Celtic Scotland

The termination of the Roman dominion in Britain produced a great and marked change in its political position and destinies. It ceased to form a part of the great European Empire, and for the time lost the link which connected it with the civilisation of the west. It no longer took part in the common life of the western nations; and, isolated from all that created for them a common interest, or unconsciously combined them in a common struggle, out of which the elements of a new historical world were to emerge, it seemed to relapse into that state of barbarism from which the influence of the Roman dominion had for the time extricated it. The British Isles seemed as it were to retire again into the recesses of that western ocean from which they had emerged in the reign of the Emperor Claudius; and a darkness, which grew more profound as their isolated existence continued, settled down upon them and shrouded their inhabitants from the eye of Europe till the spread of that great and paramount influence which succeeded to the dominion of the Roman Empire, and inherited its concentrating energy—the Christian Church—took Britain within its grasp, and the works of its monastic and clerical writers once more brought its fortunes within the sphere of history.

When the page of history once more opens to its annals, we find that the barbaric nations, whom we left harassing the Roman province till the Romans abandoned the island, had now effected fixed settlements within the island, and formed permanent kingdoms within its limits. South of the Firths of Forth and Clyde we find her containing a Saxon organisation and tribes of Teutonic descent hitherto known by the general name of Saxons, in full possession of her most valuable and fertile districts, and the Romans of the old British provincials confined to the mountains of Wales and Cumbria, the western districts extending from the Solway to the Clyde, and the peninsula of Cornwall. North of the Firths we find the barbaric tribes of the Picts and Scots, which had so often harassed the Roman province from the north and west, formed into settled kingdoms with definite limits; while Hibernia or Ireland now appears under the additional designation of Scotia.^[102]

So little was known of Britain during this interval of upwards of a century and a half, so undefined were the notions of the Continental writers, that Procopius, writing from Constantinople in the sixth century, describes Britain as extending from east to west, and consisting of two islands, ‘Brittia’ and ‘Brettannia,’ Brittia lay nearest Gaul, and was divided by a wall, the country to the east of which, or that nearest the Continent, he believed to be inhabited, fertile, and productive, and to be occupied by three nations,—the ‘Angiloi,’ ‘Phrissones,’ and ‘Brittones synonymous with the Isle;’ but the region to the west of the wall, by which he indicates Caledonia or the districts north of the Forth and Clyde, he only knew as a region infested by wild beasts, and with an atmosphere so tainted that human life could not exist; and he repeats a fable derived, he says, from the inhabitants, that this region was the place of departed spirits. The country south of the Humber he considered a separate island, named ‘Brettannia.’^[103]

Stephanus Byzantinus, writing from the same place half a century earlier, considered ‘Albion,’ ‘Brettia,’ and ‘Pretania’ separate islands, inhabited respectively by the ‘Albiones,’ ‘Brettanoi,’ and ‘Pretanoi.’^[104]

Even Gildas, himself of British descent, and writing from the neighbouring shore of Armorica, takes his description of the size of Britain from the cosmogony of Ethicus, written two centuries earlier, merely qualifying it by the addition, ‘except where the headlands of sundry promontories stretch farther into the sea,’^[105] apparently referring to Caledonia, but he evidently considered the country north of the Firths of Forth and Clyde as a separate island from the rest of Britain. He applies the same epithet of ‘transmarine’ to its inhabitants and to the Scots from Ireland. He calls the regions between the walls the extreme part of the island, and he writes of its transactions as if he had no personal knowledge of them, but had received them by report from a distant land; for he says he will relate his history,^[106] ‘so far as he is able, not so much from the writings and written memorials of his native country, which either are not to be found, or if ever there were any of them have been consumed in the fires of the enemy, or been carried off by his exiled countrymen, as from foreign report, which, from the interruption of intercourse, is by no means clear.’^[107]

In order to realise thoroughly the cause of this darkness and confusion which appear to have settled upon Britain and its affairs after the departure of the Romans, we must consider its real position towards Rome as viewed from thence. During the period of the Roman dominion it resembled a distant colony exposed to the incursions of frontier tribes whom no treaties could bind and no defeats subjugate, requiring a large military force for its protection, the accounts of whose proceedings reached Rome at distant intervals, and only attracted more than a passing attention when a crisis occurred in her affairs, which must have been considered rather as a vexatious interruption in matters of nearer and more engrossing interest than a subject of general attention. When the Roman government was withdrawn, she resembled such a distant colony with all connection severed between her and the home government, abandoned to the incursions of her enemies, and left to protect and rule herself.

