Edinburgh The Complete History Ancient Wonders Explained

Hello everyone. Welcome back to Ancient Wonders. Today, we'll discuss about very interesting topic Edinburgh. The Complete History Edinburgh. The Complete History Part 1 Edinburgh, Scotland. There are very few places on the planet that carry the kind of weight this city carries. Edinburgh has been sacked, scorched, rebuilt, and sacked all over again, and somehow it kept standing every single time. This is a city that gave the world some of its most important ideas while also living through some of the darkest chapters in its own backyard. Nothing about Edinburgh's rise was handed to it. Every inch of its identity was fought for, argued over, burned down, and rebuilt out of stubbornness alone. In this video, we are tracing the complete story of Edinburgh, from the first humans who set foot on this land more than 10,000 years ago, to the busy, world-famous city that stands here today. We are covering the wars, the betrayals, the plagues, the uprisings, the geniuses, and the turning points that shaped not only Scotland, but the wider Western world. Let's rewind all the way back to the beginning, long before this land had any name at all. Thousands of years before castles or kings, this stretch of coastline was already home to people. The earliest solid evidence of human life around what is now Edinburgh comes from Cramond, a small settlement where the River Almond meets the Firth of Forth, just northwest of the modern city centre. Archaeologists there have uncovered traces of activity stretching back to roughly 8,500 years before Christ, the Mesolithic era, often called the Middle Stone Age. These were hunters and gatherers who moved with the seasons, pulling fish and shellfish from the river, tracking game through the woodland, and leaving behind little more than scattered flint tools and blackened patches of earth. For thousands of years, that was essentially the story here, small bands of people living close to the water, leaving almost no permanent mark on the landscape. Move the clock forward into the Bronze and Iron Ages, and the picture changes. Communities settle on the high, defensible ground that dominates this part of Scotland, the rocky summit that would one day carry a castle, the Green Hill known today as Arthur's Seat, and the Pentland Hills to the south. These were hill forts, home to tribes whose culture shared deep roots with Celtic peoples across Europe. When Roman legions pushed this far north near the end of the first century after Christ, they found a Celtic confederation already rooted here, recorded by Roman writers as the Votidini. Rome built an outpost at Cremon, but its hold on this frontier never felt secure, and the legions eventually withdrew, leaving the Votidini right where they had always been. In the centuries after Rome's retreat, the descendants of the Votidini, called the Godadan, built a hill fort on that same outcrop of volcanic rock that dominates the skyline today. They called their stronghold Din Aydin, the direct ancestor of the word Edinburgh, Din meaning fortress, Aydin referring to the broader territory. Castle Rock, the sheer plug of ancient volcanic basalt thrusting up from the landscape, is almost certainly where that original fortress once stood. Around the year 600, the Godadan made a decision that would haunt them, assembling a war band at this stronghold to march south against encroaching Angle settlers. The clash, remembered as the Battle of Catreth, is immortalized in one of the oldest surviving poems from the British Isles, and it does not soften the blow. Roughly 300 warriors rode south, and tradition holds that only one made it home. That defeat left the fortress exposed, and by 638, the Angles of Northumbria laid siege and captured it outright. The Godadan's grip on this stronghold was finished for good. For the next 300 years, this hilltop belonged to Northumbria, a lonely frontier outpost at the edge of a kingdom whose center of gravity sat far to the south. It was during this occupation that the settlement's name shifted for good, as the Angles tacked on their own word, Bo, meaning a fortified settlement, and slowly Aydin became Edinburgh. The name had arrived, even though the city we would recognize today was still centuries away. Northumbria's grip would not last forever, and the tug of war over who truly controlled Edinburgh was about to decide the destiny of an entire emerging nation. Through the 10th century, Northumbrian power crumbled, and the young Kingdom of Scotland pushed its borders steadily southward. Sometime between 954 and 962, chronicles record that Edinburgh, called Oppidum Eden in Latin, passed to the Scottish king in Dulth, and in 973, the English king Edgar formally ceded Lothian to King Kenneth. The second, after centuries of changing hands, the rock finally belonged to Scotland for good, though it would take another Scottish king to turn this fortress into a real city. That king was Malcolm III, remembered as Malcolm Canmore, meaning Great Chief. Malcolm kept his primary court at Dunfermline but increasingly spent his time on this rock, building a small chapel for his devout wife, Queen Margaret, a woman later canonized as a saint. That chapel, St. Margaret's Chapel, still stands inside Edinburgh Castle and holds the title of the oldest surviving building in the city, though most historians believe it was actually completed by their son in his mother's honor after her death. Margaret was born into English royalty but raised in Hungary. Arriving in Scotland after the Norman conquest made her homeland too dangerous, and she gently pulled the Scottish court into closer alignment with European