[8]. Montes qui dividunt Scotiam ab Arregaithel.—Chron. Picts and Scots, p. 135.
[9]. Quos utrosque Dorsi montes Britannici disterminant.—Adamnan, B. ii. c. 47.
[10]. The essays contained in the appendix are of peculiar value, and well deserve the consideration of historians.
[11]. The author has collected the materials prior to Fordun’s Chronicle in the volume of The Chronicles of the Picts, Chronicles of the Scots, and other early Memorials of Scottish History, published by the authority of the Lords Commissioners of her Majesty’s Treasury, under the superintendence of the Lord Clerk Register of Scotland, in 1867, and has likewise edited Fordun’s Chronicle for the series of the Scottish Historians. The introductions to these two works contain a critical examination and analysis of these early documents as well as of the chronicle itself. In the Four Ancient Books of Wales, published in 1868, he has subjected the Welsh documents to a similar critical examination.
[12]. Burton’s Hist., vol. i. Preface, p. v.
[13]. It is curious how difficult it is to get rid of the effects of an imposture of this kind, even after it is detected.
Mr. C. H. Pearson is one of those who has most conclusively demonstrated the forgery, and yet in his historical maps of England, published in 1869, he places the Roman provinces of Britain according to an arrangement for which the so-called Richard of Cirencester is the sole authority. Mr. Burton also denounces this work as a forgery (vol. i. p. 61, note); but he elsewhere says, ‘Thus there were Scots in Ireland and Scots in Britain, and a practice arose among British writers of calling the latter Attacotti, which has been explained to mean the hither Scots or Scots of this side’ (vol. i. p. 256). This statement is apparently taken from Pinkerton, who identified the Attacotti with an early settlement of Scots in Argyll solely on the authority of Richard of Cirencester. The opinion is quite untenable, and the etymology preposterous. It was, however, rather unexpected to find Mr. W. Fraser, in a work printed in 1874 (The Lennox), adopting the whole of the spurious matter of the so-called Richard of Cirencester as genuine.
[14]. Roy, Military Ant., p. ix.
[15]. See Four Ancient Books of Wales, vol. i. pp. 30-32. In rejecting the Welsh Triads, which have been so extensively used, the author excepts those Triads which are to be found in ancient MSS., such as the Triads of the Horses in the Black Book of Caermarthen; those in the Hengwrt MS. 536, printed in the Four Ancient Books of Wales, vol. ii. p. 457; and those in the Red Book of Hergest.
[16]. For instance, the annals record the death of Somhairle MacGillaadomnan Ri Innsigall at 1083. This was Somerled Regulus of Argyll, whose death really took place in 1166, and this entry has probably been inserted at haphazard from some genealogy of the Macdonalds.