[CHAPTER II.]
Early Inhabitants—Roman Writers—Aristotle—Tacitus—Dion Cassius—Caledonians and Mæatæ—Eumenius—Picts—Dicaledones and Vecturiones—Claudian—Inferences—Ecclesiastical Chroniclers—Their value—Gildas—Adamnan—Northern and Southern Picts—Columba’s “Interpreter”—Bede’s Account of Picts—Pictish Language—Peanfahel—Northern and Southern Picts—Welsh Triads—Irish Annals—Evidence from Language—Cymric and Gaelic Theories—Inver and Aber—Innes’s Theory—Conclusion.
The preceding chapter has been occupied almost entirely with an account of the transactions of the Romans in the north of Scotland, and it is now our duty to go back and narrate what is known of the internal history of the Highlands during the time of the Romans. In doing so we are brought face to face with certain much agitated questions which have for centuries engaged the attention of antiquaries, and in the discussion of which many bulky tomes have been written and incredible acrimony displayed. To enter with anything like minuteness into this discussion would occupy more space than can be devoted to the entire history, and, moreover, would be out of place in a popular work like the present, and distasteful to most of its readers. The following are some of the much-discussed questions referred to:—Who were the original inhabitants of Caledonia? To what race did they belong—were they Gothic or Celtic? and if Celtic, were they Cymric or Gaelic? When did they enter Scotland, and whence did they come—from the opposite continent, or from the south of Britain? Was the whole of Scotland, in the time of Agricola, occupied by one people, or by a mixed race, or by various races? Were the Picts and Caledonians the same people? What is the meaning and origin of Pict, and was Caledonia a native appellation? What were the localities of the Northern and Southern Picts? Who were the Scots? What was the nature of the union of the Scots and Picts under Kenneth Macalpin?
The notices of the early inhabitants of the Highlands in the contemporary Roman historians are so few, the information given so meagre and indefinite, and the ecclesiastical historians of a later time are so full of miracle, myth, and hearsay, and so little to be depended on, that it appears to us almost impossible, with the materials at present within the historian’s reach, to arrive at anything like a satisfactory answer to the above questions. The impression left after reading much that has been written on various sides, is one of dissatisfaction and bewilderment,—dissatisfaction with the far-fetched and irrelevant arguments frequently adduced, and the unreliable authorities quoted, and bewilderment amid the dust-cloud of words with which any one who enters this debatable land is sure to be enveloped. “It is scarcely necessary to observe, that there are few points of ethnology on which historians and antiquaries have been more at variance with each other, than respecting the real race of those inhabitants of a portion of Caledonia popularly known by the designation of Picts. The difficulty arising from this discrepancy of opinion is increased by the scanty and unsatisfactory nature of the materials now available to those who wish to form an independent judgment. No connected specimen of the Pictish language has been preserved; nor has any ancient author who knew them from personal observation, stated in direct terms that they approximated to one adjoining tribe more than another. They are indeed associated with the Scots or Irish as joint plunderers of the colonial Britons; and the expression of Gildas that they differed in some degree from the Scots in their customs, might seem to imply that they did bear an analogy to that nation in certain respects. Of course, where there is such a lack of direct evidence, there is more scope for conjecture; and the Picts are pronounced by different investigators of their history to have been Germans, Scandinavians, Welsh, Gael, or something distinct from all the four. The advocates of the German hypothesis rest chiefly on Tacitus’s description of their physical conformation. Dr. Jamieson, assuming that the present Lowland Scotch dialect was derived from them, sets them down as Scandinavians; Bishop Lloyd and Camden conceive them to have been of Celtic race, probably related to the Britons; Chalmers, the author of ‘Caledonia,’ regards them as nothing more than a tribe of Cambrians or Welsh; while Skene, one of the latest authors on the subject, thinks he has proved that they were the ancestors of the present race of Scottish Highlanders.”[24]
The earliest known name applied to Britain is found in a treatise on the World ascribed to Aristotle, in which the larger island is called Albinn, and Ireland referred to as Ierne; and it is worthy of notice that at the present day the former is the name applied to Scotland by the Highlanders, who call themselves the Gael Albinnich. The first author, however, who gives us any information about the early inhabitants of the north part of Scotland is Tacitus, who, in his Life of Agricola, devotes a few lines, in a parenthetical way, to characterising each of the great divisions of the people who, in the time of that general, inhabited Britain. Tacitus tells us that in his time the inhabitants of Britain differed in the habit and make of their bodies, and from the ruddy locks and large limbs of the Caledonians he inferred that they were of German origin.[25] This glimpse is clear enough, but tantalizing in its meagreness and generality. What does Tacitus mean by German—does he use it in the same sense as we do at the present day? Does he mean by Caledonia the whole of the country north of the Forth and Clyde, or does it apply only to that district—Fife, Forfar, the east of Perth, &c.—with the inhabitants of which his father-in-law came in contact? We find Ptolemy the geographer, who flourished about the middle of the 2d century A.D., mentioning the Caledonians as one of the many tribes which in his time inhabited the north of Scotland. The term Caledonians is supposed by some authorities to have been derived from a native word signifying “men of the woods,” or the inhabitants of the woody country; this, however, is mere conjecture.