Christendom. It was Margaret and Malcolm's son, David I, who truly set this city on its course. Around 1130, David formally elevated Edinburgh to Royal Burgh status. The moment the city as we know it begins to take shape, granting the legal right to hold markets and trade freely under royal protection. David laid out a long market street running down from the castle, handing narrow strips of land to merchants with a blunt condition, build a house within a year or forfeit the plot. Behind each plot stretched long yards known as closes. If you have ever walked the royal mile and wondered why dark alleyways keep branching off, those closes are medieval in origin. David also founded Holyrood Abbey in 1128 at the far end of that market street, down in the low ground beyond the ridge. According to legend, David was hunting nearby when a stag charged him, and in the split second before disaster a glowing cross appeared between its antlers, sparing his life, and in gratitude he founded the Abbey on the spot. The Abbey became one of the kingdom's most important religious sites, and a separate settlement grew up around it called Canongate, distinct in law from Edinburgh proper. By the close of the 1100s, Edinburgh finally had real shape, a fortress on the rock, a market street sloping toward the Abbey, a working port a mile north at Leith, and a growing population of merchants and craftsmen. It was modest compared to continental Europe's great cities, but it was alive and only getting started. What it was not yet, however, was safe, because just across the border, England was about to produce a king with very aggressive opinions about who ought to be ruling Scotland, and his attention was about to fall squarely on Edinburgh. Part two the 1200s actually opened rather well for Edinburgh. Trade flowing through the harbour at Leith was expanding steadily, and the town itself was growing in confidence and wealth. But the tangled political rivalries of medieval Britain were about to drag this young city into one of the most brutal and prolonged conflicts it would ever have to endure. Everything changed in 1286, when Scotland's King Alexander III died suddenly, thrown from his horse on a stormy coastal night, leaving behind no obvious heir to secure the throne. With multiple rival claimants pressing their case, Scotland's nobles made the fateful choice to invite England's King Edward I to arbitrate the succession dispute. It is a decision the country would regret for generations to come. Edward I, remembered by history under the fearsome nickname Longshanks, was one of the most calculating and ruthless monarchs England ever produced, and he treated the invitation to arbitrate not as an act of diplomatic goodwill, but as an opening to seize outright control. By 1291, Edinburgh Castle had fallen into English hands, with an English nobleman installed as its governor. The Stone of Destiny, the ancient block of sandstone on which Scottish monarchs had been crowned for centuries, was hauled south to Westminster as a trophy. Scotland was no longer being treated as an independent neighbour, but as a conquered territory, and this humiliation lit the fuse for what history now remembers as the Wars of Scottish Independence, with Edinburgh sitting squarely at the centre of the fighting. Robert the Bruce, whose early loyalties in the conflict had been complicated and shifting, eventually threw himself completely behind the cause of Scottish independence. In 1314, his forces recaptured Edinburgh Castle in one of the boldest raids of the entire war, led by his nephew Thomas Randolph. Under cover of darkness, a small band of Scottish soldiers scaled the sheer, near-vertical north face of Castle Rock by hand, silently overwhelmed the sleeping English garrison at the top, and took the fortress back. Weeks later, Robert delivered a crushing, decisive blow to English ambitions at the Battle of Bannockburn, effectively securing Scottish independence for a generation. But the fighting was far from finished. English forces returned in the 1330s, and in 1356, King Edward III launched what became known as the Burnt Candlemas Campaign, marching into Edinburgh in the dead of winter and setting much of the town ablaze. It was a savage reminder of just how fragile life in a medieval city truly was. A settlement built largely from timber and thatch, clinging to a steep hillside, stood almost no chance against anyone determined enough to bring a torch. Despite the devastation, Edinburgh kept clawing its way back. After England seized Berwick, cutting off Scotland's principal trading port, Edinburgh's own harbour at least stepped in to fill the gap, and wool, hides, and animal skins began flowing outward in large volumes while money and goods flowed back in. By the middle of the 14th century, with the worst of the fighting finally cooling off, the visiting French chronicler Jean Froissart described the town as something like the Paris of Scotland. At that time, Edinburgh consisted of roughly 400 dwellings, small, weather-beaten, and frequently rebuilt after fire, yet still worthy in Froissart's eyes of comparison to one of Europe's great capitals. Edinburgh had already survived invasion, occupation, and repeated burning by this point in its story, but nothing it had faced so far could prepare it for the silent, invisible enemy about to sweep in from across the continent. The Black Death reached Scottish shores in 1349, and Edinburgh did not escape its reach. Carried largely by fleas riding on rats, the disease tore mercilessly through the cramped, unsanitary closes and tenements packed onto the medieval ridge. There are no precise surviving figures for how many Edinburgh residents perished, but