BRITAIN AFTER THE ROMANS.
[Sidenote: Obscurity of history of Britain after the departure of
Romans.]
The termination of the Roman dominion in Britain produced a great and
marked change in its political position and destinies. It ceased to form
a part of the great European Empire, and for the time lost the link
which connected it with the civilisation of the west. It no longer took
part in the common life of the western nations; and, isolated from all
that created for them a common interest, or unconsciously combined them
in a common struggle, out of which the elements of a new historical
world were to emerge, it seemed to relapse into that state of barbarism
from which the influence of the Roman dominion had for the time
extricated it. The British Isles seemed as it were to retire again into
the recesses of that western ocean from which they had emerged in the
reign of the Emperor Claudius; and a darkness, which grew more profound
as their isolated existence continued, settled down upon them and
shrouded their inhabitants from the eye of Europe till the spread of
that great and paramount influence which succeeded to the dominion of
the Roman Empire, and inherited its concentrating energy—the Christian
Church—took Britain within its grasp, and the works of its monastic and
clerical writers once more brought its fortunes within the sphere of
history.
[Sidenote: Settlement of barbaric tribes in Britain.]
When the page of history once more opens to its annals, we find that the
barbaric nations, whom we left harassing the Roman province till the
Romans abandoned the island, had now effected fixed settlements within
the island, and formed permanent kingdoms within its limits. South of
the Firths of Forth and Clyde we find her containing a Saxon
organisation and tribes of Teutonic descent hitherto known by the
general name of Saxons, in full possession of her most valuable and
fertile districts, and the Romans of the old British provincials
confined to the mountains of Wales and Cumbria, the western districts
extending from the Solway to the Clyde, and the peninsula of Cornwall.
North of the Firths we find the barbaric tribes of the Picts and Scots,
which had so often harassed the Roman province from the north and west,
formed into settled kingdoms with definite limits; while Hibernia or
Ireland now appears under the additional designation of Scotia.[102]
[Sidenote: Ignorance of Britain by writers of sixth century.]
So little was known of Britain during this interval of upwards of a
century and a half, so undefined were the notions of the Continental
writers, that Procopius, writing from Constantinople in the sixth
century, describes Britain as extending from east to west, and
consisting of two islands, ‘Brittia’ and ‘Brettannia,’ Brittia lay
nearest Gaul, and was divided by a wall, the country to the east of
which, or that nearest the Continent, he believed to be inhabited,
fertile, and productive, and to be occupied by three nations,—the
‘Angiloi,’ ‘Phrissones,’ and ‘Brittones synonymous with the Isle;’ but
the region to the west of the wall, by which he indicates Caledonia or
the districts north of the Forth and Clyde, he only knew as a region
infested by wild beasts, and with an atmosphere so tainted that human
life could not exist; and he repeats a fable derived, he says, from the
inhabitants, that this region was the place of departed spirits. The
country south of the Humber he considered a separate island, named
‘Brettannia.’[103]
Stephanus Byzantinus, writing from the same place half a century
earlier, considered ‘Albion,’ ‘Brettia,’ and ‘Pretania’ separate
islands, inhabited respectively by the ‘Albiones,’ ‘Brettanoi,’ and
‘Pretanoi.’[104]
Even Gildas, himself of British descent, and writing from the
neighbouring shore of Armorica, takes his description of the size of
Britain from the cosmogony of Ethicus, written two centuries earlier,
merely qualifying it by the addition, ‘except where the headlands of
sundry promontories stretch farther into the sea,’[105] apparently
referring to Caledonia, but he evidently considered the country north of
the Firths of Forth and Clyde as a separate island from the rest of
Britain. He applies the same epithet of ‘transmarine’ to its inhabitants
and to the Scots from Ireland. He calls the regions between the walls
the extreme part of the island, and he writes of its transactions as if
he had no personal knowledge of them, but had received them by report
from a distant land; for he says he will relate his history,[106] ‘so
far as he is able, not so much from the writings and written memorials
of his native country, which either are not to be found, or if ever
there were any of them have been consumed in the fires of the enemy, or
been carried off by his exiled countrymen, as from foreign report,
which, from the interruption of intercourse, is by no means clear.’[107]
[Sidenote: Position of Britain at this time as viewed from Rome.]
In order to realise thoroughly the cause of this darkness and confusion
which appear to have settled upon Britain and its affairs after the
departure of the Romans, we must consider its real position towards Rome
as viewed from thence. During the period of the Roman dominion it
resembled a distant colony exposed to the incursions of frontier tribes
whom no treaties could bind and no defeats subjugate, requiring a large
military force for its protection, the accounts of whose proceedings
reached Rome at distant intervals, and only attracted more than a
passing attention when a crisis occurred in her affairs, which must have
been considered rather as a vexatious interruption in matters of nearer
and more engrossing interest than a subject of general attention. When
the Roman government was withdrawn, she resembled such a distant colony
with all connection severed between her and the home government,
abandoned to the incursions of her enemies, and left to protect and rule
herself.
How completely such a change would for the time blot out a distant
colony from the map of the civilised world may be readily conceived; and
when she again emerged in the form of a political state, containing once
more the elements of civilisation and of a common interest with the rest
of the world, the intermediate period of confused and uncertain
knowledge would appear almost analogous to that dark age of barbarian
life which precedes the birth of infant states, and on which the dim
light of tradition and the lays of a rude people engaged in internecine
war alone throw an uncertain ray. So it was with Britain. Deserted
almost entirely by the Continental historians, and deprived of the clue
which any connection with European events would afford, we are left for
the history of this interval to the uncertain guide of tradition; and
although it necessarily fails in affording us the means of obtaining a
connected and trustworthy history, yet by discriminating between what is
tradition or fable and what may fairly be accepted as history, and by
combining the indications which traditional accounts derived from
different sources afford, with the scattered notices contained in
writings contemporary, or nearly so, with the events, we may yet be able
to present the salient features of the history of this period with some
confidence in their reality, and in something like chronological order.
These sources of information, uncertain as they are, and faint as is the
light which they throw upon the history of the country during this
interval, yet reveal very distinctly indications that to the rule of the
Romans in the island there succeeded a fierce and protracted struggle
between the provincial Britons and the various barbarian tribes, to
whose assaults they had been exposed for so many years, till it
terminated in the settlement of the latter in the country, and the
formation of four kingdoms, embracing these several races within
definite limits. They tell us also something of those races, and of
their character and relation to each other. The contest which succeeded
the departure of the Romans was one not merely for the possession of the
Roman territory, but for the succession to her dominion in the island.
The competing parties consisted, on the one hand, of the provincial
Britons who had just emerged from under the Roman rule; and, on the
other, of those independent tribes, partly inhabitants of the island and
partly piratical adventurers from other regions, who had so frequently
ravaged the Roman province, and now endeavoured to snatch the prize from
the provincial Britons, and from each other.
[Sidenote: The four races in Britain.]
The races engaged in this struggle were four—the Britons, the Picts, the
Scots, and the Saxons or Angles.[108] The two former were indigenous,
the two latter foreign settlers.
[Sidenote: The Britons.]
With regard to the former, so many years of Roman dominion in the island
could hardly fail to have produced, in some respects, a deep and lasting
effect upon the native population; but it did not leave, as might have
been expected from the existence of the Roman province for so long a
period, a provincial people speaking the Roman language, and preserving
their laws and customs. The tendency of the Britons was to throw off the
stamp of Roman provincialism with the civil government against which
they had rebelled, and to relapse into their primitive Celtic habits and
modes of thought. This arose partly from the character of the Roman
civil rule, partly from the different effect produced by it in different
parts of the country. The distance of Britain from the seat of
government, its fertility, and the uncertainty of the Roman tenure of
the island, caused it to be regarded less as a valuable portion of the
Empire than as a distant mine from which every temporary advantage ought
to be drawn at whatever cost to the natives. The Roman civil rule was
harsh and oppressive; the British provinces a field for exaction, from
which everything it could be made to yield was extracted and carried off
without remorse. The effects, too, of the Roman rule were various. On
the provincials of the fertile, accessible, and completely subjugated
districts, they were more deep and lasting. To a great extent they lost
their nationality and became Roman citizens. With it went also their
natural courage, and either the desire or the spirit to resume an
independent position, and they became enervated or effeminate. On the
inhabitants of the northern and western portions of the province the
effect must have been lighter and more ephemeral in its character. They
were more in the position of native tribes under a foreign rule than of
the civilised inhabitants of a province. They were exposed to the
continual incursions of the barbaric tribes beyond the bounds of the
Roman Empire; and as they had in a greater degree preserved their
peculiar habits and national characteristics, the withdrawal of the
Roman army and civil government was more the removal of a restraint
which left them at liberty to resort to their old habits and resume
their independent existence as best they might. Even upon the barbarian
tribes who had remained in hostility to the Roman rule it exercised an
indirect influence. It created union among them—the gradual combination
of small communities into larger associations under a general name, and
the moulding of a warlike barbarian people into a social organisation in
advance of what they had been.
But the great legacies of Rome to Britain were the idea of
monarchy,[109] the centralisation of authority, and the municipal
government, the position of the ‘civitas’ or city as the centre of local
authority to the surrounding territory. In provincial Britain the local
government under the civil staff of the Romans was vested in the cities
with their senate or ‘curia,’ the ‘decuriones’[110] which composed it,
and the magistrates elected by them. It was to them Honorius addressed
his letters, and when the Roman civilians were driven out they succeeded
to their authority, each city forming the centre of a small territorial
rule. Of the provincial Britons we find clear indications of a marked
distinction between these two classes: the first consisting of those who
considered themselves more peculiarly Romans, and bore the impress of
their language and habits, among whom were also to be found the
descendants of the Roman soldiers who had become naturalised prior to
the termination of the Roman government in Britain, and remained in the
island. There were in fact three descriptions of persons who might be
termed Romans. There was, first, the Roman army, consisting to a great
extent of barbarian auxiliaries, parties of whom remained stationed at
the same places during the greater part of their occupation of the
island. There was, secondly, the civil government, which, from the time
of Constantine, if not from that of Diocletian, had been distinct from
the military organisation, and had imposed upon the provinces a numerous
and oppressive body of civil officials, principal and subordinate; and
there were, thirdly, the descendants of those of the military who had
received benefices or grants of land, or had connected themselves by
marriage with the natives, and were thus naturalised among them. The
Roman troops had been withdrawn by the various usurpers who assumed the
purple in the island. The civil government had been expelled by the
people, by whom, in common with all the provincials of the Roman Empire,
it was detested and reluctantly submitted to; but the third class
remained, and naturally became the leaders of those provincials who had
become, as it were, Romanised. This class of the provincial Britons
would be found mainly in that part of the province longest subjected and
most easily accessible to Roman influence, bounded by the Humber and the
Severn, and in the eastern and more level portion of the territory
between the Humber and the Firths of Forth and Clyde, where the proper
frontier of the province existed.
