Such were the provincial Britons when the great contest commenced; but we are here mainly concerned with those who occupied the western districts extending from the river Derwent, which falls into the Western Sea at Workington in Cumberland, to the river Clyde on the north, forming one of four subsequent kingdoms under the name of Cumbria.
The Picts.
Among the barbaric tribes who likewise entered into the struggle for the prize, the first in order were the Picts. The accounts of them given by Gildas, Nennius, and Bede, vary considerably. Gildas first mentions them as taking a part in the irruption of the barbarians into the Roman province after the departure of Maximus with the Roman army, but he calls them a transmarine nation, and says they came from the north-east.[[112]] He tells us that after the withdrawal of the frontier to the southern wall, which we have seen took place on the departure of Constantine in 406, they occupied the districts up to that wall as natives;[[113]] and that when finally repelled by an effort of the provincial Britons, they then for the first time settled down in the extreme part of the island, where they still remained at the time he wrote his history. The natural inference from his language is that he considered that the Picts were a foreign people who first obtained a settlement in the island in the beginning of the fifth century, unless he regarded the region north of the Firths of Forth and Clyde as a separate island, and considered that it lay north-north-east from the standpoint from which he wrote.[[114]] The gloss which Bede puts upon his language, that by transmarine he merely referred to their crossing the firths, seems a forced and narrow construction of his language. Nennius too viewed the Picts as a foreign people who settled in the island, and says that they first occupied the Orkney Islands, whence they laid waste many regions and seized those on the left hand or north side of Britain, where they still remained, keeping possession of a third part of Britain to his day;[[115]] but then he placed their settlement as early as the fourth century before the birth of Christ.
Bede says that ‘at first this island had no other inhabitants than the Britons, but that when they, beginning at the south, had made themselves masters of the greatest part of the island, it happened that the nation of the Picts from Scythia, as is reported,[[116]] putting to sea in a few long ships, were driven by the winds beyond the shores of Britain, and arrived on the northern shores of Ireland, where, finding the nation of the Scots, they desired a settlement among them, and this being refused by the Scots, they sailed over to Britain and began to inhabit the northern parts of the island.’ He adds that having no wives they applied to the Scots, who gave them on condition that when the succession came into doubt they should choose their king from the female royal race rather than from the male, a custom which he says it is well known is observed among the Picts to his day.[[117]] Bede does not say at what time this settlement took place; but it is obvious that he is reporting a tradition, and that Nennius’s account is also traditionary; while Gildas does not seem to be aware that any tradition of their origin or their original seat was known to the Britons.
When we turn to the classical writers we find that under the name of the Picts they clearly understood that aggregate of tribes who, throughout the entire occupation of the provinces of Britain by the Romans, were known to them as the Barbarians who dwelt beyond the northern wall—those ancient enemies of the Romans who had so frequently harassed them in the quiet possession of Britain. From the beginning of the third century the older names by which many of the barbarian tribes beyond the frontiers of the Empire had been known to the Romans appear to have given way to new appellations, embracing a larger combination of tribes; and as in Germany the new generic names of ‘Alamanni,’ ‘Franci,’ ‘Thuringi,’ and ‘Saxones’ now appear, the constituent elements of which combinations can be identified with the tribes bearing the older names, so at the same period the name of ‘Picti’ appears as a designation of the barbaric tribes in Britain. It is first mentioned by Eumenius the panegyrist in the year 296. As the Picts seemed at first destined to carry off the prize, and, although eventually obliged to confine themselves to their ancient limits, formed the groundwork of the future kingdom of Celtic Scotland, it will be necessary, with a view to the main object before us, to trace their characteristics with somewhat more minuteness of detail.