How completely such a change would for the time blot out a distant colony from the map of the civilised world may be readily conceived; and when she again emerged in the form of a political state, containing once more the elements of civilisation and of a common interest with the rest of the world, the intermediate period of confused and uncertain knowledge would appear almost analogous to that dark age of barbarian life which precedes the birth of infant states, and on which the dim light of tradition and the lays of a rude people engaged in internecine war alone throw an uncertain ray. So it was with Britain. Deserted almost entirely by the Continental historians, and deprived of the clue which any connection with European events would afford, we are left for the history of this interval to the uncertain guide of tradition; and although it necessarily fails in affording us the means of obtaining a connected and trustworthy history, yet by discriminating between what is tradition or fable and what may fairly be accepted as history, and by combining the indications which traditional accounts derived from different sources afford, with the scattered notices contained in writings contemporary, or nearly so, with the events, we may yet be able to present the salient features of the history of this period with some confidence in their reality, and in something like chronological order.

These sources of information, uncertain as they are, and faint as is the light which they throw upon the history of the country during this interval, yet reveal very distinctly indications that to the rule of the Romans in the island there succeeded a fierce and protracted struggle between the provincial Britons and the various barbarian tribes, to whose assaults they had been exposed for so many years, till it terminated in the settlement of the latter in the country, and the formation of four kingdoms, embracing these several races within definite limits. They tell us also something of those races, and of their character and relation to each other. The contest which succeeded the departure of the Romans was one not merely for the possession of the Roman territory, but for the succession to her dominion in the island. The competing parties consisted, on the one hand, of the provincial Britons who had just emerged from under the Roman rule; and, on the other, of those independent tribes, partly inhabitants of the island and partly piratical adventurers from other regions, who had so frequently ravaged the Roman province, and now endeavoured to snatch the prize from the provincial Britons, and from each other.

The races engaged in this struggle were four—the Britons, the Picts, the Scots, and the Saxons or Angles.^[108] The two former were indigenous, the two latter foreign settlers.

With regard to the former, so many years of Roman dominion in the island could hardly fail to have produced, in some respects, a deep and lasting effect upon the native population; but it did not leave, as might have been expected from the existence of the Roman province for so long a period, a provincial people speaking the Roman language, and preserving their laws and customs. The tendency of the Britons was to throw off the stamp of Roman provincialism with the civil government against which they had rebelled, and to relapse into their primitive Celtic habits and modes of thought. This arose partly from the character of the Roman civil rule, partly from the different effect produced by it in different parts of the country. The distance of Britain from the seat of government, its fertility, and the uncertainty of the Roman tenure of the island, caused it to be regarded less as a valuable portion of the Empire than as a distant mine from which every temporary advantage ought to be drawn at whatever cost to the natives. The Roman civil rule was harsh and oppressive; the British provinces a field for exaction, from which everything it could be made to yield was extracted and carried off without remorse. The effects, too, of the Roman rule were various. On the provincials of the fertile, accessible, and completely subjugated districts, they were more deep and lasting. To a great extent they lost their nationality and became Roman citizens. With it went also their natural courage, and either the desire or the spirit to resume an independent position, and they became enervated or effeminate. On the inhabitants of the northern and western portions of the province the effect must have been lighter and more ephemeral in its character. They were more in the position of native tribes under a foreign rule than of the civilised inhabitants of a province. They were exposed to the continual incursions of the barbaric tribes beyond the bounds of the Roman Empire; and as they had in a greater degree preserved their peculiar habits and national characteristics, the withdrawal of the Roman army and civil government was more the removal of a restraint which left them at liberty to resort to their old habits and resume their independent existence as best they might. Even upon the barbarian tribes who had remained in hostility to the Roman rule it exercised an indirect influence. It created union among them—the gradual combination of small communities into larger associations under a general name, and the moulding of a warlike barbarian people into a social organisation in advance of what they had been.

