At the time the independent tribes of the north are thus described as consisting of two nations—the ‘Caledonii’ and the ‘Mæatæ’—it is recorded of them, as a characteristic feature, that they retained the custom of painting their bodies, by puncturing with iron the figures of animals on their skin; and when the inhabitants of these northern regions next appear on the scene after the interval of nearly a century, we find the whole aggregate of these tribes bearing the general name of ‘Picti.’ This name, afterwards so well known and so much dreaded, first appears as their designation after the fall of the insular empire of Carausius and Allectus, in whose armies they seem to have been largely enrolled. They are said at this time to have consisted of the ‘Caledones and other Picts.’ Fifty years later, when the first of those great and systematic irruptions into the province by the simultaneous action of several barbarian nations burst forth, the ‘Picti’ are more accurately described by the historian as now consisting of two nations—the ‘Dicaledonæ’ and the ‘Vecturiones;’ while the occupation of the Roman territory nearest them during the first four years, brought to their assistance, in their more extended attack upon the Roman province, a part of its population under the new designation of the ‘Attacotti.’
We thus see that prior to the extension of the Roman province under Antoninus, the people known to the Romans by report as the Caledonian Britons, and described by Tacitus as a distinct people under the designation of inhabitants of Caledonia, consisted of fourteen independent tribes; that a part of the largest of the southern tribes having been cut off from the rest by the Roman wall, the tribes remaining independent combined into two nations—the ‘Caledonii’ and ‘Mæatæ;’ that the Mæatæ having to cede a part of their territory, the remainder of the nation lose that name and appear under that of ‘Vecturiones,’ the ‘Caledonii’ or ‘Caledones’ being now termed ‘Dicaledonæ,’ inhabiting the north-western regions bounded by the Deucaledonian sea, while the combined nation bore the name of ‘Picti.’ Such seems the natural inference from the successive notices of the northern tribes by the Roman historians; and while they give no hint that they did not consider them the same people throughout, and while the identity of the northern division at all times is sufficiently manifest by the preservation of the name of Caledonians under analogous forms, the poets clearly indicate that they considered the Picts the indigenous inhabitants of Caledonia; for while they consider ‘Ierne’ or Ireland as the home of the Scots, and the ‘Orcades’ or Orkneys as the position from whence the Saxons issued on their expeditions, they assign to the Picts, as their original seat, the same ‘Thule’ which the earlier poets had applied as a poetical name for Caledonia, and the home of the Caledonian Britons.
The same twofold division of the Pictish nation existed among them till at least the eighth century, when Bede wrote his Ecclesiastical History of the English nation, for he tells us that the provinces of the northern Picts were separated by high and lofty mountains from the southern regions of that people; and that the southern Picts had their seats within that mountain range, alluding probably to the range of the so-called Grampians, which formed the south-western boundary of that division of the nation which throughout bore the name of Caledonians. This distinction, too, between the two branches of the nation must have been still further increased by the fact recorded by Bede, that the northern Picts were only converted to Christianity by the preaching of St. Columba in the year 565; while the southern Picts had long before embraced Christianity through the preaching of St. Ninian,[[118]] who, he tells us, built a church at ‘Candida Casa,’ or Whithern, in Galloway, which he dedicated to St. Martin of Tours. Ailred probably repeats a genuine tradition when he says in his Life of St. Ninian that he was building this church when he heard of the death of St. Martin, which happened in the year 397, so that the southern branch of the Pictish nation was at least nominally a Christian people, while the northern Picts remained pagan for a period of upwards of a century and a half.
The Irish equivalent for the name ‘Picti’ was ‘Cruithnigh;’ and we find during this period a people under this name inhabiting a district in the north of Ireland, extending along its north-east coast from the river Newry, and from Carlingford Bay to Glenarm, and consisting of the county of Down and the south half of the county of Antrim. This district was termed ‘Uladh,’ and also ‘Dalaraidhe,’ Latinised ‘Dalaradia,’ and its inhabitants were the remains of a Pictish people believed to have once occupied the whole of Ulster.[[119]] South of the Firths of Forth and Clyde we find the Picts in two different localities. Gildas tells us that after the boundary of the province they occupied the northern and extreme part of the island as settlers up to the wall, and this probably refers to the districts afterwards comprised under the general name of ‘Lodonea,’ or Lothian, in its extended sense, comprising the counties of Berwick, Roxburgh, and the Lothians. In the north-western part of this region they appear to have remained till a comparatively late period, extending from the Carron to the Pentland hills, and known by the name of the plain of Manau, or Manann, while the name of Pentland, corrupted from Petland, or Pictland, has preserved a record of their occupation.