The second great class of the provincial Britons consisted of those who
had been later conquered, and, occupying the wilder and more secluded
regions of the north and west, retained less of the impress of the Roman
provincial rule. These, on the departure of the Romans, fell back more
upon a British nationality; and while the former fell an easy prey to
the invader, the latter, retaining their British speech in its
integrity, and possessing more of the warlike habits of a people
inhabiting mountainous and pastoral districts, after the first
paralysing effect of the absence of their usual protectors, the Roman
troops, had passed away, took part in the struggle which ensued with
vigour and animation.
Gildas, the British historian, alludes plainly enough to these two
classes when he says that ‘the discomfited people, wandering in the
woods, began to feel the effects of a severe famine, which compelled
many of them without delay to yield themselves up to their cruel
persecutors to obtain subsistence. Others of them, however, lying hid in
mountains, caves, and woods, continually sallied out from thence to
renew the war, and then it was for the first time they overthrew their
enemies who had for so many years been living in their country.’[111]
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.
[Sidenote: 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.
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;’[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,
Had one perfect daughter
Dustric, she was for every good deed[125] (renowned).
This Drust is therefore clearly connected with Galloway; and we thus
learn that when two kings appear in the Pictish Chronicle as reigning
together, one of them is probably king of the Picts of Galloway.[126]
The Drusts are followed by two brothers of Drest son of Gyrom, a Talerg,
and another Drest son of Munait, and then we find ourselves on firm
historic ground when we come to Bridei son of Mailcu.[127] He is said to
have reigned thirty years, and to have been baptized in the eighth year
of his reign by St. Columba. As that saint is recorded to have come from
Ireland to Britain in the year 563, this places the first year of his
reign in the year 556, and the termination of his reign in the year 586.
His death is, however, recorded by Tighernac in the year 583. Bede terms
him Bridius, son of Meilochon, a most powerful king reigning over the
Picts, and says that St. Columba converted his nation to Christianity in
the ninth year of his reign, having preached the word of God to the
provinces of the northern Picts;[128] and Adamnan places his fort and
palace on the banks of the river Ness.[129] The Pictish Chronicle states
that Galam Cennaleph reigned one year with Bridei, and Tighernac records
the death in 580 of Cendaeladh, king of the Picts.[130] He too was
probably a king of the Picts of Galloway, and traces of his name also
can be found in the topography of that district.[131]
We have now traced the history of the Picts down to the last half of the
sixth century, when we find ourselves on firm ground, and leave them a
Christian people, united in one kingdom under the rule of a powerful
monarch.
[Sidenote: The Scots.]
But if the word ‘Picti’ was a term applied to the native tribes beyond
the northern frontier of the Roman province, and the future kingdom of
the Picts was formed from a combination of them, it is equally clear
that the term ‘Scoti’ first appears as an appellation of the inhabitants
of Ireland. Gildas tells us that the Scots assailed the province from
the north-west,[132] which, from his standpoint, indicates Ulster as the
region whence this band of Scots had emerged, and when he describes the
Picts as settling down in the extreme part of the island, where they
still remained to his day, he adds, that the shameless Irish robbers, as
he terms the Scots, returned home, at no distant date to reappear.[133]
By this expression he appears to indicate that there was a subsequent
settlement of them in the island, but he makes no further allusion to
it.
Nennius, after giving an account of the traditionary settlement of the
Scots from Spain in Ireland, adds a notice of their later settlements in
Britain; but the text of this part of his work is unfortunately corrupt,
and seems to have been so from an early period, as the Irish translation
of it in the eleventh century contains obvious marks of its being an
attempt to explain what was obscure to the translator. He appears to
indicate settlements in North and South Wales, and in Dalrieta.[134]
Bede’s account is more consistent. He says that in course of time,
Britain, after the Britons and Picts, received a third nation, that of
the Scots, into that part of the country occupied by the Picts who came
from Ireland under their leader Reuda, and either by friendly
arrangement or by the sword acquired those seats among the Picts which
they still possess, and that from their leader Reuda they were termed
‘Dalreudini.’ He adds, that ‘Hibernia’ or Ireland was the native country
of these Scots, and that their new settlement was on the north side of
that arm of the sea which formerly divided the Britons from the Picts,
and where the Britons still have their chief fastness, the city called
‘Alcluith.’[135] There is no doubt that Alcluith is the rock in the
Clyde on which Dumbarton Castle is situated; the Firth of Clyde, the arm
of the sea in question; and that Bede correctly describes the position
of the Scottish settlement in his own day, as well as its name of
Dalriada, from which he deduces his Reuda as their ‘Eponymus.’
The notices of the Scots by the Roman writers are quite in harmony with
these traditionary accounts. They make their first appearance in 360,
when they joined the Picts and the Saxons in assailing the Roman
province. It is true that an expression of the Roman historian may be
held to imply that they had first appeared on the scene seventeen years
earlier, in the year 343; but that part of Ammianus’s work is lost, and
we have no distinct account of what took place when Constans visited
Britain in that year. When Theodosius drove back the invading tribes
after their eight years’ occupation of the province, we are clearly told
by Claudian that the Scots were driven back to ‘Ierne’ or Ireland; and
throughout all the subsequent incursions in which the Scots took part,
he implies that it was from thence they were made.
The oldest document connected with the history of their settlement in
Britain will be found in the Synchronisms of Flann Mainistrech, compiled
about the reign of Malcolm the Second, in the early part of the eleventh
century. We are there told that twenty years after the battle of Ocha,
the children of Erc passed over into ‘Alban’ or Scotland.[136] The
battle of Ocha is a celebrated era in Irish chronological history, and
was fought in Ireland in the year 478, which places this Irish colony in
the year 498; and Tighernac the annalist, who died in 1088, is quite in
accordance with this when, under the year 501, he has ‘Fergus Mor, son
of Erc, held a part of Britain with the tribe of Dalriada, and died
there.’[137] A district forming the north-east corner of Ireland, and
comprising the north half of the county of Antrim, was called Dalriada.
It appears to have been one of the earliest settlements of the Scots
among the Picts of Ulster, and to have derived its name from its
supposed founder Cairbre, surnamed ‘Righfhada’ or Riada. It lay exactly
opposite the peninsula of Kintyre, from whence it was separated by a
part of the Irish Channel of no greater breadth than about fourteen
miles; and from this Irish district the colony of Scots, which was
already Christian,[138] passed over and settled in Kintyre, and in the
island of Isla. The earlier settlements indicated by the traditionary
accounts of Nennius and Bede no doubt refer to the incursions of the
Scots in the fourth century, and their temporary occupation of Britain
during eight years.[139] The circumstances which enabled a small body of
Scots to effect this settlement among the Picts cannot now be
ascertained, and they appear to have extended themselves over a
considerable portion of territory during the first sixty years of their
kingdom, without meeting with much difficulty, during the reigns of
three of their petty kings—Domangart, son of Fergus, and his two sons,
Comgall and Gabran—till Brude, son of Mailchu, termed by Bede a powerful
monarch, became king of the Picts, when a few years after he commenced
his reign he attacked the Dalriads and drove them back to their original
seat in Kintyre, slaying their king Gabran.[140] He was succeeded by
Conall, the son of Comgall, who appears to have remained with diminished
territories in Kintyre; and it was during this period, when the Scottish
possessions were reduced to that part of Argyllshire which extends from
the Mull of Kintyre to Loch Crinan, the whole of which was originally
comprehended under the name of Kintyre, that St. Columba came over from
Ireland on his mission to convert the Picts—a mission prompted possibly
by the hazardous position in which the small Christian colony of the
Scots was placed in close contact with the still pagan nation of the
northern Picts under their powerful monarch Brude. Something like this
seems to be expressed in that remarkable poem of the eleventh century,
called the Prophecy of St. Berchan, where it is said of Columba—
Woe to the Cruithnigh to whom he will go eastward,
He knew the thing that is
Nor was it happy with him that an Erinach
Should be king in the east under the Cruithnigh.[141]
The death of Conall, son of Comgall, king of Dalriada, in the thirteenth
year of his reign, is recorded by Tighernac, and he adds that a battle
was fought in Kintyre, at a place called Delgon, in that year, in which
his son Duncan and a large number of the tribe of Gabran were
slain.[142] This battle seems to have been a further attack by the Picts
with the view of suppressing them altogether, as the same poem thus
alludes to it:—
Thirteen years altogether,
Against the hosts of the Cruithnigh, mild the illustrious.
When he died he was not king,
On Thursday in Kintyre.[143]
The death of Conall opened the succession to the children of Gabran
according to the law of tanistry, and so far as we can gather from a
statement in Adamnan’s Life of St. Columba, it fell to Eoganan to fill
the throne, but St. Columba was led by a vision to prefer his brother
Aidan, whom he solemnly inaugurated as king of Dalriada, in the island
of Iona.[144] It is more probable that he was led to prefer Aidan from
his possessing qualities which pointed him out as the fittest man to
redeem the fortunes of the Dalriads, and took this mode of giving a
sanction to his choice, which Aidan appears soon to have vindicated, as
he is termed in the Albanic Duan ‘king of many divisions,’[145] that is,
of extended territories. The Dalriads seem, as yet, to have been
considered as forming a part of Irish Dalriada, and as a colony from
them, to have been still subject to the mother tribe; but St. Columba
resolved to proceed a step further, and to make him an independent king.
Accordingly he, along with Aidan, attended a great council held at
Drumceat in the year 575, when a discussion arose between him and the
king of Ireland as to the future position of Scotch Dalriada towards
Ireland, and it was agreed that the Scotch Dalriads should be freed from
all tributes and exactions, but should join with the Irish Dalriads, as
the parent stock, in all hostings and expeditions.[146] Aidan thus
became, as it were, the second founder of the Dalriadic colony in
Scotland, and its first monarch as an independent kingdom.[147]
[Sidenote: The Saxons.]
The third of the Barbarian tribes who had assailed the Roman province,
and afterwards effected a settlement in the island, and the second of
those who were foreign settlers, were the Saxons. The traditionary
account of their settlement is thus given. Gildas tells us that when the
Picts and Scots crossed the southern wall in their last invasion of the
province, and drove the Britons before them, the provincial Britons
applied to Aetius, a powerful Roman citizen, for protection. He states
that this letter bore the address ‘To Aetius, now consul for the third
time, the groans of the Britons,’ and contained the expression, ‘The
Barbarians drive us to the sea; the sea throws us back on the
Barbarians; thus two modes of death await us, we are either slain or
drowned;’[148] that no assistance being given from Rome, the more
warlike part of the Britons overthrew their enemies, who had been for so
many years living in their country; that the Picts then settled for the
first time in the northern part of the island, and the Scots returned to
Ireland; that this was followed by a great plenty in Ireland; that a
rumour suddenly arose that their inveterate foes were rapidly
approaching to destroy the whole country, and to take possession of it,
as of old, from one end to the other; that a council was called to
settle what was best and most expedient to be done to repel the
irruptions and plunderings of these nations; and that the councillors,
along with that proud tyrant, the leader of the Britons,[149] sealed the
doom of their country by inviting in among them the fierce and impious
Saxons, ‘a race,’ says the Christian and patriotic Gildas, ‘hateful
alike to God and men,’ to repel the invasions of the northern nations.