But the great legacies of Rome to Britain were the idea of monarchy,^[109] the centralisation of authority, and the municipal government, the position of the ‘civitas’ or city as the centre of local authority to the surrounding territory. In provincial Britain the local government under the civil staff of the Romans was vested in the cities with their senate or ‘curia,’ the ‘decuriones’^[110] which composed it, and the magistrates elected by them. It was to them Honorius addressed his letters, and when the Roman civilians were driven out they succeeded to their authority, each city forming the centre of a small territorial rule. Of the provincial Britons we find clear indications of a marked distinction between these two classes: the first consisting of those who considered themselves more peculiarly Romans, and bore the impress of their language and habits, among whom were also to be found the descendants of the Roman soldiers who had become naturalised prior to the termination of the Roman government in Britain, and remained in the island. There were in fact three descriptions of persons who might be termed Romans. There was, first, the Roman army, consisting to a great extent of barbarian auxiliaries, parties of whom remained stationed at the same places during the greater part of their occupation of the island. There was, secondly, the civil government, which, from the time of Constantine, if not from that of Diocletian, had been distinct from the military organisation, and had imposed upon the provinces a numerous and oppressive body of civil officials, principal and subordinate; and there were, thirdly, the descendants of those of the military who had received benefices or grants of land, or had connected themselves by marriage with the natives, and were thus naturalised among them. The Roman troops had been withdrawn by the various usurpers who assumed the purple in the island. The civil government had been expelled by the people, by whom, in common with all the provincials of the Roman Empire, it was detested and reluctantly submitted to; but the third class remained, and naturally became the leaders of those provincials who had become, as it were, Romanised. This class of the provincial Britons would be found mainly in that part of the province longest subjected and most easily accessible to Roman influence, bounded by the Humber and the Severn, and in the eastern and more level portion of the territory between the Humber and the Firths of Forth and Clyde, where the proper frontier of the province existed.

The second great class of the provincial Britons consisted of those who had been later conquered, and, occupying the wilder and more secluded regions of the north and west, retained less of the impress of the Roman provincial rule. These, on the departure of the Romans, fell back more upon a British nationality; and while the former fell an easy prey to the invader, the latter, retaining their British speech in its integrity, and possessing more of the warlike habits of a people inhabiting mountainous and pastoral districts, after the first paralysing effect of the absence of their usual protectors, the Roman troops, had passed away, took part in the struggle which ensued with vigour and animation.

Gildas, the British historian, alludes plainly enough to these two classes when he says that ‘the discomfited people, wandering in the woods, began to feel the effects of a severe famine, which compelled many of them without delay to yield themselves up to their cruel persecutors to obtain subsistence. Others of them, however, lying hid in mountains, caves, and woods, continually sallied out from thence to renew the war, and then it was for the first time they overthrew their enemies who had for so many years been living in their country.’^[111]

Such were the provincial Britons when the great contest commenced; but we are here mainly concerned with those who occupied the western districts extending from the river Derwent, which falls into the Western Sea at Workington in Cumberland, to the river Clyde on the north, forming one of four subsequent kingdoms under the name of Cumbria.

Among the barbaric tribes who likewise entered into the struggle for the prize, the first in order were the Picts. The accounts of them given by Gildas, Nennius, and Bede, vary considerably. Gildas first mentions them as taking a part in the irruption of the barbarians into the Roman province after the departure of Maximus with the Roman army, but he calls them a transmarine nation, and says they came from the north-east.^[112] He tells us that after the withdrawal of the frontier to the southern wall, which we have seen took place on the departure of Constantine in 406, they occupied the districts up to that wall as natives;^[113] and that when finally repelled by an effort of the provincial Britons, they then for the first time settled down in the extreme part of the island, where they still remained at the time he wrote his history. The natural inference from his language is that he considered that the Picts were a foreign people who first obtained a settlement in the island in the beginning of the fifth century, unless he regarded the region north of the Firths of Forth and Clyde as a separate island, and considered that it lay north-north-east from the standpoint from which he wrote.^[114] The gloss which Bede puts upon his language, that by transmarine he merely referred to their crossing the firths, seems a forced and narrow construction of his language. Nennius too viewed the Picts as a foreign people who settled in the island, and says that they first occupied the Orkney Islands, whence they laid waste many regions and seized those on the left hand or north side of Britain, where they still remained, keeping possession of a third part of Britain to his day;^[115] but then he placed their settlement as early as the fourth century before the birth of Christ.

