Once every year the Gallic Druids were accustomed to meet in solemn convention at a spot within the confines of the Carnutes, which was looked upon as the centre of Gaul, and had there been such a magistrate as an annual Vergobreith chosen to rule over the whole Gallic race, it is probable that he would have been inaugurated in this assembly in the same manner as the Æduan Druids consecrated the provincial Vergobreith, who ruled for his allotted year over that confederacy. A similar convention is traceable in Ireland under the name of the Feas Temora, or “Feast of Tara,” a place chosen probably for its centrical situation; and he who “held the feast” was the acknowledged Ardrigh of the whole nation, the “tribes of Tara” originally holding their lands on condition of quartering the king and his followers on the occasion of the great festival. This convention, undoubtedly in its origin a Druidical meeting like the solemn assembly within the borders of the Carnutes, was still existing in Ireland in historical times, dying out towards the close of the seventh century; though the Irish annalists long continued to give the title of “king of Tara” to the Ardrigh, who claimed the supreme authority over the whole Irish people.
The invariable Celtic principle of “division” is plainly traceable amongst the population of Northern Britain in their separation from a very early period into Caledones and Mæatæ, Dicaledones and Vecturiones, and latterly into Northern and Southern Picts. Towards the middle of the third century, when Dion wrote, the form of their government was still “democratic;” in other words, the various states or confederacies into which the Pictish people were divided, like the early Gauls and Southern Britons, were still ignorant of the principle of one elective or hereditary ruler.[31] The earliest bond of union may probably be traced to the time when they united under one common leader to resist or assail the Roman legionaries; and out of the Dux or Toshach elected for the occasion, like Galgacus, and exercising a paramount though temporary authority, arose the Ardrigh or supreme king, after some popular or ambitious chieftain had prolonged his power by successful wars, or procured his election to this prominent station for life. The nature of the sovereignty thus established, which was fully recognised in the days of Columba, resembled the dominion of the Ardrigh amongst the kindred Gael of Ireland, or of the Unben amongst the earlier Cymri, differing in a remarkable manner from the royal authority as it existed amongst the Welsh of a later age. Breith, or Law, was at the root of the later Welsh system. Privilege was Breint, the noble or man of privilege amongst the Southern Welsh, Breyr; the king, Breen-hyn—the senior Brehon or Lawgiver, the hereditary instead of the elective Vergobreith. In the laws of Howel Dha, the representative of the Druid, or of the noble enrolled amongst the Druids, the Cynghellwr who “divided with the Brenin” evidently took precedence of the Maer, the representative of the military noble; whilst the Rhy, and Twysawg, or Rex and Dux (though met with in the Welsh dictionaries), are never found in these laws. With the Gael, however, it was the Righ and the Toshach who were most prominent; the Brehon had no such intimate connection with the throne or with the privileged classes, and in the charter of king Robert Bruce to the Thane of Cawdor, it was the Judex who held his lands under the Thane or Toshach. The Gaelic Ardrigh represented the permanent Toshach, not the Vergobreith, the permanent holder of the office of Vercingetorix, the head of a wide confederacy bound together less by the ties of blood, or by an authority confirmed by the sacerdotal order, than by the actual power of the supreme ruler confirmed by the exaction of hostages.[32]
The different tribes enumerated by Ptolemy, and subsequently known as the Northern and Southern Picts, appear at some early period to have coalesced into seven lesser confederacies, answering to the “Pictish Provinces” of Beda. Allusion is evidently made to these principalities in the old verses ascribed by tradition to Columba, enumerating the seven sons of Cruithne—characters of the same description as the sons of Hellen—“Cait, Ce, Ciric of the hundred clans, Fiv, Fidach, Fodla, Fortreim.” In Fiv “the forest,” and in Cait, there is little difficulty in recognising “the ancient kingdom of Fife,” and a province of which the north-eastern extremity still retains the name of Caithness, the point or promontory of Caith. Meaningless alike in Gaelic and in Welsh, Caith is probably the Celtic form of Ketje, “the end” or “extremity” in Lappish, a relic of a time when an Ugrian population regarded this province as their northern limit. The recollection of Fortreim was long preserved in the Deanery of Fortrev or Fotheriff, lying along the banks of the Forth, from which river the name was most probably derived. Fodla or Fotla, a word sometimes used amongst the Irish Gael as synonymous with Ireland, or their native home, survives in Athfodla or Atholl; whilst the appellation of Fidach, or “the woody” may be safely conjectured to have belonged to that province which was once known to the Romans under the ancient British epithet of Celydon, or “the forest district.” No clue remains to identify Ce and Ciric, which may have answered to the provinces upon the coast included between the Grampian range and the eastern and northern seas. Nothing whatever is known of these seven provinces beyond the bare fact of their existence, though long after they had been broken up into earldoms, or united by conquest to the possessions of the crown, the tradition of this ancient sevenfold division of the Pictish kingdom, and of the rights of the provincial princes in electing a paramount Ardrigh, appears to have been revived amongst a party of the Scottish nobles for the purpose of adding to their overgrown power at the expense of their youthful king.[33]
