Scottish kingdom of Dalriada.
The Scottish colony was originally founded by Fergus Mor, son of Erc, who came with his two brothers Loarn and Angus from Irish Dalriada in the end of the fifth century, but the true founder of the Dalriadic kingdom was his great-grandson Aedan, son of Gabran. It consisted of three tribes, the Cinel Gabran, the Cinel Angus, and the Cinel Loarn, which were called the ‘three powerfuls of Dalriada.’ The Cinel Gabran consisted of the descendants of Fergus, whose son Domangart had two sons, Gabran and Comgall, and their possessions consisted of the district of Cowall, which takes its name from Comgall, that of Cindtire or Kintyre, which then extended from the river Add, which flows into the bay of Crinan, to the Mull of Kintyre, and included Knapdale and the small islands of this coast. The Cinel Angusa settled in Isla and Jura, while the names of their townships which have been preserved embrace the eastern half of the island only. The Cinel Loarn possessed the district of Lorn, which takes its name from them and extends from Loch Leven to the point of Ashnish. Between the possessions of the Cinel Loarn and those of the Cinel Gabhran extended what is now the great moss of Crinan, called in Gaelic ‘Monadhmor;’ and on the bank of the river Add, which meanders through it, there rises an isolated rocky hill, the summit of which bears the mark of having been strongly fortified, while the great stones and cairns on the moss around it preserve the record of many an attempt to take it. This fortified hill was called Dunadd, a name which it still retains, and was the capital of Dalriada. It was also called, from the moss which surrounds it, Dunmonaidh. The possessions of these Dalriadic tribes surrounded a small district extending from the districts of Lorn, Kintyre, and Cowal, to Drumalban, in the centre of which was the lake of Loch Awe. As this territory was not included in the possessions of any of these tribes, it probably still retained its original population, and contained the remains of the earlier inhabitants before the arrival of the Scots. The kings of this small kingdom of Dalriada all belonged to the race of Erc, and succeeded each other according to the Irish law of Tanistry, which often assumed the form of an alternate succession from the members of two families descended from the common ancestor. In Dalriada it alternated first between the descendants of Gabran and Comgall, the two grandsons of Fergus, and afterwards between the Cinel Gabran and Cinel Loarn.[[284]]
The kingdom of the Picts.
The remaining districts north of the Firths of Forth and Clyde formed the kingdom of the Picts. Throughout the whole course of their history as an independent nation there seems to have been a twofold division of this people, and they were eventually distinguished from each other as the northern and the southern Picts. Bede tells us that they were separated from each other by steep and rugged mountain chains, and he terms in one place the northern Picts, the Transmontane Picts.[[285]] This mountain range can only refer to the great chain termed the Mounth, which extends across the island from Ben Nevis in Lochaber, till it terminates near the east coast between Aberdeen and Stonehaven. The whole country north of this range from sea to sea belonged to the northern Picts, who appear to have been purely Gaelic in race and language. The southern Picts are said by Bede to have had seats within these mountains, which refers no doubt to the districts intersected by the lesser chains which extend from the main range towards the south-east, and from the barrier of the so-called Grampians. These districts consist of the Perthshire and Forfarshire Highlands, the former of which is known by the name of Atholl. The western boundary of the territory of the southern Picts was Drumalban, which separated them from the Scots of Dalriada, and their southern boundary the Forth. The main body of the southern Picts also belonged no doubt to the Gaelic race, though they may have possessed some differences in the idiom of their language; but the original population of the country extending from the Forth to the Tay consisted of part of the tribe of Damnonii, who belonged to the Cornish variety of the British race, and they appear to have been incorporated with the southern Picts, and to have introduced a British element into their language. The Frisian settlements, too, on the shores of the Firth of Forth may also have left their stamp on this part of the nation. The former are probably the Britons of Fortrenn of the Pictish legends, and the latter have apparently left a record of their presence in the term of the Frisian Shore, known as the name of a district on the south of the Firth of Forth; and the name of Fothrik, applied to a district now represented by Kinross-shire and the western part of Fifeshire, may preserve a recollection of their Rik or kingdom.
The Picts seem to have preserved a tradition that the whole nation was once divided into seven provinces, whose names were derived from seven sons of Cruithne, the ‘eponymus’ of the race, and the reference to Saint Columba, as perpetuating this in a stanza, relegates it to this period. Of these names five can be recognised. In Fib we have Fife, Fodla enters into the name of Atholl, Circinn into that of the Mearns, Fortrenn was certainly the district from the Tay to the Forth, and Caith was the district of Cathenesia, originally of great extent, and embracing the most northern part of the island from sea to sea.
The seat of government appears to have been sometimes within the territory of the southern Picts, and at others on the north of the great chain of the Mounth. When we can first venture to regard the list of the Pictish kings preserved in the Pictish Chronicle as having some claim to a historical character, we find the king having his seat apparently in Forfarshire; but when the works of Adamnan and Bede place us upon firm ground, the monarch belonged to the race of the northern Picts, and had his fortified residence near the mouth of the river Ness.