They arrive in three “cyuls” or long ships, and land on the eastern side
of the island, where they settle. They are followed by a larger body of
their countrymen, who join them. The Barbarians, being thus introduced
as soldiers and supplied with provisions, become dissatisfied with their
monthly provisions, break the treaty, and proceed to destroy the towns
and lands till they reach the Western Sea. Then follows a lamentable
description of the ruin caused by them; and of the Britons, some were
enslaved, some fled over the sea, and others took arms under a leader of
the Roman nation—Ambrosius Aurelianus, attack their cruel conqueror and
obtain a victory. A war then follows, in which sometimes the citizens
and sometimes the enemy have the advantage, till the year of the siege
of the Badon Mount,[150] which was also the year of his birth. Such is a
_résumé_ of Gildas’s narrative of the settlement of the Saxons in
Britain, and to it only two dates can be attached. There is no question
that the letter which was sent to Aetius belongs to the year 446, when
he was for the third time consul; and the siege of Badon Hill took
place, according to the _Annales Cambriæ_, in the year 516.
Procopius, who wrote at the same time as Gildas, tells us that three
very numerous nations possess Brittia, over each of which a king
presides; which nations are named ‘Angeloi,’ ‘Phrissones,’ and those
surnamed from the island, ‘Brittones,’ He thus considers that those whom
Gildas calls generally Saxons, consisted of two nations, the Angles and
the Frisians; but he tells us nothing as to their settlement in the
island.
In our present text of Nennius we find three different accounts of the
settlement of the Saxons. The first is thus told us. ‘After the
departure of the Romans, the Britons were forty years in anxiety.
Guorthegirn then reigned in Britain, and while he reigned he was
oppressed by fear of the Scots and Picts, the Roman power, and the dread
of Ambrosius. In the meantime three cyuls came from Germany, driven into
exile, in which were Hors and Hengist. Guorthegirn received them kindly,
and gave them the island of Thanet. While Gratianus the Second and
Equantius were ruling at Rome, the Saxons were received by Guorthegirn
in the 347th year after the passion of Christ.’[151] The 347th year
after the passion of Christ is equal to the 374th year after his
incarnation, and in that year Gratianus was consul a second time in
conjunction with Æquitius. He then proceeds, ‘After the Saxons had
continued some time in the island of Thanet, Guorthegirn promised to
supply them with clothing and provision, on condition they would engage
to fight against the enemies of his country, but is unable to fulfil his
engagement, and bids them depart. Hengist then sends for reinforcements,
who come in sixteen vessels with his daughter.’ Then follows the
well-known incident of the banquet, and the cession of Kent. Hengist
then proposes to send for his son and his cousin to fight against the
Scots, and asks Guorthegirn to give them the regions next the northern
wall. Octa and Ebissa come with forty cyuls, and circumnavigating the
Picts lay waste the Orkneys, and occupy several districts beyond the
Frisian sea, as far as the confines of the Picts. They are followed by
other ships, which come to Kent.[152]
The second account is this—‘From the first year in which the Saxons came
into Britain to the fourth year of King Mervin are reckoned four hundred
and twenty-nine years.’[153] The fourth year of the reign of Mervin,
king of North Wales, corresponds with the year 821, and this places the
arrival of the Saxons in the year 392.
The last account runs thus—‘Guorthegirn, however, held the supreme
authority in Britain in the consulship of Theodosius and Valentinian,
and in the fourth year of his reign the Saxons came into Britain, Felix
and Taurus being consuls in the four hundredth year of the incarnation
of our Lord.’[154] The consulship of Theodosius and Valentinian fell in
the year 425, and that of Felix and Taurus in the year 428, which is
thus given as the date of the settlement of the Saxons.
The geographer of Ravenna, who wrote in the same century in which the
work which bears the name of Nennius was originally compiled, reports
the tradition thus:—‘In the Western Ocean is the island which is called
Britannia, where the nation of the Saxons formerly coming from ancient
Saxony, with their chief Anschis, are now seen to inhabit.’[155]
Finally, Bede, in the succeeding century, the historian of the Anglic
nation, gives us the traditionary history in the following shape. He
repeats in very much the same terms the account given by Gildas of the
incursions of the Picts and Scots beyond the southern wall; the letter
to Aetius asking assistance, which, he adds, he was unable to give on
account of the war with Blaedla and Attila, kings of the Huns; the great
famine; the efforts made by the more warlike part of the Britons; the
return of the Irish plunderers to their own home,[156] and the quietness
of the Picts in the extreme part of the island; the great plenty which
followed; the alarm of renewed invasion, when ‘they all agreed with
their king Vortigern to call over to them and from the parts beyond the
sea the Saxon nation.’[157] Bede then proceeds thus:—‘In the year of our
Lord’s incarnation 449, Martian, being made emperor with Valentinian,
and the forty-sixth from Augustus, ruled the empire seven years. Then
the nation of the Angles or Saxons, being invited by the aforesaid king,
arrived in Britain with three long ships, and had a place assigned them
to dwell in by the same king in the eastern part of the island, that
they might thus appear to be fighting for the country, whilst their real
intentions were to enslave it. Accordingly they engaged with the enemy,
who had come from the north to give battle, and obtained the victory;
which, being known at home in their own country, as also the fertility
of the country and the cowardice of the Britons, a more considerable
fleet was quickly sent over, bringing a still greater number of men,
which, being added to the former, made up an invincible army. The
new-comers received from the Britons a place to inhabit among
themselves, upon condition that they should wage war against their
enemies for the peace and security of the country, whilst the Britons
agreed to furnish them with pay.’ Bede then tells us that those who came
over were of three nations, the Saxons, the Angles, and the Jutes; and
that from the Angles came all the tribes that dwell on the north side of
the river Humber, and the other nations of the English, and that the two
first commanders are said to have been Hengist and Horsa. He then
says—‘In a short time swarms of the aforesaid nations came over into the
island, and they began to increase so much that they became terrible to
the natives themselves who had invited them. Having on a sudden entered
into a temporary league with the Picts, whom they had by this time
repelled to a distance by the force of their arms, they began to turn
their weapons against their confederates.’[158] Bede then takes from
Gildas the account of the ravages by the Saxons, and their victory by
Ambrosius Aurelianus, down to the mention of the siege of ‘Mons
Badonicus,’ which he places forty-four years after the arrival of the
Saxons, or in the year 492. He then narrates the breaking out of the
Pelagian heresy, the coming of Germanus and Lupus to Britain, the war
upon the Britons by the Saxons and the Picts, which he connects with the
league he had just mentioned as having been entered into between them,
and the victory under the influence of Germanus, usually called the
Allelujatic victory. This part of his narrative he takes from the life
of Germanus, written within forty years of his death by Constantius of
Lyons.[159]
Such is the form into which Bede has reduced this legendary history. Let
us now see how far, by the aid of contemporary notices, we can extract
the few really historical facts imbedded in it. Though Gildas tells us
very distinctly that the Barbarians who assailed the Roman province
after Maximus, who usurped the Empire, had departed with the Roman army,
and the British youth consisted solely of the two nations of the Picts
and Scots, yet certain it is that bodies of Saxons were joined with them
in their incursions. For the fact that they formed one of the barbarian
tribes who burst into the province in 360 we have the united testimony
of Ammianus and Claudian, and the latter authority is equally clear that
they formed one of the bands who invaded the province after Maximus and
were driven back by Stilicho. Ammianus tells us that in 368 the Count of
the Maritime Tract was slain, and in the Notitia Imperii we find the
same functionary termed Count of the Saxon Shore. In the same document
this designation of the Saxon Shore is also applied to the country about
Grannona in Gaul,[160] where the Saxons had established regular
settlements. It is therefore reasonable to suppose that the name of the
Saxon Shore was given to the coast extending from the Wash on the north
to near Portsmouth in the south, not because it was exposed to the
ravages of the Saxons, but because they had likewise made settlements
there.[161] We may well believe, then, that between the year 368 and the
date of the Notitia, about the beginning of the fifth century, the
Saxons who had been assailing the province from the east had effected a
settlement on the shores of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Kent; and this accords
with the two earliest dates given in Nennius, 374 and 392. The statement
by Gildas that the Saxons came on the invitation of a proud tyrant and
leader of the Britons, to whom, in the succeeding century, the name of
Guorthegirn is given, and who is associated with the arrival of the
Saxons at these early dates, seems to find its counterpart in the
invitation given to the Barbarians to invade Gaul and Britain by
Gerontius, a Count of Britain in the service of Constantine, in the year
407, and in the later form of the tradition they are certainly
identified.[162] Bede tells us that after the arrival of the Saxons in
449 they united with the Picts, whom they had driven back, and attacked
the Britons, when they were defeated in the Allelujatic victory; but
Constantius, from whom this event is taken, and who was nearly a
contemporary writer, dates this event in the year 429, thus showing the
Saxons in combination with the Picts twenty years before the date
assigned by Bede for the arrival of the former; and here again the true
date of this event is in harmony with the third date assigned in Nennius
for the arrival of the Saxons, viz., the year 428.
Finally, we have the testimony of Prosper Aquitanus, whose chronicle was
compiled in the year 455, that in 441 the British provinces had already
been reduced under the power of the Saxons.[163] Five years after this
the letter to Aetius was written, and it follows that the Barbarians,
against whom it made that despairing cry for assistance, were the
Saxons, and to them the expressions quoted from the letter are much more
applicable than to the Picts and Scots.[164] The misplacing of this
document in Gildas’s narrative has given rise to the false chronology
which has been attached to it, and we are warranted in concluding that
the settlement of the Saxons on the south-eastern shore had commenced as
early as the year 374, and that Britain was considered as under
subjection to them at least eight years before the date in which Bede
places their first arrival.
Gildas records no events between the victory, which he attributes to the
leader of the Roman party, Ambrosius Aurelianus, and the siege of Mount
Badon in 516. Nennius, who connects Ambrosius with the Roman power, and
alludes to a discord between him and Guitolin, of which he gives no
particulars, but which he places in the year 437, fills up this interval
with the exploits of Arthur.
[Sidenote: War with Octa and Ebissa’s colony.]