The Pictish king was elective, unless he formed an exception to the universal rule prevailing amongst the Teutonic as well as the Celtic tribes in early times. The theory of election, indeed, pervaded all the institutions of the Gaelic people, who seem to have nominally chosen their heads of houses and chiefs of clans, as well as their Flaiths, Oirrighs, and Ardrigh, or their princes, provincial kings, and the supreme ruler of the whole nation. Brother succeeded to brother upon the throne, and the law of primogeniture, as amongst the early Germans, was only partially recognised, each “full-born” son having a claim upon the inheritance of his father, though the universal custom of “fosterage” led to the same results as Cambrensis deplored amongst his countrymen in Wales. Each child was placed in the family of a dependant, who regarded such a charge as a mark of the highest confidence and honour; and even in the seventeenth century, men of rank and station in the Scottish Highlands still esteemed it a privilege to educate in this manner one of the children of the head of their lineage. The child thus adopted shared in the property of his foster-father on the same footing as his foster-brethren, who profited in return from the protection and support of their more illustrious connection, and thus was formed a tie which generally proved a far surer bond of union than even the actual existence of blood relationship. The “fosterers” of the royal race must have invariably been chosen from amongst the greater nobles, each of whom, from mingled motives of affection and self-interest, was ever too ready to support the claims of his own foster-son, or Dalt, upon the supreme power; and the continual contests about the succession to the throne, which arose in this age in every country in Western Europe, are traceable less to the inveteracy of fraternal hatred than to the jealous rivalry of interested partizans, which must have been engendered by such a system of fosterage. Gradually, however, except in cases of incapacity, or where one of the junior members of the family far exceeded the rest in prowess or popularity, the precedency of the eldest-born grew into the rule, the contrary course becoming the exception.[34]
Upon the accession of a new monarch, he ascended the Sacred Stone, preserved inviolate for such occasions, and was inaugurated in the presence of the clergy and the laity by the principal bishop of the nation. Originally it is probable that the Druids were the necessary assistants on such occasions, their prerogatives passing to the clergy; for Columba is said by his biographer, Adamnan, to have “ordained” Aidan king of the Dalriads, an expression which cannot mean that Aidan’s title to the royal dignity was based upon the authority of the Abbot of Iona, but rather that the sanction of the sacerdotal order, which appears to have been considered indispensable to all political authority amongst the Celtic people from time immemorial, had been transferred upon the fall of the old religion, from the Druidical to the Christian priesthood.[35] Close to the Ardrigh, with his right foot planted on the same stone of honour, stood the Righdomna or Tanist, the heir-apparent of the monarchy, who seems to have been nominated on the same occasion in pursuance of the true Celtic principle of “a divided authority,” the office being immediately filled up, in case of the premature death of the Tanist during the lifetime of the reigning sovereign—a fatality of very frequent occurrence—the same rule being as applicable to the chieftain of the smallest territory as to the chosen leader of the nation. The power of the Ardrigh over the provincial kings must have depended upon his ability to enforce it, and to exact the hostages which were invariably necessary to secure the obedience of the subordinate princes. Can and Cuairt, or tribute and visitation, were amongst his rightful dues; in other words, in addition to the payment of a stipulated tribute, the Oirrighs were bound to entertain the Ardrigh and his followers in his annual progresses for a certain stated period in every year; a burdensome system of free-quarters by no means peculiar to the Celtic people, which could be exacted by every petty chieftain from the occupants of all the territory over which his influence extended.[36] The authority of the early Pictish kings over the various provinces of the confederacy was probably identical with that of the Irish Ardrigh over the subordinate principalities of Leth Cuin and Leth Mogh, and may be compared to the dominion exercised by Kent, Wessex, or Mercia, over the remaining South Humbrian kingdoms, at a time when either state was liable to exchange the situation of a ruling power for a subordinate and comparatively dependent position.[37]
