This piece was commissioned for the Birlinn Short History of Scotland (edited by Richard Oram) and submitted to the publishers in about 2001. The book has never appeared in print due to the non-submission of some of the later contributors. Tis paper has been seen in draft by a number of people who have subsequently written on the subject such as James Fraser and Thomas Clancy. AW 12th March 2015 Birlinn Short History Section 1

Early Historic Scotland To 761

Alex Woolf

The full story of human occupation in Scotland stretches back something in the region of 10,000 years to the period when the first foragers, hunters and fisher-folk settled along the shoreline. Most of this period, however, belongs to prehistory and can only be reconstructed, and then but partially, through the work of archaeologists and palaeo-environmentalists. The nature of the evidence that they have to work with allows them to reconstruct only micro-events on a local scale ― the chopping down of an individual thicket or the making of a flint axe-head ― or to posit sweeping long-term trends. The study of what might be called medium term events and processes ― political, military and social decisions and transformations ― only becomes possible when written ‘historical’ sources are available, although even then archaeological and palaeo-environmental research continues to provide valuable complimentary evidence. In Scotland this historical narrative begins with the advent of the Romans in the first century of the Christian era. The Scotland encountered by the Romans was inhabited, like the rest of Britain by a myriad of Celtic-speaking tribes. Each of these tribes occupied a territory roughly the size of a modern county. Some of the tribes, however, may have been split into one or more settlement areas that were not necessarily contiguous with one another. Thus Redesdale, just across the border south of Jedburgh, seems to have been occupied by the Uotadini who also occupied much of Lothian whilst the Selgovae occupied Teviotdale and much of Tweed dale in between these two areas. This pattern was not uncommon elsewhere in barbarian Europe and may point to historical links between the regions, perhaps one of the Uotadinian areas had been colonised from the other or perhaps the Selgovae had arrived (or emerged) later and driven a wedge between them. Tribal identities seem to have been relatively fluid with some tribes appearing in Roman sources on one occasion and not on another. Unfortunately the Romans had not developed modern cartographic skills and our attempts to reconstruct an accurate map of tribal Scotland on the basis of the information they have left us is fraught with difficulties. In what is now the southeast of England a handful of the Celtic tribes encountered by the Romans had developed into kingdoms with a centralised tributary structure, including the production of coinage, and a kingly dynasty that controlled

certain aspects of political and religious life. This was a new development here and largely the product of contact with Mediterranean institutions and commodities that were appearing in the adjacent continental Celtic countries. Elsewhere in Britain, including Scotland, the tribes seem to have lacked centralised authorities of this sort. Tribal centres seem to have existed at so-called ‘hill-forts’, like Traprain Law in East Lothian, but the internal features of these sites do not include evidence of elite residence. There are no feasting halls or particularly rich accommodation of the sort one would expect to find in the stronghold of a Dark Age warlord or in a medieval castle. Instead, what we find are large numbers of ordinary houses little different in size or construction from those of the scattered hamlets that occupied most of the countryside. Any central features that have been identified on these ‘hill-forts’ have tended to be interpreted as pagan religious sites. The dominant model for understanding these ‘hill-forts’ current today is that they represent sites of temporary occupation, perhaps for assemblies that might last a week or two once or twice a year. The largest of the hill-forts may represent major tribal assembly sites whilst the smaller ones may reflect those of more local groupings. Such assemblies would have provided venues for the settlement of disputes, the arrangement of marriages and the exchange of surpluses. They were as much the precursors of medieval fairs as of state institutions. For most of the year the population dwelt in scattered hamlets of between one and four farmsteads. The architectural details of these farmsteads and the farming regimes practiced in them varied from region to region depending upon environmental factors and access to resources but they all had much in common. Everyone in Scotland was involved in mixed agriculture with some livestock and some arable and almost all the houses were round single roomed affairs of one or sometimes two stories. In the far north and the western isles some of these houses, known today as brochs, still stand as impressive stone structures. Elsewhere where the building materials were wood and wattle, rather than stone, little remains to be seen. It seems likely that these farming folk also supplemented their diet with a little hunting and that they re-stocked their herds from time to time by raiding neighbouring tribes. Slaves may also have been acquired through raiding although such captives were probably sold on to people further afield for it is not good sense to keep neighbouring people as slaves for they can easily escape or act as a fifth column for raiders. There are two main reasons why slavery developed as one of the first long distance trades. Firstly, as stated, locals don’t make good slaves, and secondly, because there is no gradient in the slave trade. To produce slaves a region requires a human population and to use slaves a region requires a human population. A healthy slave economy simply requires four national or tribal groups, A and B raid each other and sell their slaves, respectively, to C and D, who raid each other and sell their prey to A and B.

