Celtic Scotland

by W. F. Skene

Seven children of Cruithne,

Divided Alban into seven divisions:

Cait, Ce, Cirig, a warlike clan;

Fib, Fidach, Fotla, Fortrenn,

and the name of each man is given to their territories.’ Five of these divisions can still be identified: Fib is Fife, Fotla is Athfoitle, now corrupted into Atholl; Fortrenn is the district between the rivers Forth and Tay; Circinn the district of Mearns, a name corrupted from Maghgirginn, now Kincardineshire; and Cait is Cathenesia, or Caithness. It is obvious, therefore, that this legend belongs to the Pictish inhabitants of these seven divisions. The seven sons are then followed by Gede Ollgothach, whose name is the same as one of the seven kings of the descendants of Ir, who in the first legend occupied the throne of Ireland. We then have Oenbecan and Olfinecta; and the Irish edition tells us that Onbecan, son of Caith, son of Cruthne, took the sovereignty of the seven divisions, and that Finach was lord of Erin at that time, and took hostages of the Cruithnigh. He also is one of the seven Irian kings. After three more names we have Brude bont, and are told that from him thirty Brudes reigned over Albania and Hibernia or Alban, and Erin, for a period of 150 years. These Brudes have each a name attached to them, and the Irish edition tells us that these names were also names of divisions of the country, and that the account is taken from the books of the Cruithnigh.[^[216]] It is obvious that this legend views the Picts of Alban and of Erin as forming one people, and being in close connection with each other.

The legend of the Irish Picts of Dalaradia has a close bearing upon this one. It is called ‘Of the descent of the Dalaraidhe,’ and is this. ‘Twice eighteen soldiers of the tribes of Tracia went to the fleet of the sons of Miledh to Germany, and they took them away with them and kept them as soldiers. They had no wives, and afterwards took wives of the race of Miledh; and when they had cleared their swordland among the Britons, first Magh Fortrenn, and then Maghgirginn, the succession to the sovereignty was through females. They took with them from Erin thrice fifty maidens to become mothers of sons, whence Altnaninghean or the rock of the maidens in Dalaraidhe is called. There were thirty kings of the Cruithnigh over Erin and Alban, viz. of the Cruithnigh of Alban, and of Erin, that is the Dalaraidhe. They were from Ollamhan, from whence comes Mur Ollamhan at Tara, to Fiacha, son of Baedan, who fettered the hostages of Erin and Alban. Seven kings of the Cruithnigh of Alban governed Erin at Tara,’ Then follow the seven kings of the race of Ir, who are said in the Irish legend to have ruled at Tara.[^[217]] The thirty kings of this legend who ruled over Erin and Alban are surely the thirty kings who bore the name of Brude in the previous legend, who also reigned over Erin and Alban during 150 years. In it Finach or Ollfinachta, who precedes them, is said to have taken hostages of the Cruithnigh. In this legend the thirty kings are said to have reigned over Erin and Alban, to Fiacha, son of Baedan, who fettered the hostages of Erin and Alban. Baedan was a king of Dalaradia, who died in 581, and Tighernac records in A.D. 602 the battle of Cuile Cail, in which Fiachaidh, son of Baedan, was victorious; and in 608 the death of Fiachach, son of Baedan, by the Cruithnigh.[^[218]] These entries relate surely to the event above recorded, and give us a date between 602 and 608 for the termination of the reign of these thirty kings, and 452 or 458 for its commencement. This event no doubt marks the separation of the Irish Picts or Cruithnigh of Dalaradia from all connection with the kingdom of the Picts in Scotland, and their full incorporation into the Irish monarchy.

The last of the Pictish legends relates to the Picts of Galloway. It is inserted in the Irish Nennius, and follows the account of the final departure of the Romans, when the Picts took possession of the districts extending to the southern wall, and settled there as inhabitants. It is as follows:[^[219]] ‘After this Sarran assumed the sovereignty of Britain, and established his power over the Saxons and the Cruithnigh. He married Erc, daughter of Loarn, king of Alban, but she eloped from him with Muredach, son of Eogan, son of Niall, to Erin, by whom she had a son called Murceartach MacErca, afterwards king of Ireland. Sarran then married her sister Babona, by whom he had four sons, Luirig and Cairnech and Dallan and Caemlach, and he died after victory and triumph in the House of Martain.’ By the House of Martain the monastery of Candida Casa, founded by St. Ninian, and dedicated to St. Martin of Tours, is evidently meant, which shows that Sarran’s Cruithnigh were the Picts of Galloway. ‘Luirig succeeded him, and built a fort within the precincts of the monastery of Cairnech his brother—that is, of Candida Casa—upon which Cairnech promises Murceartach MacErca, who was at that time with the king of Breatan, that is Luirig, learning military science, that he should be king of Erin and Britain for ever, if he could prevent Luirig from exercising his power against the church. Luirig refusing, Murceartach kills him, and he and Cairnech take hostages and power in that land (that is Galloway), and also the sovereignty of Britain and Cat (Caithness), and Orc (Orkney) and Saxan (Saxonia or Lothian). Murceartach then takes the wife of Luirig, and has by her four sons,—Constantine and Gaedel Ficht, from whom descend the lords[^[220]] of Breatan and the kings of Breatan Cornd, or Cornwall; and Nellan, from whom the race of Nellan, and Scandal, from whom the race of Scandal. It is in Erin the descendants of the two last are.’ It is unnecessary to follow the legend further. The kings of Cornwall and the knights of Bretan are here said to be descended from Constantine and Gaedel Ficht. Constantine is no doubt the legendary king of Cornwall, who is said to have become a Christian missionary, and preached to the Scots and Picts, and the latter is obviously the ‘eponymus’ of the Picts of Galloway, from whom their lords, here called ‘Ruirig Bretan,’ are descended.

