Bygone Scotland: Historical and Social. David Maxwell
out passes between mountains; and the great, all-encompassing sea has ever been a fascination; the sound of its waves a siren-song inciting him to make them a pathway to new lands beyond his horizon. Before the Celtic Britons dwelt in this island in the northern seas, which they have helped to a great name, there were tribes here who had not yet learned the uses of the metals, whose spear-heads and arrow-tips were flints, their axes and hammers of stone. But the Celts were of that great Aryan race, tribes of which, spreading westwards over Europe, had carried with them so much of the older civilization of Persia, that they never degenerated into savagedom. The Britons were probably in pre-Roman times the only distinctive people upon the island.
How came the Celts to Britain? Probably colonies from Old Gaul first took possession of the portions of Britain nearer to their own country; and gradually spreading northwards, came in time to be scattered over what is now England and Wales, and the Lowlands of Scotland. Ireland being in sight of Britain from both Wigton and Cantyre, adventurers would cross the North Channel, and become the founders of the Irish nation.
The Picts—a Latin name for the first northern tribes whom the Romans distinguished from the Britons—called themselves Cruithne. Their earliest settlements in and near Britain appear to have been in the Orkneys, the north-east of Ireland, and the north of Scotland. They must then have made considerable advancement in the art of navigation. At the time of the Roman invasion, the southern Britons called the dwellers in the northern part of the island Cavill daoin, or “people of the woods,”—and thus the Romans named the district Caledonia. It has been surmised that the Picts of ancient Caledonia were a colony of Celtic-Germans; for such offshoots from the parent race occupied portions of central Europe. There was the same element of Druidism; but the Druids in Caledonia declined in influence and authority at an earlier date than did their brethren in Wales and South Britain. The bards took their place in preserving and handing down—orally and in verse—the traditions of their tribes—the heroism and virtues, the loves and adventures, of their ancestors. It may be noted that whilst in this early poetry the spirits of the dead are frequently introduced, and the powers of nature—sun, moon, and stars, the wind, the thunder, and the sea—are personified, there is no mythology—no deities are called in to aid the heroes in battling with their foes.
By the end of the Roman occupation, the Caledonian Picts had spread down east and central Scotland as far as Fife. And there are Pictish traces in Galloway on the west coast; probably a migration from Ireland. After the Romans left, the Picts, in their southern raids, so often crossed and made use of Hadrian’s wall, that the Romanized-Britons came to call it the Pictish wall. Their language was a dialect of Celtic, afterwards coalescing with, or being absorbed in, the Gaelic of the Scots, and which came to be the common tongue in the Highlands and western isles; but it was never a spoken tongue in the Scottish Lowlands.
The Scots are first found historically in Ireland; and they were there in such numbers and influence, that one of the names of Ireland from the sixth to the twelfth century was Scotia. Irish traditions represent the Scotti as “Milesians from Spain;” Milesia was said to be the name of the leader of the colonizing expedition. But their Celtic name of Gael sounds akin to Gaul. Their history in Ireland forms an important factor in the annals of that country. Those of the Irish people who considered themselves the descendants of the earlier colonists of the island never came heartily to recognise as fellow-countrymen—although these had been for many generations natives of the land—the descendants of those who settled at a later date. On the other hand—and similarly keeping up old race hatreds and lines of demarcation—the descendants of the later settlers looked upon themselves as a superior race, and never heartily called themselves Irishmen. This restricted and mock patriotism, aggravated by religious differences, has almost made of the Irish people two nations.
