The Battle of ‘Degsastan’ was decisive for both Northumbria and Scotland. For the Northumbrians it began an ascendancy on its northern border which lasted until the Viking Age; for the Scots it was a crushing defeat, a seventhcentury equivalent of Flodden Field or Culloden. Thanks to Bede, we know that it was fought in 603; we know too that in it, after bitter fighting, the Bernicians vanquished the Scots of Dál Riada. Yet, the conflict's whereabouts having been unknown, we here set out previous discussion of it, before offering fresh arguments for its location and the meaning of its name. If correct, they provide a solution to a problem debated by scholars since the late seventeenth century.

We start, as often, with Charles Plummer (1851– 1927), who thought that the name Degsastan might actually be due to the battle, being a corruption of the Old English for ‘at Aedán's stone’. (The suggestion makes no sense, but is still significant. Prompted by Egesan stane in Abingdon versions of the Anglo- Saxon Chronicle, it shows how even speakers of Old English were baffled by the form.) Plummer elsewhere brought out the perplexity of his predecessors. Quoting W. F. Skene (1809– 1892) and noting the philological objections to Dalston, near Carlisle, he took the place as ‘Probably Dawston, in Liddesdale’. He also mentioned (as other proposals) Theekstone, north of Ripon, and Dissington, north- west of Newcastle. No one remembers these. An older view appears in collections of Joseph Bosworth (1789– 1876), which state ‘DAWSTON or Dalston, Cumberland’.

Even in the twentieth century, the conflict was still vaguely related to Dawstone (near Jedburgh) or Dalston (near Carlisle), as well as Dawston Rigg in Roxburghshire/ Borders. The last has thereafter ousted other contenders (on the principle that a bad suggestion is better than a worse one). We start with Anderson's version of Bede's text. ‘In these times Ethelfrid, a most powerful king, and very eager for glory, reigned over the kingdom of the Northumbrians.’ Than him ‘no one among kings, after expelling or subduing the inhabitants, made more of their lands either tributary to the English nation or habitable by them’, so that Bede applied Old Testament language to him, the king resembling Saul as a ‘ravening wolf ‘ which devoured prey and divided spoil.