After the union of the two branches of the Pictish nation under one elective sovereign, the next step in the progress of their amalgamation was to confirm the preponderance of one state, and thus render the elective monarchy hereditary in one family. In the attempts to accomplish this object, which were made by the elder Angus and his successors, the ancient sevenfold division of the nation appears to have been broken up and destroyed, and the real conquest of the Pictish people to have been effected. The tradition of a conquest is far too strong to allow it to be looked upon as a mere fable, though the total silence of all the early authorities, and the relative position of the Picts and the Dalriads render it utterly impossible that the insignificant tribe of Kintyre, occupying only a very small portion of the modern county of Argyle, could have conquered and exterminated the whole remaining population of North Britain beyond the Forth and Clyde. A very slight acquaintance, however, with early history, where it borders on the legendary and traditionary periods, will confirm the truth of the remark, that events which may have really happened are frequently misplaced and transferred to a wrong epoch, very often owing their misplacement to a wish to build up the fame of some favourite hero, by attributing to him the merit of every important action of several different periods. Scottish history abounds with instances of such misplacement, and the Scottish conquest is of the number; but by keeping strictly to the scanty records left by the annalists who lived nearest to the period in question, it will be found that the reign of the elder Angus offers the closest resemblance to an era of victory and conquest. His annexation of Atholl and the Lennox, of Lorn, and perhaps also of Kintyre, must have extended his authority to the western coast of Argyle, whilst his successive victories over three kings of the Picts appear to have enlarged his frontiers in the opposite direction, by establishing his predominance over the neighbouring district of Fife.[38] The modern shires of Perth, Fife, Stirling, and Dumbarton, with the greater part of the county of Argyle, may therefore be said to have formed the actual Scottish kingdom to which Kenneth succeeded, conquered originally by the elder Angus, and subsequently consolidated by his successors Constantine and the younger Angus, the union of the three provinces, of Fife, Atholl, and Fortreim under one family, paving the way for the permanent supremacy of the princes of the ruling race over the remaining provincial kings; and as Alpin, the father of Kenneth, was in later days confounded with the opponent of the elder Angus, so the triumphs of the latter monarch were gradually transferred to the earliest prince of the MacAlpin dynasty after the numerous and varied tribes who united in acknowledging the supremacy of Kenneth’s successors had identified their own origin with the Dalriad ancestry of their line of kings.
The Line of Kintyre:—
| Kenneth the First | 843–859. |
| Donald the First | 859–863. |
Never were the qualities more needed which earned for the first Kenneth the title of “the Hardy,” than during the sixteen years of his turbulent reign; for his kingdom was exposed to hostilities on every side. The Britons of Strath Clyde burnt Dunblane; the Danes carried their ravages to Dunkeld in Atholl, and to Cluny in Stormont, and if Ragnar Lodbroc is not the mere creation of some northern scald, it was probably under the leadership of that renowned sea-king that they destroyed the monastery of the Pictish Constantine. The Scottish king proved equal to the occasion, and six times leading his followers across the “Scots-water,” he repulsed the Britons, harried the Lothians, burnt Dunbar, and seized upon Melrose, stifling any doubts about his claim to the throne in the plunder of the fertile lowlands of “Saxony.”[39]
Iona, during the vicissitudes of this stormy era, had been far too much exposed to escape the fury of the northern pirates, and the revered asylum of Columba’s brotherhood, participating in the misfortunes of Lindisfarne, was deserted at an early period under the repeated attacks of the Pagan foe, neither island ever recovering the importance that had once attached to their hallowed shores. The destruction of Dunkeld, which had been destined by its founder to replace both Iona and Abernethy, gave occasion to the solitary peaceful action attributed to the Scottish sovereign, who, collecting the relics of Columba from the localities to which they had been borne for security, enshrined them in a new church at Dunkeld,A. D. 849. rebuilding the monastery on the same spot as had been chosen for the original foundation. An alliance with the Britons of Strath Clyde, whose prince, Cu, received the hand of his daughter in marriage, completes the record of Kenneth’s actions; and ten years after the restoration of Dunkeld he died in his capital A. D. 859. of Dunfothir or Forteviot, the victim of a painful and lingering disease.[40]