When thinking about slaves in these early historic societies, however, we must recognise that they also lived in the same one roomed houses as their masters and that the average farm would have very few slaves, mostly captured as women and children, who would live and work alongside the free family. This is a concept of slavery that has as much in common with modern au pairing as it does with plantation slavery of pre-civil war America. The only major differences lay in the mechanisms for recruitment and contract termination. Slaves who survived into middle age probably had a good chance of being freed and given their own small patch of land by

their owners to farm for themselves. Their children would in turn become full members of the tribe. Similarly any children begotten upon slave-girls by their masters would have shared full rights of inheritance with their ‘legitimate’ brothers and sisters.

This then was the world that the Romans entered in the ‘70s and ‘80s of the

first millennium. The main Roman objective in their invasion of Britain was to annex or take under their protection the centralised kingdoms that had emerged in the southeast in an arc stretching from Hampshire to Norfolk. Once they became involved in the island’s politics, however, they found that they inherited the problems of endemic raiding and slaving that had faced the peoples they had conquered. Step by step punitive expeditions against their troublesome neighbours and subsequent ‘pacification’ operations drew them further north and west. Usually their intervention was prompted by one tribe asking for protection against another or by an internal dispute, especially in those tribes that were becoming kingdoms, tempting one faction to invite Roman help. This process had important ramifications for how the empire developed. In most areas that they took into their empire the Romans maintained local identities as the mechanism for local government and, on paper at least, the empire was a federal structure comprising of the city of Rome and her allies. In reality, in places like Britain, some tribes did enter the empire as allies, and the transition was very smooth, while others were conquered, often with brutal reprisals, massacres and deportations. Unfortunately for historians the accounts of Roman invasions were almost all written in Italy by aristocrats who had themselves never visited the barbarian lands that they described. This means that the written accounts are often lacking in detail and sometimes even appear to contradict themselves. We have to supplement our understanding of the situation from the material traces which the Roman army left as it crossed the country but it is hard to be sure we have recovered all the relevant evidence and equally hard to be certain that a given fort or set of forts relates to a particular campaign mentioned in the written sources.

The best understood set of campaigns in Scotland is the earliest. Led by the

Roman governor of southern Britain, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, between AD 79 and AD 84, these campaigns were recounted as part of a biography of Agricola by his son-in-law Cornelius Tacitus. Because it is the earliest it is also the campaign most easily identified in the archaeological record. Taking place within a generation of the initial conquest of the south the traces of the army are very similar to those found elsewhere in Britain and can thus be recognised as broadly contemporary. Later campaigns took place long after the south of Britain was peaceful when most other Roman military activity beyond the frontiers was happening in eastern Europe or the Middle East and does not bear close comparison. No evidence of Roman military activity, from the first campaigns, has been found in East Lothian or Fife although Agricola’s armies crossed the Forth and the Tay and headed towards the northeast. For this reason it is generally thought that the Uotadini and the inhabitants of Fife (probably the Uenicones) were probably allies of Rome. Indeed Agricola may have made his decision to lead armies into the north of the island at the request of these lowland tribes who occupied some of the richest agricultural land in Scotland. It would be hard to believe that the highlanders did not prey upon their richer neighbours in this period as in later ones.

Agricola’s armies consisted of regular Roman troops as well as units supplied by the allied forces both Continental, who would, for the most part, have differed little in equipment and organisation from the legionaries, and British, including Uotadinian and Ueniconian troops, who would have still been equipped and organised in tribal fashion. Agricola headed north-east building a series of forts stretching from Malling (in Menteith) to Auchinhove (in Banffshire), perhaps simply ‘marching camps’ but perhaps a temporary picket line protecting the allied tribes of the East Midlands (Fife and Angus) from the highland tribes. Agricola’s main target seems to have been a large tribe known as the Caledonii who occupied a vast but, for us, ill-defined part of the highlands. The only clue as to where this may have been is given by the modern place names Dunkeld, Schiehallion and Rohallion, which all contain the element ‘caledon’. Eventually in September AD 83 he encountered a large Caledonian army at a place Tacitus calls Mons Graupius. Almost every historian of Roman Scotland has come up with a different site for Mons Graupius ranging from Bennachie in Aberdeenshire to Duncrub in Perthshire and it is perhaps unlikely that we shall ever know for certain where it was fought. Much depends on how we interpret the evidence for Agricola’s fort building. If the forts found really are ‘marching camps’, set up along his route of campaign, then we might expect the battle to be near the furthest of these, Auchinhove. If however, they are a picket line set up around Caledonian territory in the Highlands their construction may have been followed by a strike into the centre of enemy territory, perhaps up the Spey or Tay into the Highlands themselves (the ‘crub’ element found in Duncrub and thought to be the first part of ‘Graupius’ is also found as mountain name ― Crùban Beag ― in Badenoch). In any event Agricola’s force, perhaps between 20 and 30,000 strong, resoundingly defeated the Caledonii. The Caledonii were led in battle by the chieftain Calgacus, the first native of Scotland whose name is known to us. He was probably a local chief who had been temporarily elected as war-leader rather than a king of the whole tribe.