The name of ‘Picti’ was likewise applied to the inhabitants of Galloway, comprising the modern counties of Kirkcudbright and Wigtown, till a still later period, and survived the entire disappearance of the name as applied to any other portion of the inhabitants of Scotland, even as late as the twelfth century. This district was occupied in the second century by the tribe termed by Ptolemy the ‘Novantæ,’ with their towns of Rerigonium and Lucopibia, and there is nothing to show that the same people did not occupy it throughout, and become known as the Picts of Galloway, of which ‘Candida Casa,’ or Whithern, was the chief seat, and occupied the site of the older Lucopibia.[[120]]
The oldest record connected with the Picts is the Pictish Chronicle, apparently compiled in the tenth century, of which two separate editions are preserved, one of which probably emerged from Abernethy and the other from Brechin.[[121]] It contains a list of kings of the Picts who are supposed to have reigned over them from their origin to the termination of their monarchy. The earlier portion of this list is of course mythic, and the reigns of the supposed kings are characterised by their extreme length; but the latter part must form the basis of their history, after the Picts became settled and assumed the form of a kingdom within definite limits. The earlier part is mainly useful for philological purposes. The last of these shadowy monarchs is Drust, son of Erp, who is said to have reigned a hundred years and fought a hundred battles, and it is added that in his nineteenth year St. Patrick went to Ireland. This places him about the time of the repeated incursions of the Picts into the Roman province. His successor Talore is said to have reigned only four years, but with the reign of his brother Nectan Morbet, to which twenty-four years are assigned, we probably have something historical. A calculation of the reigns of the subsequent kings in the list, tested by the dates furnished by the annalists from time to time, would place the commencement of this reign in the year 457, and the termination in 481. The Chronicle tells us that Nectan had been banished to Ireland by his brother, and that in consequence of a prophecy by St. Bridget that he would return to his own country and possess the kingdom in peace, he, in the third year of his reign, received Darlugdach, abbess of Kildare, and two years after founded the church of Abernethy in honour of St. Bridget; but this tale is inconsistent with the date of St. Bridget, whose death is recorded in 525. It, however, appears to connect Nectan with the territory in which Abernethy was situated.[[122]]
A strange tale is related of him too in the Acts of Saint Boethius, or Buitte, of Mainister Buitte in Ulster, whose death is recorded in 521, which likewise connects him with the same part of the country. St. Buitte is said, on returning from Italy with sixty holy men and ten virgins, to have landed in the territories of the Picts, and to have found that Nectan, the king of that country, had just departed this life, on which he restores him to life, and the grateful monarch bestowed upon him the fort or camp in which the miracle had been performed that he might found a church there.[[123]] If he entered the Pictish territories by the Firth of Tay, it is probable that the place formerly called Dun-Nechtan, or the fort of Nechtan, and now corrupted into Dunnichen, in Forfarshire, is the place intended, and that the name of Boethius or Buitte is preserved in the neighbouring church of Kirkbuddo, situated within the ramparts of what was a Roman camp.
Of the two next kings we know nothing but their names and the length of their reigns. We then come to two Drests or Drusts—Drest son of Gyrom, and Drest son of Wdrost—who reigned together for five years, from 523 to 528, and here again we find some legendary matter connected with one of them.
In the Liber Hymnorum, or Book of Hymns of the Ancient Church of Ireland, edited by the Rev. Dr. J. H. Todd, there is a hymn or prayer of St. Mugint, and the scholiast in the preface narrates the following tradition: ‘Mugint made this hymn in Futerna. The cause was this: Finnen of Magh Bile went to Mugint for instruction, and Rioc and Talmach, and several others with him. Drust was king of “Bretan” then, and had a daughter, viz. Drusticc was her name, and he gave her to Mugint to be taught to read.’ It is unnecessary to add the adventure which followed. Dr. Todd considers that ‘Futerna is manifestly Whiterna or Whitern, the Wh being represented by F;’[by F;’][[124]] and that the Drust of the legend is one of these two Drusts who reigned from 523 to 528. As Finnen’s death is recorded in 579, the date accords with the period when he may have sought instruction. O’Clery, in the Martyrology of Donegal, quotes a poem which refers to the same legend:
Truist, king of the free bay on the strand,