historians estimate that across Scotland as a somewhere between a third and half of the entire population may have died. The bustling streets felt eerily silent. Whole families simply disappeared. The trading networks the city had fought so hard to rebuild collapsed almost overnight. And yet, within a single generation, Edinburgh rebuilt itself once again. This pattern would come to define the medieval city in a nutshell, knocked flat again and again, and rising back to its feet every single time without fail. The 15th century pulled Edinburgh firmly into the center of Scottish national life. King James II was, as one chronicler memorably summarized, born, crowned, married, and eventually buried at Holyrood, in Edinburgh Hat. Clearly become more than a fortified trading post with a castle attached, it was becoming the true royal heart of the entire nation. James II's reign is remembered for one particularly bizarre and undeniably Edinburgh-flavored piece of drama. The king developed an intense personal fascination with artillery, the cutting-edge military technology of his era, and in 1460, while overseeing the siege of Roxburgh Castle, one of his own cannons exploded beside him without warning, killing him instantly at just 29 years old, with his wife reportedly standing close enough to witness the entire disaster. His son, James III, later made Edinburgh's status entirely official, describing the city in one royal charter as the principal burg of our kingdom. The declaration was now formal. Edinburgh was, beyond any dispute, the capital city of Scotland. Meanwhile, the city itself was being forced to grow in an unusual direction, straight up. Space on the narrow ridge running between the castle and Holyrood was scarce and precious, so builders responded by stacking homes on top of homes. Multi-storey tenement buildings rose steadily along the length of the royal mile, standing among the earliest examples of genuinely high-density urban housing found anywhere in Europe at the time. By some historical estimates, the tallest of these structures, known locally as an almost unbelievable figure for the medieval period. Edinburgh's cramped geography effectively forced the city to innovate long before almost anywhere else in the world thought to build vertically out of sheer necessity. Edinburgh had firmly secured its place as Scotland's capital, both in title and in reality, but the single most turbulent, dangerous, and dramatic century in the entire history of this city was still waiting just around the corner, and it would begin with the arrival of one of the most controversial and tragic women ever to set foot on Scottish soil. Part III to 1500 stand as Edinburgh's single most dramatic century, and honestly, more history seems to unfold within these hundred years than most cities experience across an entire millennium. It begins with genuine confidence and swagger. Under King James IV, Edinburgh becomes a royal city with real, serious European ambitions. James is intelligent, cultured, and widely popular, and he commissions a brand new palace at Holyrood, still standing proudly today, intending it as a genuine royal residence rather than the modest guest quarters attached to the Before, he champions the arts, funds scholarship, and marries Margaret Tudor, daughter of England's King Henry VII, and for one brief, hopeful moment, it genuinely feels as though Scotland and England might actually settle into peaceful coexistence. Then comes Flodden, and everything that hopeful moment promised collapses in a single afternoon. In 1513, James leads a Scottish army south into England as part of an alliance with France against Henry VIII, and the resulting Battle of Flodden turns into an unmitigated catastrophe. James IV himself is killed on the field alongside an estimated 10,000 Scottish soldiers, and among the dead is a staggering portion of the Scottish nobility, earls, bishops, and knights wiped out together in a single bloody afternoon. Edinburgh's reaction to the news is immediate, and it tells you everything about the sheer terror that gripped the city in the aftermath. Citizens rushed to construct an entirely new defensive wall, remembered today as the Flodden Wall, encircling the southern and eastern edges of the town, and remarkably, large sections of that wall still survive. If you have ever climbed the Vennel Steps in modern Edinburgh, you have walked directly alongside the Flodden Wall, a structure raised not out of pride or celebration but out of raw, desperate panic. Flodden, brutal as it was, would not turn out to be the darkest chapter this century had in store for Edinburgh. That distinction belongs to 1544. Henry VIII, furious that Scotland had reneged on a marriage agreement between his son Edward and the infant Mary, Queen, of Scots, dispatched the Earl of Hertford North with instructions that left absolutely no room for interpretation. He was to burn Edinburgh to the ground without mercy. Hertford's army followed those orders to the letter, setting fire to the town for three consecutive days, consuming the streets, the Abbey at Holyrood, the Royal Palace, and the harbour at Leith in a single relentless firestorm. Contemporary witnesses described a column of smoke visible from miles away. This deliberate, calculated campaign of destruction, meant to terrify Scotland into submission, became known to history as the Rough Wooing. In the end, Henry VIII got absolutely nothing for his cruelty. Young Mary was smuggled safely away to France, and Scotland refused to bend. But rebuilding took a full generation, and the emotional scars ran far deeper than the physical ones. The Protestant Reformation arrived in Scotland during