Saxon legends.

Such being the legendary matter connected with the Picts and Scots, which appears to contain their popular traditions as to their origin, it remains to add those which tell us of the original home of the Saxons who settled in Britain. Bede says that the nation of the Angles or Saxons who settled in Britain consisted of three peoples of Germany:—The Jutes, from whom sprang the people of Kent and the Isle of Wight; the Saxons, from whom came the East, Middle, and West Saxons—that is, those of Essex, Middlesex, and Wessex; and the Angles, from whom came the East and Mid Angles, the Mercians, and the whole race of the Northumbrians—that is, all those nations of the Angles which inhabited the country north of the Humber. He states that the original settlements of these three races were in the Cimbric Chersonese, that the Saxons came from Old Saxony, which seems to have been nearly modern Holstein; the Angles from that country called ‘Angulus,’ which in his day was nearly deserted, by which the present province of Angeln in Sleswick is probably meant; and the Jutes north of them, the Angles being between them and the Saxons. Whether in this Bede is reporting a tradition of the people themselves, or whether it is merely a speculation of his own, he does not tell us.[^[221]] Nennius brings the Saxons from Germania generally;[^[222]] but in the genealogies annexed to his work, which are not much later than the period when Bede wrote, he deduces the pedigrees of the kings of Kent, East Anglia, Mercia, Deira, and Bernicia from four brothers, sons of Woden; so that he seems to have considered these five nations, being Bede’s Jutes and Angles, as forming one people, whose successive arrivals he describes, under the name of Saxons,[^[223]] while he omits Bede’s three nations of East, Middle, and West Saxons, who did not arrive in the island till the end of the fifth and the beginning of the sixth century, thus confining his account to those who arrived in the early part of the fifth century. The description which Bede gives of the country from which the Saxons came does not correspond with what we learn of its early history from other sources. The first people whom we read of as inhabiting the Cimbric Chersonese were the Cimbri, the Teutones, and the Ambrones, who assailed the Roman Empire about a century before Christ. The name of Teutones appears to have passed through several forms into that of Juthæ or Jutæ, and the Ambrones seem to be the same people whom Ptolemy places in the southern part of the peninsula, now Holstein, and calls Saxones, and to whom he also gives three islands, now Northstrand, Busen, and Heligoland.[^[224]] The Angles Ptolemy places on the west bank of the river Elbe, somewhat more to the south, in what is now the Duchy of Magdeburg.[^[225]]

The name of Saxones, however, in the third century, no longer designated a single nation, but had a much wider signification, and was applied to a confederacy of the nations extending along the north coast from the Elbe to the Ems, if not the Rhine. These were the Cauci, Cherusci, and Angrivarii. Between the Ems and Rhine were the Frisii or Frisones. From the Ems to the Elbe were the Cauci; and south of them were the Cherusci and Angrivarii, about the Weser; and on the west bank of the Elbe the Teutones and the Angles. It is in this wider sense that the name of Saxons was applied to those people who harassed the coast of Britain in the concluding half-century of the Roman province. It is to the people inhabiting this country that the name of Old Saxons was applied, to distinguish them from the Saxons in Britain. Beyond the Elbe were the original Saxons, and mixed with both were Frisians—one body extending along the coast from the Ems to the Weser, and another beyond the Saxons in Sleswick, where Bede places his Jutes. The islands, too, which Ptolemy called the islands of the Saxons, and which lay off the west coast of the Cimbrian Chersonese, appear afterwards as Frisian Islands. Whether this was an actual mixture of Frisians with the Saxons, or a mere extension of the name to a part of the Saxons, it is difficult to determine;[^[226]] but although a small district in the east of Sleswick, extending from the Schley to Flensburg, bore the name of Angeln, there is no record of any people called Angli having ever occupied it. They are placed on the west bank of the Elbe behind the Cauci, and their name too probably spread much beyond its original limits.[^[227]] Of the Saxons who settled in Britain prior to the year 441, the colony which occupied the northern district about the Roman wall were probably Frisians, as the Firth of Forth is termed by Nennius the Frisian Sea, and a part of its northern shore was known as the Frisian Shore, but the great bulk of the immigrants were Angli. Bede gives us the expression of ‘the nation of the Angles’ for the whole Saxon people. Augustine’s mission to Kent was a mission to the Angles. The church he founded there was the church of the Angles. The name of Anglia was, however, unknown to Bede; and in his Lives of the Abbots of Wearmouth he quotes a letter written by Huaetberctus, abbot of the monastery of Wearmouth, to Pope Gregory in 716, in which he says his monastery was in ‘Saxonia.’[^[228]] The name of Saxons, applied in a general way to those who settled in Britain prior to 441, seems therefore to have been used in its geographical sense. Procopius was probably right in saying that they consisted of Frisians and Angles.[^[229]] The tribes who arrived much later, and founded the petty kingdoms of the East, West, and South Saxons, probably alone belonged to the Saxons proper. The bulk of the natives consisted of the Angli, and their national name soon superseded the general appellation of Saxons, though the geographical term ‘Saxonia’ still remained attached to the most northern part of their territory.