When Agricola first penetrated beyond the Solway Firth, and extended his conquests over a hitherto unknown country as far as the Tay, his biographer records the tribes he encountered as new nations, and in his general description of the inhabitants of the island he discriminates between the tribes whom Agricola first made known to the Romans, and whom he calls inhabitants of Caledonia, and the rest of the Britons. That they were the same people who had been known to the Romans by a report not long before as ‘Caledonii Britanni’ there can be little doubt. They possessed, it is true, no diversity of language or of manners sufficient to attract the attention of the Roman historian; but still there were some distinctive features which led him to consider them as not identic with the provincial Britons, and to give that part of the island occupied by them a separate name. There was one physical mark of difference that at once attracted his observation. They were larger in body and limb, and less xanthous.
In the following century we learn more regarding these new nations. We find that in the reign of Hadrian they consisted of fourteen tribes, and extended from the districts between the Solway and the Clyde to the extreme north of Scotland. A closer examination of these tribes shows evident indications of a different degree of civilisation and of advancement in social organisation among them. In this respect they fall naturally into three groups, and they are likewise geographically divided into the same groups by three leading tribes extending entirely across the island from sea to sea. The most southern of these was the tribe of the ‘Damnonii,’ in itself representing, with the tribe of the ‘Novantæ’ in Galloway, one of these three divisions, and extending from the Firth of Forth to the great estuary of the Clyde, and from the mountains of Dumfriesshire to the river Tay. A line drawn from the head of Loch Long to the Moray Firth separates the tribe of the ‘Caledonii’ from that of the ‘Vacomagi,’ each extending parallel to the other from south-west to north-east. The entire platform of these fourteen tribes thus naturally falls into three not very unequal portions. The numbers of the tribes, however, are more unequally distributed. In the northern and more mountainous portion were no fewer than nine out of the fourteen tribes, the great tribe of the ‘Caledonii’ joining the frontier people on the south-east. In the more lowland districts, from the Moray Firth to the Firth of Forth, were only three tribes, of which the ‘Vacomagi’ extended along the north-west boundary, and the fertile plains from the Tay to Galloway were entirely possessed by one great tribe, the ‘Damnonii,’ while the ‘Novantæ’ occupied Galloway. This very plainly points to a more advanced social organisation as we proceed south, and the same fact is further indicated even more clearly by the existence of towns among some of them only.
Among the three tribes extending from the Forth to the Moray Firth we find what the geographer Ptolemy terms πόλεις or towns, but not very numerous, and placed on the frontier of each tribe, so as to show they were organised for the defence of the community. Among the tribes in the more northern portion there is no trace whatever of the existence of such towns, while in the great southern tribe of the ‘Damnonii’ there are enumerated no fewer than six, as many as are to be found in the three tribes north of the Forth; and we likewise find them placed more in the interior of the territories of the tribe, while the ‘Novantæ’ in Galloway possesses two.
Not many years after this account of the tribes, the Roman wall was constructed between the Firths of Forth and Clyde, through the heart of the territories of the ‘Damnonii,’ thus dividing the nation into two parts, one of which was included within the province and subjected to the Roman government, while the other remained beyond the boundary of Roman Britain. Of the towns enumerated by Ptolemy, three were now within the province, and the other three were situated north of the wall.
When the Roman classical writers again furnish us with any particulars of these tribes, we find that the progress of social organisation had advanced a step further, and that they were now combined into two nations—the ‘Caledonii’ and the ‘Mæatæ.’ The historian Dio expressly states that these were the two divisions of the hostile nations beyond the Roman province, and that all other names of tribes beyond the wall had merged into these two denominations, of which, he adds, the ‘Mæatæ’ were next the wall. The name of ‘Caledonii’ identifies that nation with the group of northern tribes, of which the ‘Caledonii’ were the leading tribe, while the ‘Mæatæ’ must have included those extending from the ‘Caledonii’ to the wall. The ‘Mæatæ,’ soon after they first appear under that name, were obliged to yield up a considerable portion of this territory to the Romans. The ceded district must have been that nearest the wall; and if, as we have seen, it consisted of the plains extending from the wall to the Tay, it included exactly that portion of the nation of the ‘Damnonii’ which lay on the north side of the wall, who now passed under the Roman influence, as well as the southern portion of that nation.