Bede says that ‘at first this island had no other inhabitants than the Britons, but that when they, beginning at the south, had made themselves masters of the greatest part of the island, it happened that the nation of the Picts from Scythia, as is reported,^[116] putting to sea in a few long ships, were driven by the winds beyond the shores of Britain, and arrived on the northern shores of Ireland, where, finding the nation of the Scots, they desired a settlement among them, and this being refused by the Scots, they sailed over to Britain and began to inhabit the northern parts of the island.’ He adds that having no wives they applied to the Scots, who gave them on condition that when the succession came into doubt they should choose their king from the female royal race rather than from the male, a custom which he says it is well known is observed among the Picts to his day.^[117] Bede does not say at what time this settlement took place; but it is obvious that he is reporting a tradition, and that Nennius’s account is also traditionary; while Gildas does not seem to be aware that any tradition of their origin or their original seat was known to the Britons.

When we turn to the classical writers we find that under the name of the Picts they clearly understood that aggregate of tribes who, throughout the entire occupation of the provinces of Britain by the Romans, were known to them as the Barbarians who dwelt beyond the northern wall—those ancient enemies of the Romans who had so frequently harassed them in the quiet possession of Britain. From the beginning of the third century the older names by which many of the barbarian tribes beyond the frontiers of the Empire had been known to the Romans appear to have given way to new appellations, embracing a larger combination of tribes; and as in Germany the new generic names of ‘Alamanni,’ ‘Franci,’ ‘Thuringi,’ and ‘Saxones’ now appear, the constituent elements of which combinations can be identified with the tribes bearing the older names, so at the same period the name of ‘Picti’ appears as a designation of the barbaric tribes in Britain. It is first mentioned by Eumenius the panegyrist in the year 296. As the Picts seemed at first destined to carry off the prize, and, although eventually obliged to confine themselves to their ancient limits, formed the groundwork of the future kingdom of Celtic Scotland, it will be necessary, with a view to the main object before us, to trace their characteristics with somewhat more minuteness of detail.

When Agricola first penetrated beyond the Solway Firth, and extended his conquests over a hitherto unknown country as far as the Tay, his biographer records the tribes he encountered as new nations, and in his general description of the inhabitants of the island he discriminates between the tribes whom Agricola first made known to the Romans, and whom he calls inhabitants of Caledonia, and the rest of the Britons. That they were the same people who had been known to the Romans by a report not long before as ‘Caledonii Britanni’ there can be little doubt. They possessed, it is true, no diversity of language or of manners sufficient to attract the attention of the Roman historian; but still there were some distinctive features which led him to consider them as not identic with the provincial Britons, and to give that part of the island occupied by them a separate name. There was one physical mark of difference that at once attracted his observation. They were larger in body and limb, and less xanthous.

In the following century we learn more regarding these new nations. We find that in the reign of Hadrian they consisted of fourteen tribes, and extended from the districts between the Solway and the Clyde to the extreme north of Scotland. A closer examination of these tribes shows evident indications of a different degree of civilisation and of advancement in social organisation among them. In this respect they fall naturally into three groups, and they are likewise geographically divided into the same groups by three leading tribes extending entirely across the island from sea to sea. The most southern of these was the tribe of the ‘Damnonii,’ in itself representing, with the tribe of the ‘Novantæ’ in Galloway, one of these three divisions, and extending from the Firth of Forth to the great estuary of the Clyde, and from the mountains of Dumfriesshire to the river Tay. A line drawn from the head of Loch Long to the Moray Firth separates the tribe of the ‘Caledonii’ from that of the ‘Vacomagi,’ each extending parallel to the other from south-west to north-east. The entire platform of these fourteen tribes thus naturally falls into three not very unequal portions. The numbers of the tribes, however, are more unequally distributed. In the northern and more mountainous portion were no fewer than nine out of the fourteen tribes, the great tribe of the ‘Caledonii’ joining the frontier people on the south-east. In the more lowland districts, from the Moray Firth to the Firth of Forth, were only three tribes, of which the ‘Vacomagi’ extended along the north-west boundary, and the fertile plains from the Tay to Galloway were entirely possessed by one great tribe, the ‘Damnonii,’ while the ‘Novantæ’ occupied Galloway. This very plainly points to a more advanced social organisation as we proceed south, and the same fact is further indicated even more clearly by the existence of towns among some of them only.