The Arthur of Nennius was, however, a very different personage from the
shadowy and mythic monarch of the later Welsh traditions, and of the
Arthurian romance. He is described by Nennius as merely a warrior who
was a military commander in conjunction with the petty British kings who
fought against the Saxons.[165] The Saxons referred to were those whom
Nennius had previously described as colonising the regions in the north
under Octa and Ebissa, and it is to that part of the country we must
look for the sites of the twelve battles which he records. The first was
fought at the mouth of the river Glein. The second, third, fourth, and
fifth, on another river called Dubglas, in the region of Linnius, and
this brings us at once to the Lennox, where two rivers called the
Douglas, or Dubhglass, fall into Loch Lomond. This was certainly one of
the districts about the wall called ‘Guaul’ which had been occupied by
Octa’s colony; and Nennius tells us elsewhere that Severus’s wall, which
passed by Cairpentaloch to the mouth of the river Clyde, was called in
the British speech ‘Guaul.’[166] The sixth battle was fought at a river
called Bassas. The seventh in the Caledonian wood,[167] which again
takes us to the north for the site of these battles. The eighth in the
fastness of Guinnion, which is connected by an old tradition with the
church of Wedale, in the vale of the Gala Water. The ninth at the City
of the Legion. The tenth on the strand of the river called Tribruit. The
eleventh in the mount called Agned, which once more brings us to the
north, as there can be no doubt that Edinburgh, called by the Welsh
Mynyd Agned, is the place meant, and this battle appears to have been
directed against the Picts, who were in league with the Saxons.[168] The
twelfth was the battle at Mount Badon,[169] in which Nennius tells us
that 960 men of the enemy perished in one day from the onslaught of
Arthur, and that he was victorious in all of these battles. Nennius adds
that while the Saxons were defeated in all of these battles, they were
continually seeking help from Germany, and being increased in numbers,
and obtaining kings from Germany to rule them till the reign of Ida, son
of Eobba, who was the first king in Bernicia, with which sentence he
closes his narrative, and this still further tends to place these events
in the north. So far we may accept Arthur as a historic person, and this
account of his battles as based on a genuine tradition.[170] The
chronicle attached to Nennius tells us that he was slain twenty-one
years afterwards in the battle of Camlan, fought in 537 between him and
Medraud.[171] As Medraud was the son of Llew of Lothian, this battle
again takes us to the north for its site.[172]
[Sidenote: Kingdom of Bernicia.]
Ten years after this we find the scattered tribes of the Angles and the
Frisians occupying the districts on the east coast from the Tees to the
Forth, and those who had been the opponents of Arthur in most of these
battles, formed into the kingdom of Bernicia by Ida, son of Eobba, in
the year 547,[173] who placed his capital on a headland not far from the
Tweed, where he erected a fort called in British Dinguardi, or
Dinguoaroy, and in Anglic Bebbanburch, afterwards Bamborough. Ida
reigned twelve years, and died in 559, when he was succeeded by Ella,
who belonged to a different family, and added the districts between the
Humber and the Tees, termed Deira, thus forming one kingdom of
Northumbria, extending from the Humber as far north as the territory
occupied by the Angles reached. The province of Bernicia, however,
remained under the rule of Ida’s sons, and it is with this province
alone that we are concerned in this work.[174]
Ida left twelve sons, six of whom reigned successively over Bernicia,
and it is with these sons that the conflict between the Britons and
Saxons in the north was continued. Adda, the eldest, reigned seven
years, and was followed by Clappa, one year, which brings us to the year
567, when Hussa, the next brother, begins to reign; and we are told that
‘against him four kings of the Britons—Urbgen, Riderchen, Guallauc, and
Morcant—fought.’[175] One of their kings, Riderchen, belonged to that
party among the Britons who were termed Romans, from their supposed
descent either from Roman soldiers or from Roman citizens; the other
three to the native or warlike party among the Britons. These seem
mainly to have belonged to that part of the nation which occupied the
western districts, while the so-called Romans were to be found
principally in the central regions. Of the result of this war during
Hussa’s reign we are told nothing; but dissensions seem now to have
broken out among the Britons themselves, who formed two parties, arising
from other grounds besides those of supposed descent. The existence in
the country of a pagan people like the Angles, and the extent to which
they had subjected the natives, exercised a great influence even over
those who were not subject to their power. The Picts, who were either
subjected by them or in close alliance with them, were more immediately
under their influence, and seem to a great extent to have apostatised
from the Christianity introduced among them by St. Ninian, and a great
part of the British population in the south fell back upon a half
paganism fostered by their bards, who recalled the old traditions of the
race before they had been Christianised under the Roman dominion. There
was thus a Christian and what may be called a Pagan party. The so-called
Romans mainly belonged to the former, and this Riderchen or Rhydderch
was at their head. The latter embraced the native Britons, whose leaders
traced their descent from Coil Hen, or the aged, and their head was
Gwendolew.
[Sidenote: Battle of Ardderyd.]
These dissensions now broke into open rupture, and a great battle is
recorded to have taken place between them in the year 573, which was to
decide who was to have the mastery. It was termed the battle of
Ardderyd, and the scene of it was at Arthuret, situated on a raised
platform on the west side of the river Esk, about eight miles north of
Carlisle. This name is simply the modern form of the word Ardderyd. Two
small hills here are called the Arthuret knowes, and the top of the
highest, which overhangs the river, is fortified by an earthen rampart.
About four miles north of this is a stream which flows into the Esk, and
bears the name of Carwhinelow, in which the name of Gwendolew can be
easily recognised; and near the junction of the Esk and the Liddel, at
no great distance from it, is the magnificent hill-fort called the Moat
of Liddel. Here this great battle was fought, the centre of a group of
Welsh traditions.[176] It resulted in the victory of the Christian party
and the establishment of Rhydderch as the king of the Cumbrian Britons.
We find him mentioned in Adamnan’s Life of Saint Columba as reigning at
Alclyde or Dumbarton, and from the seat of his capital his kingdom came
to be called Strathclyde. Adamnan tells us that Rodercus, son of
Tothail, who reigned at the Rock of Cluaithe (Petra Cloithe, Alclyde, or
Dumbarton), being on friendly terms with St. Columba, sent him a message
to ask him whether he would be killed by his enemies or not, and the
saint replied that he would never be delivered into the hands of his
enemies, but die at home on his own pillow; which prophecy, adds
Adamnan, regarding King Roderic, was fully accomplished, for, according
to his word, he died quietly in his own house.[177] Adamnan was born
only twenty-one years after the death of Rhydderch.
The next brother who reigned over Bernicia was Freodulf, for six years,
but no war is recorded in his reign; but that of his successor
Theodoric, who reigned from 580 to 587, introduces us to a new champion
for the Britons, Urbgen, the City-born—the Urien of the Bards—who, with
his sons, is said to have fought stoutly against him; and it is added
that sometimes the enemy and sometimes the natives prevailed. This
Theodoric is the Flamddwyn or Flame-bearer of the Bards.[178] He was
succeeded by the last of the brothers who reigned, Aethelric, who, after
a short reign of two years, was followed in 594 by his son Ethelfred
Flesaurs, of whom Bede tells us that he was a most powerful king and
covetous of glory, who more than all the chiefs of the Angles ravaged
the nation of the Britons. For no one among the tribunes, no one among
the kings, after exterminating or subjugating the natives, caused a
greater extent of their territory to become either tributary to the
nation of the Angles or to be colonised by them.[179]
During the last three reigns another actor had appeared on the scene,
and this was Aidan the Scot. Before his accession to the throne of
Dalriada in 574 he appears as one of the kinglets among the nations
south of the Firths of Forth and Clyde, and seems to have had claims
upon the district of Manau or Manann, peopled by the Picts. After his
accession he allied himself with Baedan, son of Cairell, who then ruled
over the Irish Cruithnigh, and called himself king of Ulster. By him the
Saxons were driven out of Manann, and he retained possession of it till
his death in 581.[180] Two years after Tighernac records the battle of
Manann by Aidan, of which, however, we have no particulars except that
he was victorious; and again, in 596, the battle of Chirchind, in which
four of his sons were slain.[181] Adamnan evidently refers to this
battle, which he calls ‘the battle of the Miathi,’ when he tells us in
his Life of Saint Columba that while the Saint was in Iona ‘he suddenly
said to his minister, Diormit, “Ring the bell.” The brethren, startled
at the sound, proceeded quickly to the church, with the holy prelate
himself at their head. There he began, on bended knees, to say to them,
“Let us pray now earnestly to the Lord for this people and king Aidan,
for they are engaging in battle at this moment.” Then, after a short
time, he went out of the oratory, and, looking up to heaven, said, “The
barbarians are fleeing now, and to Aidan is given the victory—a sad one
though it be;” and the blessed man in his prophecy declared the number
of the slain in Aidan’s army to be three hundred and three men.’[182] It
is difficult to fix the site of this battle, but it was no doubt fought
against the Southern Picts, who seem to have been still known by the
name of Miathi, perhaps the same as Mæatæ.
[Sidenote: Battle of Degsastane or Dawstane.]
In 603 Rhydderch appears to have died, and Bede tells us that Aidan came
against Aedilfrid with a large and powerful army. It consisted no doubt
of a combined force of Scots and Britons, at whose head Aidan was placed
as Guledic, and he appears also to have had the aid of Irish Picts. He
advanced against the Bernician kingdom, and entered Aedilfrid’s
territories by the vale of the Liddel, from the upper end of which a
pass opens to the vale of the Teviot, and another to that of the North
Tyne. The great rampart called the Catrail, which separated the Anglic
kingdom from that of the Strathclyde Britons, crosses the upper part of
the vale of the Liddel. Its remains appear at Dawstaneburn, whence it
goes on to Dawstanerig, and here, before he could cross the mountain
range which separates Liddesdale from these valleys, Aidan was
encountered by Aedilfrid and completely defeated, his army being cut to
pieces at a place called by Bede ‘Degsastan,’ in which we can recognise
the name of Dawstane, still known there. On the part of Aedilfrid, his
brother Theobald, called by Tighernac, Eanfraith, was slain by Maeluma,
the son of Baedan, king of Ulster, and the body of men he led into
battle cut off.[183] On Nine Stone Rig, opposite Dawstane, there still
exists a circle of nine stones; and on the farm of Whisgills, some miles
lower down the valley, there is an enormous cairn in the middle of an
extensive moor, and near it a large stone set on end about five feet
high, called the standing stone; and at Milnholm, on the Liddel, an
ancient cross of one stone. These are probably memorials of the battle
and flight which followed it. It was fought within sight of the ancient
hill-fort which we have identified as Coria, one of the cities of the
Ottadeni in the second century.
Bede adds that this battle was fought in the year 603, and the eleventh
year of the reign of Aedilfrid, which lasted for twenty-four years, and
that from this time forth till his own day (that is, till 731), none of
the kings of the Scots ventured to come in battle against the nation of
the Angles, and thus terminated the contest between these tribes for the
possession of the northern province substantially in favour of the
latter people, who under Aedilfrid now retained possession of the
eastern districts from the Humber to the Firth of Forth, as far west as
the river Esk.
