Strathclyde, in British history, native Briton kingdom that, from about the 6th century, had extended over the basin of the River Clyde and adjacent western coastal districts, the former county of Ayr. The original occupants of the area where a Celtic tribe known as the Damnonii.
At the height of its empire there stretched a kingdom from its capital Ail - Cluathe (Dumbarton) in the north down to Wales in the south. Dumbarton was captured by Scandinavian rulers in 870;thereafter the kingdom’s centre ofgravity shifted southwards.Amajor political and ecclesiastical centre flourished at Govan, in the Clyde Valley, whereas the lands north of the Clyde (the Lennox) were no longer the epicentre.
The people of the kingdom were Britons who spoke an early form of Welsh. The kingdom emerged after Roman rule was withdrawn from Britain at the beginning of the fifth century.
Converted to Christianity in the early 6th century, the men of Strathclyde, in alliance with the Cumbrians, later in the century waged war against the still-pagan Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Bernicia (later part of the larger kingdom of Northumbria).
Kingdom of Strathclyde (5th century–c. 1030)
