Dumnagual III of Alt Clut

Dumnagual III (Welsh: Dyfnwal ap Tewdwr, died c. 760) was a king of Strathclyde in the mid-eighth century (probably 754–760). According to the Harleian genealogies, he was the son of Teudebur, one of his predecessors.[1]

According to Symeon of Durham, his kingdom was invaded by both King Óengus I of the Picts and King Eadberht of Northumbria. The same source indicates that on August 1, 756, they arrived at Alt Clut (Dumbarton Rock, Dumnagual's capital) and obtained the homage of the Britons. However, nine days later, the Northumbrian king's army was destroyed while Eadberht was leading it between "Ouania" and "Niwanbirig",[2] probably meaning "Govan" and "Anglian Northumbria".[3] Dumnagual is usually regarded as the king of Alt Clut in the period, but it has also been suggested that the destroyer of the Northumbrian army was Óengus.[4] Phillimore's reconstruction of the Annales Cambriae puts Dumnagual's death in battle at 760.[5] It is thought likely that the territory of Alt Clut remained under Pictish or joint Pictish and English control in the years following his death.[6] Dumnagual is the last British king of Alt Clut to be known as anything more than a name until the later ninth century.

  1. ^ "Harleian genealogy of the Kings of Alt Clut".
  2. ^ Symeon of Durham, Historia Regum Angliae, in T. Arnold (ed.) Symeonis Dunelmensis Opera Omnia, (Rolls Series, 1882), vol. ii, pp. 40-41; translated and quoted in Alan Orr Anderson, Scottish Annals from English Chroniclers: AD 500–1286, (London, 1908), republished, Marjorie Anderson (ed.) (Stamford, 1991), p. 57.
  3. ^ Govan is increasingly being accepted as the identification of Ouania, for a variety of historical and philological reasons; see Thomas Owen Clancy, "Govan, the Name, Again", in Report of the Society of Friends of Govan Old, 8 (1998), pp. 8-13; Kathryn Forsyth, , "Evidence of a Lost Pictish source in the Historia Regum Anglorum of Symeon of Durham", in Simon Taylor (ed.) Kings, Clerics, and Chronicles in Scotland, 500-1297: Essays in Honour of Marjorie Ogilvie Anderson on the Occasion of Her Ninetieth Birthday, (Dublin, 2000), pp. 19-32; Appendix by John Koch, pp. 33-4; Alex Woolf, "Onuist son of Uurguist:Tyrannus Carnifex or a David for the Picts", in David Hill & Margaret Worthington (eds.), Æthelbald and Off, Two Eighth-Century Kings of Mercia: Papers from a Conference held in Manchester in 2000, (Manchester, 2005), p. 38.

    The English name Niwanbirig suggests a location in English-speaking Northumbria, perhaps one of the many Newburghs there.
  4. ^ Alan MacQuarrie, "The Kings of Strathclyde", in A. Grant & K.Stringer (eds.) Medieval Scotland: Crown, Lordship and Community, Essays Presented to G.W.S. Barrow, (Edinburgh, 1993), p. 11.
  5. ^ Annales Camrbiae, s.a. 760, here
  6. ^ Alan MacQuarrie, loc. cit.