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During the period covered in this chapter, Scotland was made up of four separate groups: the Angles, Britons, Picts and Gaels (or Scoti). Each of these groups spoke its own language. The fifth language? Latin, the language of the Church of Rome.
Angles
The Angles, later the Anglo-Saxons, originally settled on the east coast of what we know today as Northumberland and Yorkshire. Their kingdom was known as Bernicia. At the begi
The Angles spoke a Germanic language. They originally were pagans, but they converted to Christianity in 629, mainly through the efforts of St Aidan of Iona, who founded Lindisfarne.
Britons
By the sixth century, the Britons comprised a series of linked northern kingdoms and lordships covering the northeast of England, the Lothians and Borders of Scotland in the east and Strathclyde in the west. The two main kingdoms were:
The kingdom of Gododdin
(derived from the Latin
Votadini
, the people of Lothian) was centred on Edinburgh (known then as Din Eidyn).
The kingdom of Alt Clut
was centred on Falkirk and Stirling. The fortress on Dumbarton Rock was the stronghold of this kingdom for more than two centuries, until the Vikings destroyed it after a four-month siege in 870.
It was a world of warrior aristocracies motivated by loyalty to the king through the distribution of rewards. Perhaps because of the conquest of this part of Scotland by the Romans, it was also a Christian world: warriors gave alms to the Church before going off to battle, performed penance and were baptised.
In 600, in response to the aggressive bid for territory by the pagan Angles, the king of Gododdin, with 300 men, attacked the Angles’ stronghold at Catraeth (perhaps Catterick, North Yorkshire). The battle ended disastrously for the Britons and was memorialised in Aneirin’s poem ‘Y Gododdin’. The Venerable Bede claimed that the Angles had been sent by God as a scourge to the Britons because they had failed to live up to their Christian ideals.
Defeat at Catraeth effectively drove the Britons out of the east coast of Scotland and led to the disappearance of the kingdom of Gododdin. By the 670s, the Bernicians had captured all the territory of the northern Britons, including the religious centre of Whithorn. From this point forward, the Britons were confined to their stronghold in Strathclyde.
Picts
The name Picts means ‘painted people’. The origins of this group are obscure, but they seem to have been a fusion of some of the original Celtic tribes who settled in northeastern Scotland. Picts were closely related to Britons in culture and language, but differences were also evident.
Paganism, particularly among the northern Picts, survived long after the Britons had accepted Christianity. The Picts also accepted
primogeniture
(eldest son inherits), but in cases of dispute, they used the matrilineal pedigree. Although Pict women legally married, they were allowed other sexual partners as well – talk about having your cake and eating it too!
Artistically, the Picts used different symbols from the Britons to decorate their monuments, such as depictions of broken spears, jewellery and animal forms. None of these symbols is entirely understood today.
Archaeological records show that Pictish society hardly differed either culturally or economically from other Gaelic and British societies, and the same applied to the Anglo-Saxons. Indeed, the south Irish poets portrayed their Pictish counterparts as very much like themselves. Although their language didn’t survive, we think they spoke some variant of the Celtic tongue of their British neighbours.
The Picts lived in
wheelhouses,
circular buildings divided into ten or so dwellings by stone piers, like the one found at Jarlshof in Shetland. They were farmers who worked their fields systematically, used the quern stone to grind corn, and herded cattle and sheep.
Picts could be found in numbers from Skye to Fife, in the Northern Isles, in the Moray Firth, in Aberdeenshire and in lands either side of the Firth of Tay. By the sixth century, all northern tribes had become known as Picts, with the exception of the Gaels in Argyllshire. The kingdom of the Picts was known as Fortriu.
The Picts were excellent seamen and, as early as the third century, possessed a navy large enough to harass the Romans south of Hadrian’s Wall. According to one contemporary source, the
A
in 729 no fewer than 150 Pictish ships were wrecked off a headland called Ross Cuissini. The boats weren’t very big, comprising only ten benches with 20 oars (as opposed to the Norse longship of 60 oars).
Politically, the Picts were probably paying tribute to Northumbria, the most powerful of the northern kingdoms, until the reign of King Bridei, who in 685 defeated the Angles or Anglians at the Battle of Dun Nechtain (Nechtansmere), which some historians see as one of the most decisive battles in Scottish history.
Bridei’s cousin, King Ecgfrith, was killed in battle, along with the greater part of his army. According to the
A
The battle of Dún Nechtain was fought on Saturday, May 20th, and Egfrid son of Oswy, king of the Saxons, who had completed the 15th year of his reign, was slain therein with a great body of his soldiers… .
Bridei had halted the northward expansion of the Northumbrians, although they continued to dominate much of southern Scotland. From that point onward, Pictavia became the dominant power north of the River Forth and totally independent of Northumbria.
Pictish dominance was evident from the few battles that took place between the separate Scottish kingdoms. In 558, the Pictish king, Brude, defeated the Gaels and their king, Gabran, in battle. Nearly two centuries later, Nechtan’s successor, Ungus, occupied Dunadd, the main centre of the Gaels, in the 730s. The Picts may have bossed ancient Scotland, but their dominance was not set to last (see Chapter 4).
Gaels
The Gaels or Goidels are speakers of the Gaelic (or Goidelic) languages. Their origins are in Ireland, and it seems that they made their appearance in Scotland as settlers around 500. Fergus Mor, son of Eric, moved the seat of his kingdom of Dál Riata from his palace in Country Antrim to Dunadd (‘fort on the River Add’), near Lochgilphead, Argyllshire. The first settlement only consisted of 150 of Mor’s followers, but the numbers quickly grew – so much so that in a fairly short time they were able to colonise the whole of Argyll and the Western Isles.
From before the fourth century, the Gaels were known to the Romans as the Scoti, although the Gaels did not refer to themselves this way. The term
Scoti
had co
The Gaels were, like their neighbours, a warrior society. Their power was drawn from the sea and the land. In Gaeldom, every 20th house was obliged to provide two seven-benched boats. The problem with the Gaels was that their warrior caste wasn’t really up to the job! They were no match for the Picts, and when they tried to expand the kingdom in 603 into England, the Gaels were defeated by Æthelfrith at Degsastan.
Under their king, Domnall Brecc, the Gaels fought a number of unsuccessful battles in Ulster; the best documented battle was Mag Rathin in 637. To heap insult upon insult, Owen, king of Alt Clut, killed Domnall in battle in 642 at Strathcarron, Stirlingshire. The Gaels’ attempt to burst out of the western Highlands had come to nothing.
Given their weakness in battle, it’s strange that the Gaels and their language became dominant after 750, while the Picts and their culture and language disappeared (see Chapter 4). But history is full of odd and unpredictable happenings, which is why we love it so much!
Although the Gaels were a militaristic society, by the begi