its possession
between them and the Picts, each being victorious
in turn; and Edwin, one of these Northumbrian
invaders, is said to have rebuilt it in 626. Terri-
* tories seemed so easily overrun in those times, that
the latter, with the Scots, in the year 638, under
the reign of Valentinian I., penetrated as far as
London, but were repulsed by Theodosius, father
of the Emperor of the same name. This is the
Edwin whose pagan high-priest Coifi was converted
to Christianity by Paulinus, in 627, and who, according
to Bede, destroyed the heathen temples
and altars. A curious and very old tradition still
exists in Midlothian, that the stones used in the
construction of the castle were taken from a quarry
near Craigmillar, the Craig-moiZard of antiquity.
Camden says, ?The Britons called it CasfeZ
Mynedh Agnedh-the maidens? or virgins? castlebecause
certain young maidens of the royal blood
were kept there in old times.? The source of this
Oft-repeated story has probably been the assertion
of Conchubhranus, that an Irish saint, or recluse,
named Monena, late in the fifth century founded
seven churches in Scotland, on the heights of
Dun Edin, Dumbarton, and elsewhere. This may
have been the St. Monena of Sliabh-Cuillin, who
died in 5r8. The site of her edifice is supposed
to be that now occupied by the present chapel
of St. Margaret-the most ancient piece of masonry
in the Scottish capital; and it is a curious
circumstance, with special reference to the fable
of the Pictish princesses, that close by it (as recorded
in the CaZedonian Mercury of 26th September,
1853), when some excavations were made,
a number of human bones, apparently aZZ of
females, were found, together with the remains of
several coffins.
? Castmm PuelZarum,? says Chalmers, ?? was the
learned and diplomatic name of the place, as
appears from existing charters and documents
Edinburgh, its vulgar appellation f while Buchanan
asserts that its ancient names of the Dolorous
Valley and Maiden Castle were borrowed from .
ancient French romances, ? devised within the
space of three hundred years ? from his time.
The Castle was the nucleus, so to speak, around
which the city grew, a fact that explains the triple
towers in the arms of the latter-three great
towers connected by a curtain wall-being the
form it presented prior to the erection of the
Half-Moon Battery, in Queen Mary?s time.
Edwin, the most powerful of the petty kings of
Northumberland, largely extended the Saxon conquests
in the Scottish border counties; and his
possessions reached ultimately from the waters of
Abios to those of Bodoria-i.e., from Humber to
Forth ; but Egfrid, one of his successors, lost these
territories, together with his liie, in battle with the
Pictish King Bridei, or Brude, who totally defeated
him at Dun-nechtan, with temble slaughter. This
was a fatal blow to the Northumbrian monarchy,
which never regained its previous ascendency, and
was henceforth confined to the country south of
Tweed. Lodonia (a Teutonic name signifying
marshes or borders) became finally a part of the
Pichsh dominiops, Dunedin being its stronghold, and
both the Dalriadic Scots and Strathclyde Britons
were thus freed from the inroads of the Saxons.
This battle was fought in the year 685, the
epoch of the bishopric of Lindisfasne, and as the
Church of St. Giles was a chaplainry of that
ancient see, we may infer that some kind of townof
huts, doubtless-had begun to cluster round the
church, which was a wooden edifice of a primitive
kind, for as the world was expected to end in the
year 1000, sacred edifices of stone were generally
deemed unnecessary. From the time of the
Saxon expulsion to the days of Malcolm 11.-a
period of nearly four hundred years-everything
connected with the castle and town of Edinburgh
is steeped in obscurity or dim tradition.
According to a curious old tradition, preserved
in the statistical account of the parish of Tweedmuir,
the wife of Grime, the usurper, had her
residence in the Castle while he was absent
fighting against the invading Danes. He is said
to have granted, by charter, his hunting seat of
Polmood, in that parish, to one of his attendants
named Hunter, whose race were to possess it while
wood grew and water ran. But, as Hogg says
in his ?Winter Evening Tales,? ?There is one
remarkable circumstance connected with the place
that has rendered it unfamous of late years, and
seems to justify an ancient prediction that the
hunters of Polmood were mer foprospr..?