Among the three tribes extending from the Forth to the Moray Firth we find what the geographer Ptolemy terms πόλεις or towns, but not very numerous, and placed on the frontier of each tribe, so as to show they were organised for the defence of the community. Among the tribes in the more northern portion there is no trace whatever of the existence of such towns, while in the great southern tribe of the ‘Damnonii’ there are enumerated no fewer than six, as many as are to be found in the three tribes north of the Forth; and we likewise find them placed more in the interior of the territories of the tribe, while the ‘Novantæ’ in Galloway possesses two.

Not many years after this account of the tribes, the Roman wall was constructed between the Firths of Forth and Clyde, through the heart of the territories of the ‘Damnonii,’ thus dividing the nation into two parts, one of which was included within the province and subjected to the Roman government, while the other remained beyond the boundary of Roman Britain. Of the towns enumerated by Ptolemy, three were now within the province, and the other three were situated north of the wall.

When the Roman classical writers again furnish us with any particulars of these tribes, we find that the progress of social organisation had advanced a step further, and that they were now combined into two nations—the ‘Caledonii’ and the ‘Mæatæ.’ The historian Dio expressly states that these were the two divisions of the hostile nations beyond the Roman province, and that all other names of tribes beyond the wall had merged into these two denominations, of which, he adds, the ‘Mæatæ’ were next the wall. The name of ‘Caledonii’ identifies that nation with the group of northern tribes, of which the ‘Caledonii’ were the leading tribe, while the ‘Mæatæ’ must have included those extending from the ‘Caledonii’ to the wall. The ‘Mæatæ,’ soon after they first appear under that name, were obliged to yield up a considerable portion of this territory to the Romans. The ceded district must have been that nearest the wall; and if, as we have seen, it consisted of the plains extending from the wall to the Tay, it included exactly that portion of the nation of the ‘Damnonii’ which lay on the north side of the wall, who now passed under the Roman influence, as well as the southern portion of that nation.

At the time the independent tribes of the north are thus described as consisting of two nations—the ‘Caledonii’ and the ‘Mæatæ’—it is recorded of them, as a characteristic feature, that they retained the custom of painting their bodies, by puncturing with iron the figures of animals on their skin; and when the inhabitants of these northern regions next appear on the scene after the interval of nearly a century, we find the whole aggregate of these tribes bearing the general name of ‘Picti.’ This name, afterwards so well known and so much dreaded, first appears as their designation after the fall of the insular empire of Carausius and Allectus, in whose armies they seem to have been largely enrolled. They are said at this time to have consisted of the ‘Caledones and other Picts.’ Fifty years later, when the first of those great and systematic irruptions into the province by the simultaneous action of several barbarian nations burst forth, the ‘Picti’ are more accurately described by the historian as now consisting of two nations—the ‘Dicaledonæ’ and the ‘Vecturiones;’ while the occupation of the Roman territory nearest them during the first four years, brought to their assistance, in their more extended attack upon the Roman province, a part of its population under the new designation of the ‘Attacotti.’

We thus see that prior to the extension of the Roman province under Antoninus, the people known to the Romans by report as the Caledonian Britons, and described by Tacitus as a distinct people under the designation of inhabitants of Caledonia, consisted of fourteen independent tribes; that a part of the largest of the southern tribes having been cut off from the rest by the Roman wall, the tribes remaining independent combined into two nations—the ‘Caledonii’ and ‘Mæatæ;’ that the Mæatæ having to cede a part of their territory, the remainder of the nation lose that name and appear under that of ‘Vecturiones,’ the ‘Caledonii’ or ‘Caledones’ being now termed ‘Dicaledonæ,’ inhabiting the north-western regions bounded by the Deucaledonian sea, while the combined nation bore the name of ‘Picti.’ Such seems the natural inference from the successive notices of the northern tribes by the Roman historians; and while they give no hint that they did not consider them the same people throughout, and while the identity of the northern division at all times is sufficiently manifest by the preservation of the name of Caledonians under analogous forms, the poets clearly indicate that they considered the Picts the indigenous inhabitants of Caledonia; for while they consider ‘Ierne’ or Ireland as the home of the Scots, and the ‘Orcades’ or Orkneys as the position from whence the Saxons issued on their expeditions, they assign to the Picts, as their original seat, the same ‘Thule’ which the earlier poets had applied as a poetical name for Caledonia, and the home of the Caledonian Britons.