The next writer who gives any definite information as to the inhabitants of Caledonia is Dion Cassius, who flourished in the early part of the 3d century, and who wrote a history of Rome which has come down to us in a very imperfect state. Of the latter part, containing an account of Britain, we possess only an epitome made by Xiphilinus, an ecclesiastic of the 11th century, and which of course is very meagre in its details. The following are the particulars given by this writer concerning the early inhabitants of north Britain. “Of the Britons the two most ample nations are the Caledonians and the Mæatæ; for the names of the rest refer for the most part to these. The Mæatæ inhabit very near the wall[26] which divides the island into two parts; the Caledonians are after these. Each of them inhabit mountains, very rugged and wanting water, and also desert fields, full of marshes: they have neither castles nor cities, nor dwell in any: they live on milk and by hunting, and maintain themselves by the fruits of the trees: for fishes, of which there is a very great and numberless quantity, they never taste: they dwell naked in tents and without shoes: they use wives in common, and whatever is born to them they bring up. In the popular state they are governed, as for the most part: they rob on the highway most willingly: they war in chariots: horses they have, small and fleet; their infantry, also, are as well most swift at running, as most brave in pitched battle. Their arms are a shield and a short spear, in the upper part whereof is an apple of brass, that, while it is shaken, it may terrify the enemies with the sound: they have likewise daggers. They are able to bear hunger, cold, and all afflictions; for they merge themselves in marshes, and there remain many days, having only their head out of water: and in woods are nourished by the bark and roots of trees. But a certain kind of food they prepare for all occasions, of which if they take as much as ‘the size’ of a single bean, they are in nowise ever wont to hunger or thirst.”[27]
From this we learn that in the 3d century there were two divisions of the inhabitants of the Highlands, known to the Romans as the Caledonians and Mæats or Mæatæ, the latter very probably inhabiting the southern part of that territory, next to the wall of Antonine, and the former the district to the north of this. As to whether these were Latinized forms of native names, or names imposed by the Romans themselves, we have no means of judging. The best writers on this subject think that the Caledonians and Mæats were two divisions of the same people, both living to the north of the Forth and Clyde, although Innes,[28] and one or two minor writers, are of opinion that the Mæats were provincial Britons who inhabited the country between the wall of Hadrian and that of Antonine, known as the province of Valentia. However, with Skene,[29] Mr. Joseph Robertson, and other able authorities, we are inclined to think that the evidence is in favour of their being the inhabitants of the southern portion of Caledonia proper.
Herodian,[30] who wrote about A.D. 240, tells us that the Caledonians were in the habit of marking or painting their bodies with figures of animals, and that they wore no clothes in order that these figures might be preserved and exhibited.
The next reference made by a Roman writer to the inhabitants of Caledonia we find in a panegyric pronounced in his presence on the Emperor Constantius Chlorus, by Eumenius, a professor of rhetoric at Augustodunum (Autun) in Gaul, in the year 296 or 297, who speaks of the Britons, in the time of Cæsar, having been attacked by the half-naked Picts and Irish. To what people the orator meant to apply the term Picts, around which there has clustered so much acrimonious disputation, we learn from another oration pronounced by him on the same emperor, before his son Constantine, in the year 309, in which, recording the actions of Constantius, he speaks of the woods and marshes of the Caledonians and other Picts.