Following the Mons Graupius campaign Agricola retired and it is not clear if it

was he or his successor who was responsible for constructing a major legionary fortress at Inchtuthil on the Tay just below Dunkeld. Blocking the major route into the heart of the highlands now followed by the A9, this seems to confirm the idea that Roman policy was to protect the lowland tribes from highland marauders. This was the pattern that the Romans had successfully followed elsewhere, protecting their allies and oppressing hostile tribes with a network of garrisons interconnected by roads. As Agricola set sail for the Continent it must have looked as if it was only a matter of time before northern Britain was as much a part of the Empire as the south. It was not to be, however, for in the later ‘80s and into the ‘90s Rome suffered a series of punishing defeats inflicted by a series of hostile tribes in the Danube region. Several imperial armies were wiped out and the garrison in Britain was greatly reduced in order to restore order in the Balkans. The legionary fortress at Inchtuthil, which might, in time, have become a Roman city, was abandoned, the retreating soldiers even burying the nails so that they couldn’t be melted down and used for arms manufacture by the Caledonii.

The Empire had not entirely abandoned its allies. The southern portion of the

frontier, south of the Tay was maintained and strengthened, its key feature being a string of watchtowers and fortlets along the line of the Gask Ridge which lies between Strathearn and Glen Almond. Fife and Strathearn were thus within the frontier but

otherwise nothing beyond the Forth. Within a short time, however, this frontier too seems to have been abandoned, though there are no historical records, and permanent fortification seems to have dropped back behind the Southern Uplands, the great ridge that runs from St Abb’s Head in the East to Glen Appin in the West. This line of hills is the best natural frontier dividing Britain from coast to coast and for most of the Roman period it was the effective ‘line of control’ with successive military strategies policing it either from forts positioned a few miles north of it or forts positioned a little to the south.

Just as the Southern Uplands are the only line of hills that run from coast to

coast the only easy pass going from coast to coast between Derbyshire in the English Midlands and the valley of the Forth is that which runs between Carlisle and Newcastle along which the Romans built their major trunk road known today as the Stanegate. This major arterial road, running parallel to the frontier but to its south, became the focus for policing the region for the next fifty years or so and it was just to the north of this that in the 120s the Emperor Hadrian had the most famous Roman frontier work in the world built; the wall that bears his name. Hadrian’s Wall was probably not conceived of as the frontier at the time it was constructed and garrisoned but as a ‘line of control’. That is to say it was a position that could easily be policed, both for military and customs purposes, not an indicator that the empire claimed no authority beyond it. Some forts beyond the Wall continued to be occupied and there are clear indications that the tribes south of the Forth Clyde line were still in a relationship of alliance with Rome. As it happened Hadrian’s Wall only remained the line of control for some twenty years before the emperor Antoninus Pius adopted a more pro-active military policy. A new line of control, the Antonine Wall ― a turf rampart ― was constructed running between Old Kilpatrick, near Dumbarton, and Carriden, by Bo’ness-on-Forth, and a large number of small forts were constructed south of this frontier. Amongst these were two ports in Uotadinian territory at Inveresk and Cramond (flanking modern Edinburgh). These may well have been naval bases and part of the strategy of the Antonine thrust to the Forth-Clyde line may have been the decision to utilise naval forces fully against insurgents from beyond the frontier. Harbours in the Firth of Forth and on the Clyde would be of much more use than bases on the northern English coastline. When this happened the level of military activity on Hadrian’s Wall was drastically scaled down. This transformation was, however, only temporary and the Antonine Wall was probably largely abandoned by the mid 160s. Nonetheless, many of the forts in the country between the walls remained in use. The end result of all this was the creation of a military zone stretching north from Hadrian’s Wall and imperceptibly petering out by the shores of the Forth. Almost certainly by the later second century the allied tribes south of the Forth had become so committed to the idea of the Empire that most of the defence of the north was left to native chieftains who would call on the regular army only in times of dire emergency.