The Scotti must have made considerable settlements in North Britain in the second or third century, or they would not have been in a position to join the Picts in attacks upon the Roman province in the fourth century. When we come to enquire who were the peoples associated with the Christian missionary Columba in the latter half of the sixth century, we find that the districts bordering the east coast down to the Firth of Forth, and the central Highlands, with the chief fort at Inverness, were peopled by Picts; and that Scots were in Argyle and the Isles as far north as Iona. Their settlement around the shores of Loch Linnhe—the arm of the sea at the entrance to which Oban now stands—became in time a little kingdom called Dalriada, which gradually shook off the over-lordship of the Scotic kings in Ireland, and maintained itself against the Picts on its northern and eastern borders. A British king ruled in Strathclyde, which included the south-west of Scotland up to the Clyde; and, bordering on Strathclyde, Anglo-Saxon Northumbria included the east of Scotland up to the Forth. Up to this time the Celts in North Britain had left no written history behind them; indicating that they were less civilized than their Welsh and Irish kin. It is in the annals of Beda and other Anglo-Saxon writers that we find anything like trustworthy history after the departure of the Romans. The Romanized Britons got Christianity from their rulers, but subjection to the Bishop of Rome was not transmitted with the faith. The British bishops, at their meeting under St. Augustine’s oak, declined to submit to the missionary from Rome.
It is usually said that Scotland gave Patrick to Ireland. It was a strange kind of giving. Shortly after the Roman exodus, amongst a number of Britons taken captive by a Scotti-Irish raid on the banks of the Clyde, was a young lad of sixteen, who was sent as a slave to tend sheep and cattle in Antrim. The people round him were idolators; but in the solitude of the pastures he nursed the Christian faith of his childhood, and burned with the zeal of a young apostle for the conversion of the land. For ten years he remained in captivity, then he made his escape, and after many wanderings, reached his old home. Ordained a priest, and in time a bishop, he set manfully to realize in Ireland the dream of his youth, and he had abundant success. He founded churches, seminaries, and monasteries; the new faith spread like wildfire over the land.
And a century later, in 563, thirty-three years before the Roman mission of Augustine, Ireland sent over Columba to Britain. He, with twelve companion monks, founded on the little isle of Iona a monastery, which became the centre of Christianity in North Britain. The Scotti who had settled in the neighbouring islands, and on the nearest mainland, were already Christians. But Columba visited and converted the Pictish King Bruda, and founded a number of churches and monasteries. Than Iona there is no spot of greater historical interest in the United Kingdom; but none of the ecclesiastical ruins found there date from Columba. The first buildings were of wood, but the original foundations in Skye and Tiree were his work. Columba was also a warrior, taking a strong part in several campaigns in Ireland, as a liegeman of the Scotic King. The disciples of Columba were called Culdees, meaning, from their monastic life, “sequestered persons.” The Pictish bard Ossian is said, when blind and in old age, to have met and conversed with one of these Culdees. After ten years of prosperous rule in Iona, Columba contributed to start into greater unity and more vigorous life the Scotic settlement of Dalriada. He consecrated a young chieftain, Aedhan, as king; and Aedhan drove the Bernicians from the debatable land south of the head-waters of the Forth, and formed a league of Scots and Strathclyde Britons against Northumbria itself. But the league was, in 603, defeated by the Northumbrian King Ethelfrith in a great battle. The Scots were thrown back into their Highland fastnesses, and Beda says, writing a hundred years later, “From that day to this no Scot King has dared to come into battle with the English folk.” Ethelfrith, by another victory over the Welsh at Chester, in 611, and further successes up to Carlisle, divided by a great gap the Kingdom of Strathclyde from North Wales, and it became tributary to Northumbria. On the decline of Northumbria, in the eighth century, Strathclyde re-asserted its independence; and, in a restricted sense, its extent, more nearly answered to its name, “The Valley of the Clyde.” With Galloway, it continued under its own rulers, until, in the tenth century, it was connected with the Kingdom of Scone by the election to its throne—if it could afford a throne—of Donald, brother of Constantine II., King of Scots.
The Picts whom Columba converted appear to have been then consolidated under one monarch, Brude; his rule was from Inverness to Iona on the west; on the north to the Orkneys—probably including Aberdeen; its southern boundary is undefined. Of succeeding kings to Brude, there is a list of names; but little is known of the men themselves until, in 731, we come to Angus Mac-Fergus. In reprisal