the 1560s, and once again, Edinburgh found itself standing directly at the centre of the storm. The fiery reformer John Knox preached relentlessly from St Giles Cathedral on the Royal Mile, a church that had already stood on that exact site since at least the 1200s. Knox was passionate, uncompromising, and utterly convinced that Scotland needed to break decisively with the Catholic Church, and in the end, he got his wish. In 1560, the Scottish Parliament, meeting in Edinburgh, formally declared Protestantism the official national religion of Scotland. Into this newly reshaped, staunchly Protestant city walked Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1561, Catholic by faith, French-educated, still remarkably young, and stepping directly into what may be the single worst possible situation any monarch could inherit. Mary had already been Queen of France, was Queen of Scotland by birthright, and in the eyes of many Catholics across Europe, was also the rightful Queen of England. She was sharp, politically capable, and in a different set of circumstances might have gone down as one of the great rulers of her age. But Edinburgh in 1561 showed her no mercy whatsoever. Knox despised her openly, the Protestant nobility distrusted her instinctively, and the sequence of events that follows her arrival at Holyrood Palace reads like a tragedy that only gets darker Her trusted private secretary, David Rizzio, is murdered right in front of her by a group of Protestant nobles, including her own husband Lord Darnley, in 1566, while she is heavily pregnant. Darnley himself is killed the following year in a mysterious explosion at a house called Kirk O' Field, just outside the town walls. Mary then makes what many historians consider her single most disastrous decision, marrying the Earl of Bothwell, the man widely suspected of orchestrating Darnley's murder only months later. Edinburgh turns on her completely. She is captured, imprisoned, and ultimately forced to abdicate the throne in favor of her infant son James. After a failed attempt to escape and a final crushing defeat at the Battle of Langside, she flees south into England and throws herself on the mercy of her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I. She would spend the next 19 years as Elizabeth's prisoner before her execution in 1587. Edinburgh Castle itself becomes the last stronghold of her remaining loyalists during what is remembered as the Lang siege. A grinding four-year standoff finally broken in 1573 when English cannons sent by Elizabeth battered the castle walls into submission. Yet even surrounded by all of this chaos and bloodshed, Edinburgh managed to produce one of its most lasting and important achievements of the entire century. In 1583, the University of Edinburgh officially opened its doors, founded by royal charter under King James VI, and it stands today as one of the oldest universities in the entire United Kingdom, destined to become one of most influential centers of learning anywhere on the planet. With fresh young king now on the throne and a brand new university welcoming its first students, it might have seemed reasonable to assume Edinburgh was finally heading into calmer, more peaceful waters. It absolutely was not, and the century ahead would bring religious warfare, foreign occupation, renewed plague, and a political union the city never wanted and was nowhere near ready to accept. Part for the 1600s opened with a seismic political shift. In 1603, King James VI of Scotland inherits the English throne following the death of Elizabeth I, an event remembered as the Union of the Crowns. Scotland and England now share a single monarch, yet remain, for the time being, entirely separate kingdoms with entirely separate parliaments. James promptly relocates his royal court to London, promising his Scottish subjects he will return north every three years to maintain the connection. In reality, he returns exactly once, in 1617. Edinburgh, having spent centuries as the undisputed home of an actual royal court, suddenly finds its king living 400 miles away. The city does not collapse under the weight of this change, but it undeniably loses a significant amount of its political gravity and prestige almost overnight. Even without a resident monarch, the city keeps building on itself, quite literally. With the crown gone south, Edinburgh's merchants and lawyers become the new civic aristocracy, and their wealth reshapes the skyline along the royal mile even further, pushing the crowded tenements higher still. It is in this period that George Heriot, court goldsmith to King James and a man wealthy enough to have effectively bankrolled the royal household, leaves his fortune to found a charitable school for the city's orphaned and fatherless boys. George Heriot's hospital, its foundation stone laid in 1628, still stands today as one of Edinburgh's finest surviving pieces of Renaissance architecture, and the institution it created continues to educate children in the city centuries later. It is a small but telling detail about Edinburgh in this era, a city whose royal glamour has been packed off to London, yet whose civic pride and private wealth keep quietly reshaping the place from the ground up. The religious tensions simmering beneath the surface for decades finally boil over in the 1630s. King Charles I, never particularly skilled at reading the political temperature of his own kingdom, attempts to force an Anglican-style prayer book on the fiercely Presbyterian Church of Scotland. The reaction inside Edinburgh is immediate and explosive. In 1637, the moment this new prayer book is read aloud inside St. Giles Cathedral, the congregation erupts into