-----
Footnote 102:
Hibernia is first mentioned as being also called Scotia by Isidore of
Seville in 580.
Footnote 103:
Procop. _Bell. Goth._ iv. 20. (A.D. 540-550.)
Footnote 104:
Steph. Byzant. _De Urbibus_ (A.D. 490).
Footnote 105:
Exceptis diversorum prolixioribus promontoriorum tractibus, quæ
arcuatis oceani sinibus ambuitur.—_Hist. Gild._ § 3.
Footnote 106:
Quantum tamen potuero, non tam ex scripturis patriæ scriptorumve
monimentis—quippe quæ, vel si qua fuerint, aut ignibus hostium exusta,
aut civium exsilii classe longius deportata, non compareant,—quam
transmarina relatione, quæ crebris irrupta intercapedinibus, non satis
claret.—_Hist. Gild._ 4.
Footnote 107:
It is hardly conceivable that Gildas, if he was a native of
Strathclyde, as is generally supposed, could have used the language he
does regarding the northern part of the island; but there is much
confusion regarding his life, and great difficulty in ascertaining the
real events of it. Usher came to the conclusion that there were at
least two persons of the name, whom he distinguishes as Gildas Albanus
and Gildas Badonicus, whose acts have been confounded together, and
his opinion has been very generally adopted. Mabillon considered that
there was only one Gildas. There are four lives of St. Gildas
preserved. One by Caradoc of Llancarvan, printed in Stevenson’s
edition of his writings; another in the Bodleian, printed by Capgrave;
another by a monk of Ruys, printed by Mabillon; and a fourth in the
British Museum, still in MS. (Egerton, No. 7457). It is, however,
impossible to compare these lives without seeing that they relate to
the same person. Gildas in his work states that the battle of Badon
was fought in the year he was born, and that he was then forty-four
years, which, as that battle was fought, according to the Annales
Cambriæ, in 516, gives us 560 as the year in which he composed his
history.
The confusion has arisen, in this as in everything relating to Welsh
history, from not discriminating between his acts compiled before
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s fabulous history appeared, and those which bear
the impress of that work. The third and fourth life belong to the
former period; that by Caradoc of Llancarvan, and the second, which is
substantially the same, to the latter.
In the fourth life he is said to have been born in Bretagne; to have
been educated by St. Phylebert, abbot of Tournay; to have founded a
monastery, which, by its description, answers to that of Ruys; and to
have gone to Island, by which, however, Ireland is evidently
meant—when it terminates abruptly. In the life by the monk of Ruys, he
is said to have been born in ‘Arecluta fertilissima regione,’ which
‘Arecluta autem regio, quum sit Britanniæ pars, vocabulum sumpsit a
quodam flumine quod Clut nuncupatur.’ His father, Caunus, had four
other sons—Cuillus, who succeeded him; Mailocus, who founded a
monastery at ‘Lyuhes in pago Elmail;’ Egreas; Alleccus; and Peteona,
who became a nun. Mailocus is evidently St. Meilig, son of Caw, to
whom the church of Llowes in Elfael, Radnorshire, is dedicated.
Egreas, Alleccus, and Peteona are Saints Eigrad, Gallgo, and Peithien,
children of Caw, to whom churches in Anglesea are dedicated. If he was
born, therefore, in Britain, it is more probable that Arecluta was the
vale of the Clwyd in North Wales, where St. Kentigern founded the
church of Llanelwy, or St. Asaphs. He is said in this life to have
been educated by Illtutus, and to have gone to Ireland in the reign of
King Ainmere, and after going to Rome to have gone to Armorica when he
was thirty years old, and founded the monastery of Ruys, where after
ten years he wrote his history. This places the date of his leaving
Britain for Armorica in 546, and his history in 556, and he is said to
have died an old man in Armorica. Ainmere, king of Ireland, reigned
according to Tighernac, from 566 to 569, and the Annales Cambriæ have
at 565, ‘Navigatio Gildæ in Hybernia,’ and Tighernac has at 570
‘Gillas quievit.’ He therefore probably died in Ireland, and the monk
of Ruys has made his visit to Ireland precede his going to Armorica in
order that he may claim Ruys as the place of his death.
The acts compiled subsequent to the appearance of Geoffrey of
Monmouth’s history identify Cuillus, his father’s eldest son, with
Geoffrey’s Howel, king of Alclyde—transfer his birth to Strathclyde,
where his father is in the one life Nau rex Scotiæ—in the other Caunus
rex Albaniæ—increase his family from four to twenty-four sons—import
the element of Arthur and his times into his acts; and finally take
him to Glastonbury, where he dies after it has been besieged by King
Arthur,—additions which have led to the solution of two Gildases, but
which may more reasonably be rejected as spurious.
Footnote 108:
In ea prius habitabant quatuor et gentes; Scoti, Picti, atque Saxones,
Britones.—Nennius, _Hist. Brit._ 2. Omnes nationes et provincias
Britanniæ, quæ in quatuor linguas, id est, Brettonum, Pictorum,
Scottorum, et Anglorum divisae sunt, in ditione accepit.—Bede, _Ec.
Hist._ iii. c. vi. Gildas terms the latter people simply Saxones.
Bede, in narrating their settlement, ‘Gens Anglorum sive Saxonum.’
Footnote 109:
Procopius makes the important statement that, after the departure of
Constantine, although the Romans were unable to recover the island,
the kingly government did not cease and the island fall into anarchy;
but ‘that it remained subject to tyrants.’—Procop. _Bel. Van._ i. 2.
Footnote 110:
St. Patrick tells us in his _Confessio_ that his father lived at
Bannavem Taberneæ, and in his epistle to Coroticus that he was a
‘decurio.’
Footnote 111:
Interea fames dira ac famosissima vagis ac nutabundis hæret, quæ
multos eorum cruentis compellit prædonibus sine delatione victas dare
manus, ut pauxillum ad refocillandam animam cibi caperent, alios vero
nusquam; quin potius de ipsis montibus, speluncis ac saltibus, dumis
consertis continue rebellabant. Et tum primum inimicis per multos
annos in terra agentibus, strages dabant.—Gild. _de Excidio Brit._ 17.
Footnote 112:
Ab aquilone; strictly north-north-east.
Footnote 113:
Pro indigenis.
Footnote 114:
See Fordun, _Chron._ vol. ii. p. 380, note.
Footnote 115:
‘Post intervallum vero multorum annorum non minus octingentorum Picti
venerunt et occupaverunt insulas quae vocantur Orcades, et postea ex
insulis vastaverunt regiones multas, et occupaverunt eas in sinistrali
plaga Britanniæ, et manent ibi usque in hodiernam diem, tertiam partem
Britanniæ tenentes.’ The previous paragraph shows that he counted the
800 years from the traditionary settlement of the Britons, which he
places in the time when Eli judged Israel, that is, in the twelfth
century before Christ.
Footnote 116:
Ut perhibent.
Footnote 117:
Bede, _Hist. Ec._ i. § 7.
Footnote 118:
Prædicaturus verbum Dei provinciis septentrionalium Pictorum, hoc est,
eis quæ arduis atque horrentibus montium jugis, ab australibus eorum
sunt regionibus sequestratæ. Namque ipsi australes Picti, qui intra
eosdem montes habent sedes, etc.—Bede, _Hist. Ec._ B. iii. c. 4.
Footnote 119:
These Cruithnigh are repeatedly mentioned by Adamnan in his Life of
St. Columba, who wrote between the years 692 and 697. See ed. 1874,
pp. 120, 146, 253. In the Life of St. Cadroë we find, ‘Igitur ad
terram egressi, ut moris est, situm locorum, mores et habitum hominum
explorare, gentem Pictaneorum reperiunt.’—_Chron. Picts and Scots_, p.
108.
Footnote 120:
Chalmers, in his _Caledonia_ (i. p. 358), states dogmatically that
Galloway was colonised in the eighth century by Cruithne from Ireland,
and that they were followed by ‘fresh swarms from the Irish hive
during the ninth and tenth centuries,’ and this statement has been
accepted and repeated by all subsequent writers as if there were no
doubt about it. There is not a vestige of authority for it. Galloway
belonged during these centuries to the Northumbrian kingdom, and was a
part of Bernicia. Bede, in narrating the foundation of Candida Casa by
St. Ninian (B. iii. c. iv.), says, ‘qui locus ad provinciam
Berniciorum pertinens;’ and there is abundant evidence that Galloway
was under the rule of the Northumbrian kings after his time. It is
antecedently quite improbable that it could have been colonised from
Ireland during this time without a hint of such an event being
recorded either in the Irish or the English Annals.
The only authorities referred to by Chalmers consist of an entire
misapplication of two passages from the Ulster Annals. He says, ‘In
682 A.D., Cathasao, the son of Maoledun, the Maormor of the Ulster
Cruithne, sailed with his followers from Ireland, and landing on the
Firth of Clyde, among the Britons, he was encountered and slain by
them near Mauchlin, in Ayr, at a place to which the Irish gave the
name of _Rathmore_, or great fort. In this stronghold Cathasao and his
Cruithne had probably attacked the Britons, who certainly repulsed
them with decisive success.—_Ulster An. sub an._ 682.’ In 702 the
Ulster Cruithne made another attempt to obtain a settlement among the
Britons on the Firth of Clyde, but they were again repulsed in the
battle of Culin.—_Ib. sub an._ 702. The original text of these
passages is as follows:—‘682. Bellum Rathamoire Muigeline contra
Britones ubi ceciderunt Catusach mac Maelduin Ri Cruithne et Ultan
filius Dicolla. 702. Bellum Campi Cuilinn in Airdo nepotum Necdaig
inter Ultu et Britones ubi filius Radgaind cecidit [adversarius]
Ecclesiarum Dei. Ulait victores erant.’ Now, both of these battles
were fought in Ulster. Rathmore or great fort of Muigeline, which
Chalmers supposes to be Mauchlin, in Ayr, was the chief seat of the
Cruithnigh in Dalaraidhe, or Dalaradia, and is now called
Moylinny.—See Reeves’s _Antiquities of Down and Connor_, p. 70. Airdo
nepotum Necdaig, or Arduibh Eachach, was the Barony of Iveagh, also in
Dalaradia, in Ulster (_Ib._ p. 348); and these events were attacks by
the Britons upon the Cruithnigh of Ulster, where the battles were
fought, and not attacks by the latter upon the British inhabitants of
Ayrshire.