When we examine the historical part of the list of the Pictish monarchs, we find that it exhibits a very marked peculiarity in the order of succession. We see brothers, sons of the same father, succeeding each other, but it does not present a single instance, throughout the whole period of the Pictish kingdom, of a son directly succeeding his father. Bede gives us the law of succession thus: ‘That when it came into doubt they elected the king rather from the female than from the male royal lineage, a custom,’ he says, ‘preserved among the Picts to his day.’[[286]] It is thus stated in the poem attached to the Irish Nennius, ‘that from the nobility of the mother should always be the right to the sovereignty;’ and in the prose legends, ‘that the regal succession among them for ever should be on the mother’s side.’ ‘That not less should territorial succession be derived from men than from women for ever;’[[287]] ‘so that it is in right of mothers they succeed to sovereignty and all other successions.’ ‘That they alone should take of the sovereignty and of the land from women rather than from men in Cruithintuath for ever.’ ‘That of women should be the royal succession among them for ever.’[[288]] These statements, when compared with the actual succession, lead to this, that brothers succeeded each other in preference to the sons of each, not an unusual feature in male succession; but, on their failure, the contingency alluded to by Bede arose, and the succession then passed to the sons of sisters, or to the nearest male relation on the female side, and through a female. This, however, does not exhaust the anomalies exhibited in this list of kings, for we find that the names given as those of the fathers of the kings differ entirely from those of their sons, and in no case does a son who reigns bear the same name as that of any one of the fathers in the list. The names of the reigning kings are in the main confined to four or five names, as Brude, Drust, Talorgan, Nechtan, Gartnaidh, and these never appear among the names of the fathers of kings, nor does the name of a father occur twice in the list. Further, in two cases we know that while the kings who reigned were termed respectively Brude and Talorcan, the father of the one was a Briton, and of the other an Angle.[[289]] The conclusion which Mr. M‘Lennan, in his very original work on primitive marriage, draws from this is, that it ‘raises a strong presumption that all the fathers were men of other tribes. At any rate there remains the fact, after every deduction has been made, that the fathers and mothers were in no case of the same family name;’[[290]] and he quotes this as a reason for believing that exogamy prevailed among the Picts. But this explanation, though it goes some way, will not fully interpret the anomalies in the list of Pictish kings. The only hypothesis that seems to afford a full explanation is one that would suppose that the kings among the Picts were elected from one family clan or tribe, or possibly from one in each of the two divisions of the northern and southern Picts; that there lingered among the Picts the old custom among the Celts, who, to use the language of Mr. M‘Lennan, ‘were anciently lax in their morals, and recognised relationship through mothers only;’[[291]] that intermarriage was not permitted in this royal family or tribe, and the women had to obtain their husbands from the men of other tribes, not excluding those of a different race;[[292]] that the children were adopted into the tribe of the mother, and certain names were exclusively bestowed on such children. Such an hypothesis seems capable of explaining all the facts of the case; and if the male child thus adopted into the tribe of the mother became king, and was paternally of a foreign race, it will readily be seen how much this would facilitate the permanent occupation of the Pictish throne by a foreign line of kings. It would only be necessary that one king, who was paternally of a foreign tribe, and whose succession to the throne could not be opposed in conformity with the Pictish law of succession, should become powerful enough to alter the succession to one through males, and perpetuate it in his own family. Although the Pictish people might resist to the utmost their subjection to a foreign nation, and would make every effort to throw off the yoke, there would be nothing in the mere occupation of the throne by a family of foreign descent, who derived their succession originally through a female of the Pictish royal tribe, to arouse their national feeling to any extent against it.
The death of Brude mac Mailchon, the king of the northern Picts, whom Saint Columba converted, is recorded by Tighernac in the year 584,[[293]] after a reign of thirty years; and as no battle is mentioned between him and the Dalriads after the arrival of Saint Columba, it seems probable that the boundaries of the respective kingdoms by the Picts and Scots of Dalriada were amicably settled by the same influence which procured the recognition of the independence of Dalriada at the convention of Drumceitt. Brude was succeeded by Gartnaidh, who is called son of Domelch, who reigned eleven years, and his death took place in 599,[[294]] two years after that of Saint Columba himself. He is succeeded by Nectan, who bears the unusual designation of grandson of Uerd, and who occupied the throne at the beginning of the sixth century.[[295]]
Kingdom of the Britons of Alclyde.
The districts south of the Firths of Forth and Clyde, and extending to the Solway Firth on the west and to the Tyne on the east, were possessed by the two kingdoms of the Britons on the west and of the Angles of Bernicia on the east. The former extended from the river Derwent in Cumberland in the south to the Firth of Clyde in the north, which separated the Britons from the Scots of Dalriada. The British kingdom thus comprehended Cumberland and Westmoreland, with the exception of the baronies of Allerdale or Copeland in the former and Kendal in the latter, and the counties of Dumfries, Ayr, Renfrew, Lanark, and Peebles, in Scotland. On the east the great forest of Ettrick separated them from the Angles, and here the ancient rampart of the Catrail which runs from the south-east corner of Peeblesshire, near Galashiels, through the county of Selkirk to the Peel Hill on the south side of Liddesdale, probably marked the boundary between them. The population of this kingdom seems to have belonged to two varieties of the British race,—the southern half, including Dumfriesshire, being Cymric or Welsh, and the northern half having been occupied by the Damnonii who belonged to the Cornish variety. The capital of the kingdom was the strongly-fortified position on the rock on the right bank of the Clyde, termed by the Britons Alcluith, and by the Gadhelic people Dunbreatan, or the fort of the Britons, now Dumbarton; but the ancient town called Caer Luel or Carlisle in the southern part must always have been an important position. The kingdom of the Britons had at this time no territorial designation, but its monarchs were termed kings of Alcluith, and belonged to that party among the Britons who bore the peculiar name of Romans, and claimed descent from the ancient Roman rulers in Britain. The law of succession seems to have been one of purely male descent.