The same twofold division of the Pictish nation existed among them till at least the eighth century, when Bede wrote his Ecclesiastical History of the English nation, for he tells us that the provinces of the northern Picts were separated by high and lofty mountains from the southern regions of that people; and that the southern Picts had their seats within that mountain range, alluding probably to the range of the so-called Grampians, which formed the south-western boundary of that division of the nation which throughout bore the name of Caledonians. This distinction, too, between the two branches of the nation must have been still further increased by the fact recorded by Bede, that the northern Picts were only converted to Christianity by the preaching of St. Columba in the year 565; while the southern Picts had long before embraced Christianity through the preaching of St. Ninian,^[118] who, he tells us, built a church at ‘Candida Casa,’ or Whithern, in Galloway, which he dedicated to St. Martin of Tours. Ailred probably repeats a genuine tradition when he says in his Life of St. Ninian that he was building this church when he heard of the death of St. Martin, which happened in the year 397, so that the southern branch of the Pictish nation was at least nominally a Christian people, while the northern Picts remained pagan for a period of upwards of a century and a half.

The Irish equivalent for the name ‘Picti’ was ‘Cruithnigh;’ and we find during this period a people under this name inhabiting a district in the north of Ireland, extending along its north-east coast from the river Newry, and from Carlingford Bay to Glenarm, and consisting of the county of Down and the south half of the county of Antrim. This district was termed ‘Uladh,’ and also ‘Dalaraidhe,’ Latinised ‘Dalaradia,’ and its inhabitants were the remains of a Pictish people believed to have once occupied the whole of Ulster.^[119] South of the Firths of Forth and Clyde we find the Picts in two different localities. Gildas tells us that after the boundary of the province they occupied the northern and extreme part of the island as settlers up to the wall, and this probably refers to the districts afterwards comprised under the general name of ‘Lodonea,’ or Lothian, in its extended sense, comprising the counties of Berwick, Roxburgh, and the Lothians. In the north-western part of this region they appear to have remained till a comparatively late period, extending from the Carron to the Pentland hills, and known by the name of the plain of Manau, or Manann, while the name of Pentland, corrupted from Petland, or Pictland, has preserved a record of their occupation.

The name of ‘Picti’ was likewise applied to the inhabitants of Galloway, comprising the modern counties of Kirkcudbright and Wigtown, till a still later period, and survived the entire disappearance of the name as applied to any other portion of the inhabitants of Scotland, even as late as the twelfth century. This district was occupied in the second century by the tribe termed by Ptolemy the ‘Novantæ,’ with their towns of Rerigonium and Lucopibia, and there is nothing to show that the same people did not occupy it throughout, and become known as the Picts of Galloway, of which ‘Candida Casa,’ or Whithern, was the chief seat, and occupied the site of the older Lucopibia.^[120]

The oldest record connected with the Picts is the Pictish Chronicle, apparently compiled in the tenth century, of which two separate editions are preserved, one of which probably emerged from Abernethy and the other from Brechin.^[121] It contains a list of kings of the Picts who are supposed to have reigned over them from their origin to the termination of their monarchy. The earlier portion of this list is of course mythic, and the reigns of the supposed kings are characterised by their extreme length; but the latter part must form the basis of their history, after the Picts became settled and assumed the form of a kingdom within definite limits. The earlier part is mainly useful for philological purposes. The last of these shadowy monarchs is Drust, son of Erp, who is said to have reigned a hundred years and fought a hundred battles, and it is added that in his nineteenth year St. Patrick went to Ireland. This places him about the time of the repeated incursions of the Picts into the Roman province. His successor Talore is said to have reigned only four years, but with the reign of his brother Nectan Morbet, to which twenty-four years are assigned, we probably have something historical. A calculation of the reigns of the subsequent kings in the list, tested by the dates furnished by the annalists from time to time, would place the commencement of this reign in the year 457, and the termination in 481. The Chronicle tells us that Nectan had been banished to Ireland by his brother, and that in consequence of a prophecy by St. Bridget that he would return to his own country and possess the kingdom in peace, he, in the third year of his reign, received Darlugdach, abbess of Kildare, and two years after founded the church of Abernethy in honour of St. Bridget; but this tale is inconsistent with the date of St. Bridget, whose death is recorded in 525. It, however, appears to connect Nectan with the territory in which Abernethy was situated.^[122]