The natural inference from an examination of Bede’s Ecclesiastical
History is that apparently he knew of no Picts south of the Firth of
Forth. He certainly mentions none, and expressly says (B. iv. c.
xxvi.), in describing the result of the defeat and death of Ecgfrid,
king of Northumbria, by the Picts in 686, that Trumwine, with his
Angles, fled from the monastery of Abercorn, ‘posito quidem in regione
Anglorum, sed in vicinia freti quod Anglorum terras Pictorumque
disterminat;’ but he is here talking of the territories belonging to
each kingdom, and not of the distribution of the population; and as
the territory of Galloway undoubtedly belonged to the Anglic kingdom,
its population must have been either a subject British or Pictish
population, as Bede elsewhere implies that twenty years later it was
but partially occupied by Angles. In another work, however, Bede
clearly implies that the population of Galloway was Pictish at that
time. In his Life of St. Cuthbert (cap. xi.) he says, ‘Quodam etenim
tempore pergens de suo monasterio pro necessitatis causa accidentis ad
terram Pictorum, qui Niduari vocantur navigando pervenit.’ His
monastery was Melrose. Mr. E. W. Robertson was inclined to think that
St. Cuthbert had sailed from the mouth of the Tweed, and been driven
northwards by contrary winds into the Firth of Tay, landing near
Abernethy, on the coast of Fife, the inhabitants of the banks of the
Nethy probably being the ‘Picti qui Niduari vocantur;’ and he refers
in a note to a suggestion of the author’s that Cuthbert may have
crossed the Firth of Forth and landed at Newburn, the old name of
which was Nithbren (_Scotland under her Early Kings_, vol. ii. p.
383), but a more careful consideration has satisfied him that neither
view is tenable. Bede says (B. i. c. xv.), ‘De Jutarum origine sunt
Cantuari et Victuari, hoc est, ea gens quæ Vectam tenet insulam et ea
quæ usque hodie in provincia Occidentalium Saxonum Jutarum natio
nominatur, posita contra ipsam insulam Vectam.’ Now, the term Niduari
is a word evidently formed in precisely the same way from the root
Nid, as Cantuari and Vectuari are from the roots Cantia and Vecta, and
certainly signifies the ‘gens’ on the Nid, which can only mean the
river Nith, now forming the eastern boundary of Galloway, and which
separated it in the lower part of its course from the Strathclyde
kingdom. Ptolemy terms the river Nith ‘Novius;’ and from this in the
same way was formed the name ‘Novantæ,’ a tribe which occupied the
territory from the ‘Novius,’ which here separated them from the
Selgovæ, to the Irish Sea. As the name Nith is the equivalent of
Ptolemy’s ‘Novius,’ so Bede’s ‘Niduari’ is the exact equivalent of
Ptolemy’s ‘Novantæ;’ and the author does not now doubt that they were
the same people to whom the name of ‘Picti’ was likewise applied. In
either view St. Cuthbert had to go some distance by land from Melrose
to reach the sea. If he proceeded to the Solway Firth, he would pass
from Teviotdale by Ewisdale, and his course is marked by the church
being dedicated to him. The most prominent headland on the north side
of the Solway is where the Dee enters into it, and here the parish of
Kirkcudbright is also dedicated to him. He landed ‘sub ripa,’ where he
and his companions passed three days between the highland and the
shore, waiting for a fair wind. ‘The line of coast from Mullock bay on
the east to Torr’s point extends about three miles. It is bold and
rocky, except for a short space immediately below the farmhouse of
Howell, and at a point east of that called “the Haen,” _i.e._ Haven,
in Balmae.... In a precipice, on the Balmae shore, to the west, and
not far from the mouth of the Dee, is a remarkable natural cavern
called Torr’s Cove which extends sixty feet into the rock.... The door
is said to have been originally built with stone, and to have had a
lintel at the top, which is now buried in the ruins. The cave is
thought to have been sometimes used as a hiding-place in former
times.’—(_N. S. A._ vol. iv. Kirkcudbright, p. 6.) This may have been
the scene of St. Cuthbert’s adventure.
Footnote 121:
See _Chronicles of the Picts and Scots_, Pref. pp. xviii-xxiii.
Footnote 122:
_Chron. Picts and Scots_, p. 6.
Footnote 123:
_Ibid._ p. 410.
Footnote 124:
_Liber Hymnorum_, i. pp. 97, 105.
Footnote 125:
_Ib._ p. 117.
Footnote 126:
‘Near to the parish church of Anwoth, in Galloway, is a low undulating
range of hills, called the Boreland Hills. One of these goes by the
name of Trusty’s Hill, and round its top may be traced the remains of
a vitrified wall.’—Stuart’s _Sculptured Stones_, vol. i. p. 31. Anwoth
is on the east side of Wigtown Bay; Whithern in the peninsula on the
west side.
Footnote 127:
Mailcon is the genitive form of Mailcu. It is the same name as Milchu,
the Dalaradian king who held St. Patrick in slavery.
Footnote 128:
Venit autem Brittaniam Columba, regnante Pictis Bridio filio
Meilochon, rege potentissimo, nono anno regni ejus, gentemque illam
verbo et exemplo ad fidem Christi convertit.—_Hist. Ec._ B. iii. c.
iv.
Footnote 129:
Adamnan, _Vit. Columbæ_, ed. 1874, p. 174.
Footnote 130:
580 Cendaeladh rex Pictorum mortuus est.—_Chron. Picts and Scots_, p.
67.
Footnote 131:
The old name of the parish of New Abbey, in Kirkcudbright, was Loch
Kindeloch, as appears from the Chartulary of Kelso, No. 253. The loch
seems to have taken its name from Cendaeladh.
Footnote 132:
Scotorum a circione, Pictorum ab aquilone.
Footnote 133:
Revertuntur ergo impudentes grassatores Hiberni domum post non multum
temporis reversuri (§ 21). The author considers this the correct
reading in preference to ‘ad hibernas domos,’ as it is supported by
the best MSS.
Footnote 134:
The MSS. differ so much that it is impossible to give a correct
quotation, and the reader is referred to any of the recent additions
of Nennius. The settlement of the Dam Hoctor, or company of eight, was
probably that in Gwyned or North Wales, which he afterwards states was
driven out by Cuneda, as was the settlement in ‘regione Dimetorum’ or
S. Wales. That by Istoreth in Dalmeta or Dalrieta was the same as that
described by Bede. The Irish translator, in transferring the first to
Ireland, and in connecting the latter with the Picts, is probably
making alterations at his own hand; but is right in identifying the
settlers of Builc in Eubonia with the Firbolg who fled to the isles of
Man, Arran, and others.
Footnote 135:
Bede, _Hist. Ec._ B. i. c. 1.
Footnote 136:
_Chron. Picts and Scots_, p. 18.
Footnote 137:
Feargus mor mac Earca cum gente Dalriada partem Britanniæ tenuit et
ibi mortuus est.—_Chron. Picts and Scots_, p. 66.
Footnote 138:
The tripartite life of St. Patrick contains an account of the
conversion of Erc and his people by St. Patrick.—_Ib._ p. 17.
Footnote 139:
The tale told by the Irish historians is this:—Conare, son of
Mogalama, chief of a tribe of Munster Scots called the Degada, became
king of Ireland, and reigned eight years, from 158 to 165. He had
three sons: Cairbre Musc, from whom descend all the septs of the
Muscraidhe in Munster; Cairbre Baschaein, from whom descend the
Baiscnidh of Corco Baiscinn in Munster; and Cairbre Riada, who
established himself with his sept in Ulster, and whose possessions
there were termed Dalriada. He is said to have passed over to Argyll
and settled the Scots there, and is the Reuda of Bede. Pinkerton
adopts this story, and dates their earliest colony in 258. He
identifies it with the Attacotti, which he absurdly explains to
mean—Hither Scots, and in this Mr. Burton seems disposed to follow
him; but this part of his argument is based entirely upon the spurious
Richard of Cirencester. Chalmers, with more judgment, rejects it, and
in fact there is no authority for it in the Irish Annals. The Scotch
Chronicles are opposed to it. The oldest which gives the Dalriadic
history expressly says of Fergus, son of Erc, ‘ipse fuit _primus_ qui
de semine Chonare suscepit regnum Alban.’ The Albanic Duan knows of no
earlier colony than that under the sons of Erc. Flann Mainistrech and
Tighernac know nothing of it, nor do the Irish additions made to
Nennius. Gildas, too, knows nothing of it. It is to be found in
Nennius and Bede alone, and the Irish translator neutralises Nennius’s
statement of a settlement of Scots in Dalrieta under Istoreth, son of
Istorinus, by converting it into a settlement of Picts, while he
removes the colony of Dam Hoctor, or the company of eight, from
Britannia to Erin. The only Irish authority which at all points to an
earlier settlement is the curious legend contained in Cormac’s
Glossary, under the word Mog-Eime (a lap-dog). It is there said,
‘Cairbre Musc, son of Conaire, brought it from the east from Britain,
for when great was the power of the Gael in Britain, they divided
Alban between them into districts, and each knew the residence of his
friend; and not less did the Gael dwell on the east side of the sea
than in Scotia (Ireland), and their habitations and royal forts were
built there. Inde dicitur Duin Tradui, _i.e._ Dun Tredui, _i.e._ the
triple fort of Crimthan mor, son of Fidach, king of Erin and Alban, to
the Mur n-Icht (Straits of Dover), et inde est Glasimpere of the Gael,
_i.e._ a church on the borders of Mur n-Icht ... and it is in that
part is Duin Map Lethain in the land of the Cornish Britons, _i.e._
the Fort of Mac Liathain, for Mac is the same as Map in the British.
Thus every tribe divided on that side, for its property to the east
was equal (to that on the west).’—Goidilica _Sanas Cormaic_, p. 29.
But it will be remarked that in this passage the legend is attached to
Cairbre Musc, and there is no mention of Cairbre Riada; there is also
no allusion to a settlement of Dalriada, and it evidently points to an
occupation of the whole country by the Scots. The reference to Duin
Map Liathan connects it with Nennius’s list of the Scottish colonies
in Britain, one of which was by the sons of Liathan, while the
reference to Crimthan mor mac Fidach, king of Erin and Alban, who is
said to have reigned over Ireland from 366 to 378, as clearly connects
it with the invasion of the Scots who occupied Britain for eight
years, from 360 to 368, when they were expelled by Theodosius. The
occasional occurrence of names in their Welsh form seems to point to a
British origin for this legend; and the author considers that the
tradition of an earlier settlement in Dalriada is a British and not an
Irish legend; that it arose when the Britons and Angles came in
contact with Dalriada as a settled kingdom in Britain; that it is not
older than the seventh century; and that its sole historical
foundation is the temporary occupation of Britain by the Scots during
the last fifty years of the Roman province.
Footnote 140:
Tighernac terms these three kings ‘Ri Alban,’ which implies a
considerable extent of territory; but in 560 he has ‘Bass (death of)
Gabrain mic Domanguirt, Ri Albain. Teichedh do Albanchaib ria (flight
of the people of Alban before) m-Bruidi mic Maelchon Ri Cruithnech
(king of the Picts),’ and he terms Conall and the subsequent kings Ri
Dalriada, or kings of Dalriada only.—_Chron. Picts and Scots_, p. 67.
