In 635, Oswald, King of Northumbria, routed a British Strathclyde army, largely shattering this kingdom of the older race; it was as much as the Welsh could do to hold the country west of the Severn.
In this seventh century, Devon and the whole of Somersetshire became English. Oswald was now Bretwalda, and Northumbria, in the struggles for supremacy of the Saxon kingdoms, was for a generation the foremost power. It also became Christian, but more from the labours of Scottish missionaries from Iona, than from the successors of Augustine.
In early life, Oswald, during an exile amongst the Scots, had visited Iona, and there became acquainted with Christianity. On his return he founded a monastery on Lindisfarne, thence called Holy Isle; a Scottish Bishop, Aidan, he placed at its head; a succeeding Bishop, Cuthbert, was the most famous of the saints of Northern England. And the Christianity which came to Scotland from Ireland through Columba, himself a Dalriadan Scot, differed in many ways from that which had come from Rome. Not only did they differ in ritual, in dates of festivals, and in the shape of the monkish tonsure, but in what was of more political importance—ecclesiastical discipline and organization. The Church of Augustine implied dioceses, bishops in gradation of rank and authority, culminating in the Bishop of Rome as the head of the Church. The Church of Columba was a network of monasteries, a missionary church full of the zeal of conversion, but wanting in the power of organization. And thus there was conflict between the two churches, and this conflict was an important factor in the political history of the times. Ultimately the policy of Rome prevailed. The country was divided into dioceses, the loose system of the mission-station sending out priests to preach and baptize as their enthusiasm led them, gave place to the parish system with its regular incumbency, and settled order.
In the beginning of the ninth century the strife for headship over the others, which had been long waged by the kings of the stronger kingdoms, was terminated by the Northumbrian Thanes owning Egbert, King of Wessex, as their over-lord. Egbert defeated the Britons in Cornwall, brought Mercia under his rule, and united all the territories south of the Tweed. The Kings of Wessex were henceforth, so far as Anglo-Saxon rivals were concerned, Kings of England.
The Rise of the Scottish Nation.
In the second century, Ptolemy, the Egyptian astronomer, composed the first geography of the world, illustrated by maps. He would probably get his information about Britain—which was still called Albion—from Roman officers. What is now England, is shown with fair accuracy; but north of the Wear and the Solway it is difficult to identify names, or even the prominent features of the country; and the configuration of the land stretches east and west, instead of north and south.
The Celts were not indigenous to Britain. It is hardly possible to trace in any—in the very earliest peoples, of whom history or archæology can speak—the first occupants of any one spot on the earth. Science is ever pushing back, and still farther back, the era of man’s first appearance as fully developed man upon the globe. And in his families, his tribes, and his nations, man has ever been a migrant. Impelled by the necessities of life, or by his love of adventure or of conquest, he has changed his hunting and grazing grounds, made tracks through forests, sought 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.