A strange tale is related of him too in the Acts of Saint Boethius, or Buitte, of Mainister Buitte in Ulster, whose death is recorded in 521, which likewise connects him with the same part of the country. St. Buitte is said, on returning from Italy with sixty holy men and ten virgins, to have landed in the territories of the Picts, and to have found that Nectan, the king of that country, had just departed this life, on which he restores him to life, and the grateful monarch bestowed upon him the fort or camp in which the miracle had been performed that he might found a church there.^[123] If he entered the Pictish territories by the Firth of Tay, it is probable that the place formerly called Dun-Nechtan, or the fort of Nechtan, and now corrupted into Dunnichen, in Forfarshire, is the place intended, and that the name of Boethius or Buitte is preserved in the neighbouring church of Kirkbuddo, situated within the ramparts of what was a Roman camp.

Of the two next kings we know nothing but their names and the length of their reigns. We then come to two Drests or Drusts—Drest son of Gyrom, and Drest son of Wdrost—who reigned together for five years, from 523 to 528, and here again we find some legendary matter connected with one of them.

In the Liber Hymnorum, or Book of Hymns of the Ancient Church of Ireland, edited by the Rev. Dr. J. H. Todd, there is a hymn or prayer of St. Mugint, and the scholiast in the preface narrates the following tradition: ‘Mugint made this hymn in Futerna. The cause was this: Finnen of Magh Bile went to Mugint for instruction, and Rioc and Talmach, and several others with him. Drust was king of “Bretan” then, and had a daughter, viz. Drusticc was her name, and he gave her to Mugint to be taught to read.’ It is unnecessary to add the adventure which followed. Dr. Todd considers that ‘Futerna is manifestly Whiterna or Whitern, the Wh being represented by F;’by F;’^[124] and that the Drust of the legend is one of these two Drusts who reigned from 523 to 528. As Finnen’s death is recorded in 579, the date accords with the period when he may have sought instruction. O’Clery, in the Martyrology of Donegal, quotes a poem which refers to the same legend:

This Drust is therefore clearly connected with Galloway; and we thus learn that when two kings appear in the Pictish Chronicle as reigning together, one of them is probably king of the Picts of Galloway.^[126]

The Drusts are followed by two brothers of Drest son of Gyrom, a Talerg, and another Drest son of Munait, and then we find ourselves on firm historic ground when we come to Bridei son of Mailcu.^[127] He is said to have reigned thirty years, and to have been baptized in the eighth year of his reign by St. Columba. As that saint is recorded to have come from Ireland to Britain in the year 563, this places the first year of his reign in the year 556, and the termination of his reign in the year 586. His death is, however, recorded by Tighernac in the year 583. Bede terms him Bridius, son of Meilochon, a most powerful king reigning over the Picts, and says that St. Columba converted his nation to Christianity in the ninth year of his reign, having preached the word of God to the provinces of the northern Picts;^[128] and Adamnan places his fort and palace on the banks of the river Ness.^[129] The Pictish Chronicle states that Galam Cennaleph reigned one year with Bridei, and Tighernac records the death in 580 of Cendaeladh, king of the Picts.^[130] He too was probably a king of the Picts of Galloway, and traces of his name also can be found in the topography of that district.^[131]

We have now traced the history of the Picts down to the last half of the sixth century, when we find ourselves on firm ground, and leave them a Christian people, united in one kingdom under the rule of a powerful monarch.

But if the word ‘Picti’ was a term applied to the native tribes beyond the northern frontier of the Roman province, and the future kingdom of the Picts was formed from a combination of them, it is equally clear that the term ‘Scoti’ first appears as an appellation of the inhabitants of Ireland. Gildas tells us that the Scots assailed the province from the north-west,^[132] which, from his standpoint, indicates Ulster as the region whence this band of Scots had emerged, and when he describes the Picts as settling down in the extreme part of the island, where they still remained to his day, he adds, that the shameless Irish robbers, as he terms the Scots, returned home, at no distant date to reappear.^[133] By this expression he appears to indicate that there was a subsequent settlement of them in the island, but he makes no further allusion to it.