Footnote 141:
_Ib._ p. 82.
Footnote 142:
574 Bass Conaill mac Comgaill Ri Dalriada xiii. anno regni sui qui
oferavit insulam Ia Coluimcille. Cath Delgon a Cindtire in quo Duncadh
mac Conaill mic Comgaill et alii multi de sociis filiorum Gabrain
ceciderunt.—_Ib._ p. 67. Delgon seems to be afterwards called
Cindelgen. It is probably the place from which the Lord of the Isles
dates a charter in 1471, apud Ceandaghallagan in Knapdal.
Footnote 143:
_Chron. Picts and Scots_, p. 83.
Footnote 144:
Reeves’s _Adamnan_, ed. 1874, p. 81.
Footnote 145:
_Chron. Picts and Scots_, p. 60.
Footnote 146:
Reeves’s _Adamnan_, ed. 1874, p. 264.
Footnote 147:
This is evidently alluded to in the passage in the tripartite life of
St. Patrick, when he blesses Fergus, son of Ere, in Irish Dalriada,
and says, ‘Though not great is thy land at this day among thy
brothers, it is thou shalt be king. From thee the kings of this
territory shall for ever descend, and in Fortrenn (Pictland), and this
was fulfilled in Aidan, son of Gabran, who took Alban by
force.’—_Chron. Picts and Scots_, p. 17.
Footnote 148:
Aetio ter consuli gemitus Britannorum. Repellunt nos Barbari ad mare,
repellit nos mare ad Barbaros; inter hæc oriuntur duo genera funerum,
aut jugulamur, aut mergimur.—Gildas, 17.
Footnote 149:
The name Gurthrigern, usually inserted in the text, is not to be found
in the best MSS., and is an interpolation. The ‘concilium’ or council
was evidently the Roman provincial council, and the leader is here
called Dux Britannorum, also a Roman military title.
Footnote 150:
‘Usque ad annum obsessionis Badonici montis.’ The words which follow,
‘qui prope Sabrinum ostium habetur,’ are not in the best MSS., and are
an interpolation.
Footnote 151:
‘Transactoque Romanorum imperio in Brittannia per quadraginta annos
fuerunt sub metu. Guerthigirnus regnavit in Brittania et dum ipse
regnabat in Brittannia urgebatur a metu Pictorum Scottorumque et a
Romanico impetu necnon et a timore Ambrosii. Interea venerunt tres
cyulæ a Germania expulsæ in exilio in quibus erant Hors et Hengist....
Guorthigernus suscepit eos benigne et tradidit eis insulam quæ in
lingua eorum vocatur Tanet Britannico sermone Rusihen. Regnante
Gratiano secundo Equantio Romæ Saxones a Guorthigirno suscepti sunt
anno trecentesimo quadragesimo septimo post passionem Christi.’ This
account appears to belong to the work as originally compiled in the
seventh century.
Footnote 152:
Invitabo filium meum cum fratrueli suo, bellatores enim viri sunt, ut
dimicent contra Scottos et da illis regiones, quæ sunt in aquilone,
juxta murum qui vocatur Guaul. Et jussit ut invitaret eos et invitati
sunt Octha et Ebissa cum quadraginta ciulis. At ipsi, cum navigarent
circa Pictos, vastaverunt Orcades insulas, et venerunt et occupaverunt
regiones plurimas ultra mare Fresicum usque ad confinia Pictorum. Some
MSS. connected with Durham add after ‘mare Fresicum,’ ‘quod inter nos
Scottosque est.’ The author understands Nennius to mean that this body
of invaders arrived on the east coast, went round the island, ravaging
the Orkneys on their way, and entered the districts about the wall and
on the north of the Firth of Forth by the west.
Footnote 153:
A tempore quo primo Saxones venerunt in Bryttanniam usque ad annum
quartum Mermeni regis computantur anni ccccxxix. This account is in
the Vatican MS. only, and has obviously been added in an edition
compiled in 821. It corresponds with an old Welsh chronicle in the Red
Book of Hergest, which commences thus:—‘From the age of Guorthegirn
Guorthenau to the battle of Badwn are 128 years.’—_Chron. Picts and
Scots_, p. 161. The date of the battle is 516, and deducting 128 years
gives us 388 as the beginning of Guorthegirn’s reign, and the fourth
year when the Saxons came 392.
Footnote 154:
Guorthigirnus autem tenuit imperium in Brittannia Theodosio et
Valentiniano consulibus et in quarto anno regni sui Saxones ad
Brittanniam venerunt, Felice et Tauro consulibus, quadringentesimo
anno ab incarnatione Domini nostri Jesu Christi.
Nennius appears to have reckoned 27 years between the incarnation and
the passion of Christ. We should probably read ‘a passione’ for ‘ab
incarnatione,’ which makes the year equal to 427 or 428.
Footnote 155:
In Oceano vero occidentali est insula quæ dicitur Britannia, ubi olim
gens Saxonum veniens ab antiqua Saxonia cum principe suo, nomine
Anschis, modo habitare videtur.
Footnote 156:
Bede quotes the passage thus:—‘Revertuntur ergo impudentes grassatores
Hiberni domus,’ which shows the reading of the text in his time.—B. i.
c. xiv.
Footnote 157:
Placuitque omnibus cum suo rege Vortigerno ut Saxonum gentem de
transmarinis partibus in auxilium vocarent.—B. i. c. xiv.
Footnote 158:
Tum subito inito ad tempus fœdere cum Pictis quos longius jam bellando
pepulerant, in socios arma vertere incipiunt.—Bede, _Hist. Ec._ B. i.
c. xv.
Footnote 159:
Bede, _Hist. Ec._ B. i. c. xv. In his Chronicon, written apparently
two years earlier than his History, Bede narrates the incursions of
the Picts and Scots and the final departure of the Romans under the
year 429, and the landing of the Angles or Saxons in 459. The true
date of the accession of Martian to the Empire in conjunction with
Valentinian is 450. Lappenberg, in his _History of England_, has
clearly demonstrated the legendary character of this narrative; and
Kemble, in his _Saxons in England_, takes the same view. Nevertheless,
Mr. Freeman, in his _Old English History_, appears to accept both
dates and narratives as history; and Mr. Green, in his _History of the
English People_, describes the landing of the Saxons under Hengist and
Horsa in 449 in the island of Thanet as if he had himself witnessed
the event.
Footnote 160:
Tribunus Cohortis Primæ Novæ Armoricæ Grannona in Litore
Saxonico.—_Not. Imp._
Footnote 161:
This has been well shown by Kemble, _Saxons in England_, vol. i. p.
10.
Footnote 162:
This was first observed by Sharon Turner in his _History of the
Anglo-Saxons_, vol. i. p. 105.
Footnote 163:
Theodosii xviii (A.D. 441) Britanniæ usque ad hoc tempus variis
cladibus eventibusque latæ in ditionem Saxonum rediguntur.
Footnote 164:
Compare the expression, ‘Repellunt nos Barbari ad mare, repellit nos
mare ad Barbaros; aut jugulamur aut mergimur,’ with what is said of
the Saxons, ‘Confovebatur namque, ultionis justæ præcedentium scelerum
causa, de mari usque ad mare ignis orientalis,’ etc.; and of the
Britons, ‘Itaque nonnulli miserarum reliquiarum in montibus deprehensi
acervatim jugulabantur ... alii transmarinas petebant regiones.’
Footnote 165:
Nennius, after describing how the Saxons increased in number in
Britain, and how Octa passed from the north to Kent, from whom the
subsequent kings of Kent descended, proceeds, ‘Tunc Arthur pugnabat
contra illos in illis diebus cum regibus Brittonum, sed ipse dux erat
bellorum.’ The ‘illos’ here is referred in another MS. to the Saxones
mentioned in the beginning of the passage, and not to the ‘reges
Cantiorum.’
Footnote 166:
‘Et vocatur Britannico sermone Guaul.’ This district is termed in the
Bruts Mureif, from ‘mur,’ signifying a wall, and is identified with
Reged, the kingdom of Urien, the old form of which name was
Urbgen—Urbigena—City-born, alluding probably to Dumbarton.
Footnote 167:
‘Id est Cat Coit Celidon,’ the battle of the wood Celidon.
Footnote 168:
The Vatican MS. adds, ‘ubi illos in fugam vertit quem nos Cat Bregion
appellamus.’ This strange name seems to belong to the Picts more than
to the Saxons, who could hardly have possessed Edinburgh at that early
period.
Footnote 169:
516, Bellum Badonis in quo Arthur portavit Crucem Domini nostri Jesu
Christi tribus diebus et tribus noctibus in humeros suos et Britones
victores fuerunt.—_An. Cam._ Tradition points to Ossa Cyllellaur, a
descendant of Octa, as Arthur’s opponent in this battle.
Footnote 170:
The author goes no further than this in this work. The question as to
the true character of Arthur, and the site of these battles, is
discussed in the _Four Ancient Books of Wales_, vol. i. pp. 51-58; and
in Mr. Glennie’s _Arthurian Localities_. Neither does he import into
this work any matter from the old Welsh poems, which, whether genuine
or spurious, afford at all events no proper basis for an historical
narrative.
Footnote 171:
A.D. 537, Gueith Camlann in qua Arthur et Medraut corruere.—_An.
Cam._, _Chron. Picts and Scots_, p. 14.
Footnote 172:
Mr. Nash, in his introduction to ‘Merlin or the Early History of King
Arthur’ (_Early English Text Society_, 1865), makes a statement which
appears to me well founded: ‘Certain it is,’ he says, ‘that there are
two Celtic—we may perhaps say two Cymric—localities, in which the
legends of Arthur and Merlin have been deeply implanted, and to this
day remain living traditions cherished by the peasantry of these two
countries, and that neither of them is Wales or Britain west of the
Severn. It is in Brittany and in the old Cumbrian kingdom south of the
Firth of Forth that the legends of Arthur and Merlin have taken root
and flourished.’ To Cumbria, however, may be added Cornwall, where the
Arthurian romance places the scene of many of its adventures; and it
is rather remarkable that we should find in the second century a tribe
termed Damnonii, possessing Cornwall, and a tribe of the same name
occupying the ground which forms the scene of his exploits in the
north.
