Result of Ethnological inquiry.
The result of our inquiry into the ethnology of Britain and the race and language of the occupants of its northern districts, hasty and general as, from the limits of this work, it has necessarily been, may be thus summed up:—
The Celtic race in Britain and Ireland was preceded by a people of an Iberian type, small, dark-skinned, and curly-haired. They are the people of the long-headed skulls, and their representatives in Britain were the tin-workers of Cornwall and the Scilly Islands, who traded with Spain, and the tribe of the Silures in South Wales, and, in the legendary history of Ireland, the people called the Firbolg. The Celtic race followed them both in Britain and in Ireland. These are the people of the round-headed skulls, and consisted of two great branches, whose language—the British and the Gadhelic—though possessing evident marks that they had a common origin, and that both branches belonged originally to one race, is yet distinguished by marked dialectic differences. Each of these great branches again was divided into varieties. Of the Gadhelic branch, one was a fair-skinned, large-limbed, and red-haired race, and were represented in Britain by the people of the interior whom the Romans thought to be indigenous, and who, after the Roman province was formed, were called by them the Picts or painted people. They are represented in the legendary history of Ireland by the Tuatha De Danann and by the Cruithnigh, a name which was the Irish equivalent of the Latin ‘Picti,’ and was applied to the Picts of Scotland, and to the people who preceded the Scots in Ulster, and were eventually confined to a district in the eastern part of it. The other variety was a fair-skinned brown-haired race, represented in the legendary history as the race of Milidh or Milesius, and, after the fourth century, known by the name of Scots.
The other great branch of the Celtic race, which extended itself over the whole of that part of Britain which became subject to the Roman power, and was incorporated into a province of the Roman Empire, were those we have termed British, and resembled the Gauls in their physical appearance. The two varieties of their language in Britain are represented by the Cornish and the Welsh.
The Celtic race was followed by a Teutonic people, who were of the low German race, and issued from the low-lying country along the north coast of Germany, extending from the Rhine to the Cimbric Chersonese. After assailing the Roman province during the last half-century of its existence, when they were known by the name of Saxons, they made settlements during the first half of the fifth century in what was called the Saxon Shore, and along the east coast from the Humber to the Firth of Forth. These earliest settlers consisted partly of Frisians, but mainly of the people called ‘Angli,’ who were part of a confederation of tribes who bore the general name of Saxons, and were followed at a later period by those who seemed to have belonged to the people originally called Saxons.
The four kingdoms.
Out of these Celtic and Teutonic races there emerged in that northern part of Britain which eventually became the territory of the subsequent monarchy of Scotland, four kingdoms within definite limits and under settled forms of government; and as such we find them in the beginning of the seventh century, when the conflict among these races, which succeeded the departure of the Romans from the island, and the termination of their power in Britain, may be held to have ceased, and the limits of these kingdoms to have become settled.
North of the Firths of Forth and Clyde were the two kingdoms of the Scots of Dalriada on the west and of the Picts on the east. They were separated from each other by a range of mountains termed by Adamnan the Dorsal ridge of Britain, and generally known by the name of Drumalban. It was the great watershed which separated the rivers flowing eastward from those flowing westward, and now separates the counties of Argyll and Perth. The northern boundary appears to be represented by a line drawn from the mouth of Loch Leven through the district of Morvern, separating the old parish of Killecolmkill from that of Killfintach, then through the island of Mull by the great ridge of Benmore, and by the islands of Iona and Colonsay to Isla, where it separated the eastern from the western districts of the island.[[283]]
THE
FOUR KINGDOMS
W. & A.K. Johnston, Edinburgh & London.