Nennius, after giving an account of the traditionary settlement of the Scots from Spain in Ireland, adds a notice of their later settlements in Britain; but the text of this part of his work is unfortunately corrupt, and seems to have been so from an early period, as the Irish translation of it in the eleventh century contains obvious marks of its being an attempt to explain what was obscure to the translator. He appears to indicate settlements in North and South Wales, and in Dalrieta.^[134]

Bede’s account is more consistent. He says that in course of time, Britain, after the Britons and Picts, received a third nation, that of the Scots, into that part of the country occupied by the Picts who came from Ireland under their leader Reuda, and either by friendly arrangement or by the sword acquired those seats among the Picts which they still possess, and that from their leader Reuda they were termed ‘Dalreudini.’ He adds, that ‘Hibernia’ or Ireland was the native country of these Scots, and that their new settlement was on the north side of that arm of the sea which formerly divided the Britons from the Picts, and where the Britons still have their chief fastness, the city called ‘Alcluith.’^[135] There is no doubt that Alcluith is the rock in the Clyde on which Dumbarton Castle is situated; the Firth of Clyde, the arm of the sea in question; and that Bede correctly describes the position of the Scottish settlement in his own day, as well as its name of Dalriada, from which he deduces his Reuda as their ‘Eponymus.’

The notices of the Scots by the Roman writers are quite in harmony with these traditionary accounts. They make their first appearance in 360, when they joined the Picts and the Saxons in assailing the Roman province. It is true that an expression of the Roman historian may be held to imply that they had first appeared on the scene seventeen years earlier, in the year 343; but that part of Ammianus’s work is lost, and we have no distinct account of what took place when Constans visited Britain in that year. When Theodosius drove back the invading tribes after their eight years’ occupation of the province, we are clearly told by Claudian that the Scots were driven back to ‘Ierne’ or Ireland; and throughout all the subsequent incursions in which the Scots took part, he implies that it was from thence they were made.

The oldest document connected with the history of their settlement in Britain will be found in the Synchronisms of Flann Mainistrech, compiled about the reign of Malcolm the Second, in the early part of the eleventh century. We are there told that twenty years after the battle of Ocha, the children of Erc passed over into ‘Alban’ or Scotland.^[136] The battle of Ocha is a celebrated era in Irish chronological history, and was fought in Ireland in the year 478, which places this Irish colony in the year 498; and Tighernac the annalist, who died in 1088, is quite in accordance with this when, under the year 501, he has ‘Fergus Mor, son of Erc, held a part of Britain with the tribe of Dalriada, and died there.’^[137] A district forming the north-east corner of Ireland, and comprising the north half of the county of Antrim, was called Dalriada. It appears to have been one of the earliest settlements of the Scots among the Picts of Ulster, and to have derived its name from its supposed founder Cairbre, surnamed ‘Righfhada’ or Riada. It lay exactly opposite the peninsula of Kintyre, from whence it was separated by a part of the Irish Channel of no greater breadth than about fourteen miles; and from this Irish district the colony of Scots, which was already Christian,^[138] passed over and settled in Kintyre, and in the island of Isla. The earlier settlements indicated by the traditionary accounts of Nennius and Bede no doubt refer to the incursions of the Scots in the fourth century, and their temporary occupation of Britain during eight years.^[139] The circumstances which enabled a small body of Scots to effect this settlement among the Picts cannot now be ascertained, and they appear to have extended themselves over a considerable portion of territory during the first sixty years of their kingdom, without meeting with much difficulty, during the reigns of three of their petty kings—Domangart, son of Fergus, and his two sons, Comgall and Gabran—till Brude, son of Mailchu, termed by Bede a powerful monarch, became king of the Picts, when a few years after he commenced his reign he attacked the Dalriads and drove them back to their original seat in Kintyre, slaying their king Gabran.^[140] He was succeeded by Conall, the son of Comgall, who appears to have remained with diminished territories in Kintyre; and it was during this period, when the Scottish possessions were reduced to that part of Argyllshire which extends from the Mull of Kintyre to Loch Crinan, the whole of which was originally comprehended under the name of Kintyre, that St. Columba came over from Ireland on his mission to convert the Picts—a mission prompted possibly by the hazardous position in which the small Christian colony of the Scots was placed in close contact with the still pagan nation of the northern Picts under their powerful monarch Brude. Something like this seems to be expressed in that remarkable poem of the eleventh century, called the Prophecy of St. Berchan, where it is said of Columba—