Footnote 173:
It is usually stated by modern writers that Ida landed in 547 with a
body of Angles, and founded the kingdom of Northumberland, but the
older authorities give no countenance to the idea of a colony under
Ida. Nennius has no hint of his having come into the island from the
Continent. Bede, in the short chronicle annexed to his History, has
‘Anno 547, Ida regnare cœpit, a quo regalis Nordanhymbrorum prosapia
originem tenet et duodecim annis in regno permansit.’ This statement
is repeated by the _Saxon Chronicle_, which adds, ‘And built
Bambrough, which was at first enclosed by a hedge, and afterwards by a
wall,’ and by Florence of Worcester. Simeon of Durham has simply, ‘Ida
rex annis regnavit xi.’ William of Malmesbury, however, connects Ida
very clearly with the earlier settlements; for, after narrating how
Octa and Ebissa seized the northern parts of Britain, he says, ‘Annis
enim uno minus centum, Northanhimbri duces communi habitu contenti,
sub imperio Cantuaritarum privatos agebant: sed non postea stetit hæc
ambitionis continentia, seu quia semper in deteriora decliva est
humanus animus, seu quia gens illa naturaliter inflatiores anhelat
spiritus. Anno itaque Dominicæ incarnationis quingentesimo
quadragesimo septimo, post mortem Hengesti sexagesimo, _ducatus in
regnum mutatus_, regnavitque ibi primus Ida, haud dubie nobilissimus,
ætate et viribus integer; verum utrum ipse per se principatum
invaserit, an aliorum consensu delatum susceperit, parum definio.’ The
first writer who mentions the colony is the anonymous author of the
tract ‘De primo Saxonum Adventu,’ and he is copied by John
Wallingford. After repeating the usual statement, ‘Ida primus rex ex
Anglis cœpit regnare in Northanhymbrorum provincia,’ he adds, ‘Venerat
autem Ida comite patre Eoppa cum lx. navibus ad Flamaburch, indeque
boreales plagas occupans, ibidem regnavit duodecim annis.’ The
statement seems to be adopted from the account of Octa and Ebissa’s
colony.
Footnote 174:
These names, Bernicia and Deira, are taken from the British names of
the same districts, Deifr and Byrneich. Nennius has a curious notice
which shows that these Anglic kingdoms did not first arise from
colonies as late as 547. He says of Soemil, four generations before
Ella, ‘Ipse primus separavit Deur o Berneich.’ The race from which
Ella sprang must have been some generations before in the country.
Footnote 175:
Contra illum quatuor reges Urbgen et Riderchen et Guallauc et Morcant
dimicaverunt.—_Gen. Nennius._ The genealogy of these four kings is
given in the Welsh pedigrees annexed to Nennius.—_Chron. Picts and
Scots_, pp. 15, 16. The reader is referred to the _Four Ancient Books
of Wales_, vol. i. pp. 336-355, for the historical poems relating to
the battles fought in this war.
Footnote 176:
The Chronicle annexed to Nennius has, at 573, ‘Bellum Armterid,’ to
which a later MS. adds—‘Inter filios Elifer et Gwendoleu filium
Keidiau; in quo bello Gwendoleu cecidit: Merlinus insanus effectus
est.’—_An. Camb._ A more detailed account will be found in the
Proceedings of the S. A. Scot. (vol. vi. p. 91), in a notice of the
site of the battle of Ardderyd. The Welsh genealogies annexed to
Nennius, as well as those in the tract on the Gwyr Gogled, or men of
the north (_Four Ancient Books of Wales_, ii. 455), show us very
clearly the native and the Roman party. The former are in both
documents traced to Coil Hen, who is supposed to have given his name
to the district of Kyle in Ayrshire, and to them belonged both Eliffer
and Gwendolew. The latter are brought by both from Dungual Hen, or the
aged, but in this document he is made grandson of Maxim Guletic, or
Maximus the emperor; but in the former and older account he is
grandson of Ceretic Guletic, whose pedigree is traced from Confer or
Cynfor, the reputed father of Constantine, who usurped the empire in
406. This Ceretic, the Guletic or leader of the North Britons, being
four generations earlier than Rhydderch, must have lived in the middle
of the fifth century, and I do not hesitate to identify him with the
Coroticus to whom St. Patrick addressed his letter written between 432
and 493. It is addressed ‘ad Christianos Corotici Tyranni subditos.’
It is to be given to his soldiers, ‘tradenda militibus mittenda
Corotici.’ He will not call them his fellow-citizens (civibus meis),
St. Patrick being a native of Strathclyde—sed civibus dæmoniorum. He
calls them ‘Socii Scotorum atque Pictorum apostatarum’—the Scots and
the apostate Picts of this region. And again he says that his sheep
have been plundered by robbers—‘jubente Corotico ... traditor
Christianorum in manus Scottorum et Pictorum;’ and again that ‘ingenui
homines Christiani in servitute redacti sunt, præsertim
indignissimorum pessimorum apostatarumque Pictorum.’ It shows
Coroticus as the Guletic, or one of the Tyranni who succeeded the
Romans in command of soldiers, and in close contact with apostate
Picts. This falling off of the Britons and Picts will be further
illustrated in another part of this work. For a more detailed account
of the Men of the North, see the _Four Ancient Books of Wales_, vol.
i. chap. x., and the genealogical tables there given. Among the
descendants of Dungual Hen will be found another grandson, Nud, also
called Hael or liberal, whose son Dryan fought at Ardderyd; and at
Yarrow, in the centre of the districts more especially connected with
the Roman party, a stone has been found with the following
inscription, part of which only can be read:
HIC MEMOR IACETI
LOIN : : : NI : : : : : :
PRINC
PE : : NVDI (LIBERALI)
dVMNOGENI · HIC IACENT
IN TVMVLO dVO FIlII
LIBERALI
This inscription appears to contain the name of Nud Hael or Liberalis,
and the word Dumnogeni probably connects him with the Damnonii whom
Ptolemy places here.—_Proceed. S. A. Scot._ vol. iv. p. 539.
Footnote 177:
Reeves’s _Adamnan_, ed. 1874, pp. 15, 136. Adamnan was born in
624.—_Ib._ p. 244.
Footnote 178:
Contra illum Urbgen cum filiis dimicabat fortiter. In illo tempore
aliquando hostes, nunc cives, vincebantur.—_Nennius, Gen._ It is
invariably assumed that Flamddwyn was a title borne by Ida, but there
is no authority whatever for it. It is merely asserted by writers on
Welsh history without proof. The epithet is only mentioned by the
Bards in two poems: the Gweith Argoet Llwyfein or Battle of Leven
Wood, and the Marwnat Owein or Death-song of Owen, son of Urien. In
the one Urien and his son Owen are described as fighting against
Flamddwyn, and in the other Owen is slain by Flamddwyn. (See _Four
Ancient Books of Wales_, i. 265, 366; ii. 413, 418.) It is clear,
therefore, that it was Theodoric, against whom Urien with his sons
fought valiantly.
Footnote 179:
His temporibus signo Nordanhymbrorum præfuit rex fortissimus et
gloriae cupidissimus Aedilfrid, qui plus omnibus Anglorum primatibus
gentem vastavit Brittonum.... Nemo enim in tribunis, nemo in regibus
plures eorum terras, exterminatis vel subjugatis indigenis, aut
tributarias genti Anglorum, aut habitabiles fecit.—Bede, _Hist. Ec._
B. i. c. xxxiv.
Footnote 180:
See _Chron. Picts and Scots_, p. 127. Tighernac records, at 606, the
death of Aidan, son of Gabran, in the thirty-eighth year of his reign
and seventy-fourth of his age. This places his birth in 533, and the
commencement of his reign in 569. He did not, however, succeed Conall
on the throne of Dalriada till 574. There were, therefore, five years
during which he reigned elsewhere before he became king of Dalriada.
Welsh tradition connects him with the battle of Ardderyd as one of the
contending parties; and in the tract on the Gwyr y Gogled, or Men of
the North, he appears among the Roman party as grandson of Dungual
Hen. His mother was Lleian, daughter of Brachan of Brecheniauc. There
is a tract in the Cotton MSS. (Vesp. A, xiv.), ‘De Brachan Brecheniauc
et cognatione ejus,’ which states that Brecheniauc or Brecknock, in
South Wales, received its name from him, and that he was son of
Aulach, son of Cormac, king of Ireland. It gives him ten sons and
twenty-six daughters, but while some of these sons and daughters are
connected with localities in South Wales, others are stated to have
founded churches or died in the north. Thus Arthur is buried in Manau
or Manann, Rhun Dremrudd was slain with his brother Rhawin or Rhuofan
by the Saxons and Picts, and both founded churches in Manau; Nefydd
was a bishop in y Gogledd, where he was slain by Saxons and Picts. Of
the daughters Beithan died in Manau; Lleian was mother of Aidan; Nevyn
was mother of Urien; Gwawr was mother of Llywarch Hen; Gwrgon Goddeu
was wife of Cadrawd Calchvynydd, and the sepulchre of Brychan is said
to be in an island called Yny Brychan, near Manau. The history of two
different persons of the same name is here obviously combined, and one
of the Brychans, the son of Aulach, is closely connected with Manau,
and brought in contact with the Picts and Saxons. His daughter Lleian
was mother of Aidan, and through her he may have inherited rights
connected with it, and thus appear among the British knights engaged
in the struggle which terminated with the battle of Ardderyd in 573.
The other Brychan was probably Brychan, son of Gwyngon, who appears in
the _Liber Llandavensis_ (p. 456) as a donor of lands to Bishop
Trychan, and among the witnesses are Dingad and Clydawg, two of the
sons who are connected with Wales.
Footnote 181:
582 or 583, Cath Manand in quo victor erat Aidan mac Gabrain.—_Tigh._
590, Cath Leithrig la h-Aidan mac Gabrian.—_Ib._
596, Jugulatio filiorum Aidan i Bran Domangart et Eochad Find et
Artuir i Cath Chirchind in quo victus est Aedan.—_Ib._
Footnote 182:
Reeves’s _Adamnan_, ed. 1874, p. 12. The author cannot identify the
battle of Leithrig, but Adamnan tells us that Artur and Eochoid Find,
two of Aidan’s sons, were killed in the battle of the Miathi, which
identifies it with the battle of Chirchind, fought in 596. This was
the last year of St. Columba’s life. It is difficult to fix the
locality of this battle. Circinn was a name applied to the district of
which Maghgirginn or Mearns, now Kincardineshire, was a part, but
Aidan could hardly have penetrated so far east. Dr. Reeves thinks it
may have been at the place now called Kirkintulloch. The term
‘Barbari’ is applied by Adamnan both to Picts and Saxons, but the name
Miathi seems to belong to the Picts. The same war may have embraced
Saxons also, as Domangart, slain the same year, perished, according to
Adamnan, in battle ‘in Saxonia.’
Footnote 183:
Bede, _Hist. Ecc._ B. i. c. xxxiv. Tighernac has, in 600, ‘Cath
Saxonum la h-Aedain ubi cecidit Eanfraith frater Etalfraich la Maeluma
me Baedain in quo victor erat.’ The Irish annalist ignores Aidan’s
defeat, and fixes upon Maeluma’s success in cutting off Theobald with
his troops. By some it has been supposed that Dalstone in Cumberland
was the scene of this battle; but while the word Degsastane passes
naturally into Dawstone, it never could have formed Dalstone.