open riot. According to a story that has survived for centuries, quite possibly embellished somewhat over the years, a woman named Jenny Geddes hurls her wooden folding stool directly at the officiating bishop's head. What is beyond dispute, however, is everything that follows. The Bishop's Wars and eventually the much wider English Civil War, a conflict that drags Scotland into multiple, shifting and often contradictory alliances. Even while political and religious tensions consume the city, Edinburgh faces something far older and far more merciless than any human army. Plague returns in 1645 in one of its most devastating outbreaks yet, tearing through thousands of lives packed into the tight, overcrowded streets of the old town. With no genuine understanding of how disease actually spreads from person to person, authorities respond by boarding infected families directly into their own homes to prevent them from wandering outside. Bodies accumulate faster than they can be properly buried. The very same narrow closes that give Edinburgh so much of its distinctive charm today In this era, genuine death traps for entire families. Only a handful of years later, in 1650, Oliver Cromwell and his Commonwealth army march north on Edinburgh after the Scots throw their support behind the restoration of Charles II to the throne. Cromwell crushes the Scottish forces decisively at the Battle of Dunbar and marches straight into the city, quartering his soldiers inside Holyrood Palace and various churches around town. Edinburgh remains under English military occupation for close to an entire decade. As the century draws to its close, one of the most consequential political decisions in Edinburgh's entire history is still being furiously debated within the Scottish Parliament. The question of whether to enter into a full and permanent political union with England. Scotland's economy is reeling. The disastrous Darien scheme, a hugely ambitious attempt to establish a Scottish trading colony on the isthmus of Panama, has collapsed catastrophically, wiping out the savings of many of the nation's leading investors and shattering public confidence in Scotland's economic independence. England, meanwhile, is deliberately restricting Scottish access to its lucrative overseas trade routes, applying steady economic pressure. The arguments in favour of the union are almost entirely financial and practical. The arguments against touch on nearly everything else, pride, identity and centuries of hard-fought independence. The Act of Union ultimately passes in 1707, formally dissolving the Scottish Parliament and merging Scotland fully into the new Kingdom of Great Britain. Scotland's elected representatives now travel south to sit in Westminster and Edinburgh loses its own Parliament entirely. For a city that had spent centuries as a genuine capital wielding real independent political power, this represents nothing short of a devastating blow to civic identity. Riots break out in the streets the moment the Act is finally passed and the poet Robert Burns, writing generations later, would famously describe the whole affair as being bought and sold for English gold. The full economic reality is considerably more nuanced than that, but the raw feeling of national loss was entirely genuine and it lingered for a very, very long time afterward. Yet out of this uneasy political calm that eventually settles over the city, Edinburgh goes on to produce one of the single most extraordinary bursts of intellectual achievement in all of human history, the Scottish Enlightenment. Inside the crowded coffee houses, taverns and lecture halls scattered across this compact city, an extraordinary generation of thinkers begins fundamentally, reshaping how the entire world understands itself and the consequences of their work would ripple outward for centuries, touching nearly every corner of modern thought, from economics to philosophy to the natural sciences themselves. Part 5 David Hume, quite possibly the greatest philosopher Britain has ever produced, lives and writes his most influential work right here in Edinburgh, challenging the very foundations of religious belief, human causality and the limits of human knowledge with a clarity that philosophers are still wrestling with today. His close friend Adam Smith publishes The Wealth of Nations in 1776, the foundational text that essentially gives birth to modern economics. Meanwhile, James Hutton, studying the exposed rock formations around the city, effectively invents the science of geology, demonstrating that the earth itself is unimaginably older than anyone had previously dared believe, laying groundwork that Charles Darwin would later build upon. In the span of a few remarkable decades, this single, relatively small city produces work that transforms science, economics, philosophy and humanity's basic understanding of the natural world. Edinburgh does not just transform intellectually during this period, it physically transforms itself as well. By the middle of the 1700s, the old town has become one of the most desperately overcrowded and unsanitary urban environments found anywhere in Europe. The towering tenements lining the Royal Mile are stuffed with thousands of residents living virtually on top of one another, and household waste is routinely emptied directly out of upper-story windows onto the street below, accompanied by the shouted warning gardelot, a corrupted version of the French phrase meaning watch out for the water. Visitors to the city remark constantly on the overwhelming stench. Long-time residents simply learn to live with it as an unavoidable fact of daily life. The eventual solution is the new town. In 1766,