All this brings us to the effects of the presence of the Roman army on native

society. In its fundamental structure society remained unchanged but the constant need to negotiate with the Romans probably enhanced the position of chiefs who could improve their own economic position both through controlling access to the Romans and receiving gifts and subsidies from them. Material manufactured within the Roman Empire, from pottery and metalwork to coins and silver plate turn up regularly on archaeological sites from across Scotland and whilst some of this

material may have crossed the frontier as loot most of it probably spread north as gifts or trade items. Some archaeologists, such as Ian Armit of Queens University Belfast, have even suggested that periods of unrest amongst the northern tribes might even have been stimulated by the withdrawal of Roman troops whose economic input had become a mainstay of their social order. Whilst the idea that the Caledonii and their neighbours attacked the Romans in the hope that they would re-occupy their territory seems somewhat paradoxical, not to say surreal, there may be a grain of truth in such an argument. If, as happened on the German Frontier, contact with the Roman army and empire created the conditions for dynamic chieftains to rise above their fellows in status and wealth and to begin to make kings of themselves then one could see that they had a vested interest in such contacts. Whether as war-leader or peacemaker the man who shook hands with the emperor or his agents was undoubtedly the first amongst his people. It is also very likely that the army recruited from beyond the frontier and that there was a steady, if not vast, trickle of returning veterans bringing with them not just wealth but experience and ideas gleaned in Continental service.

Local warfare was probably endemic but the historical sources tell of only a

small number of major campaigns. Perhaps the most significant of these later campaigns were those fought by the emperor Septimius Severus c.208-211. The earlier campaign, probably fought in 209 has left a trail of camps surrounding the highlands similar to those of Agricola. Cassius Dio, our literary source for the war, tells us that the campaign was directed against the Caledonii and the Maeatae, a tribe not mentioned before but said to live ‘nearer the wall’. Avoiding a major battle they made peace with the Emperor and he returned south to York. Once he had gone the Maeatae rose up in revolt and threw off the garrisons left behind. Severus sent his son Caracalla north with orders to kill anyone he met. A legionary fortress appears to have been built at Carpow near Abernethy (Perthshire) and a number of camps constructed in Fife, Angus and the surrounding area. The Tay was crossed on a pontoon bridge, probably at Carpow. Cassius Dio is vague about the results of this expedition, which was abandoned when the Emperor succumbed to sickness and his son turned south to take the throne, but studies of ancient pollen have suggested that at around about this time the amount of land under cultivation in Fife and Angus underwent a drastic reduction which it was not to recover from for several hundred years. While it is perfectly plausible that Caracalla carried out a scorched earth policy and committed genocide wherever possible it seems hardly credible that neighbouring peoples would not have re-occupied the land after a time. One possibility is that Caracalla’s expedition heralded a new frontier policy in which regular, unrecorded, expeditions continually harassed a stretch of territory between the frontier and the free tribes. Unfortunately the literary accounts of campaigns in northern Britain dry up at this point and we have very little information about events here during the rest of the Roman period.

In 367 the northern frontier was over-run and count Theodosius was sent

north to restore order. Ammianus Marcellinus, himself a high-ranking Roman officer, briefly records this episode. His account is notable on a number of counts. He describes two native tribes, the Dicalydones (the Caledonii presumably) and the Verturiones (a new people?), whom he collectively terms Picti, operating in concert with two other fierce peoples, the Scotti and the Attacotti, whilst the Saxons and Franks raided the coastline of Gaul. The apparent ‘barbarian conspiracy’ may owe more to Roman paranoia than real diplomatic achievements. It is hard to imagine that

so many peoples speaking different languages and lacking effective central government were coordinating their action rather than independently taking advantage of Roman weakness. Ammianus’ account is one of the earliest references to the both the Picti and the Scotti two peoples who will concern us closely for much of what remains of this chapter. The term Picti first appears in a short poem composed in 297 which lists hostile barbarians. It is important to note that the term was never used in the more detailed earlier accounts of Roman expeditions in Scotland. It seems likely that it is in no sense a native term but that it derives from the Latin verb pingere, ‘to paint’, and refers to the practice of painting (tattooing?) their bodies ascribed to the Britons by early Roman writers such as Julius Caesar. By the middle of the third century the majority of Britons were Roman citizens and perfectly civilised and the use of the terms Brittones or Brittani ― Britons― as collective term for the hostile tribes would no longer have been as acceptable as it was in Tacitus’ and Agricola’s day. Instead the conservative ‘uncivilised’ practice of tattooing, still practised beyond the frontier, was emphasized to distinguish the ‘wild’ Britons from the ‘tame’ at a level beyond that of the local tribe. Whether the Picti themselves were aware of their existence at this stage is to be doubted. Pictish origins are to be sought in the imagination and prejudice of the Romans. Who the Attacotti were is anyone’s guess and as for the Scotti we shall see more of them anon.

Roman rule in Britain ended in AD 409 but the brief accounts we have of this

traumatic period make detailed analysis of the northern frontier impossible. It seems as if both before and after the Britons expelled their imperial officers, warfare in the north was rife. Indeed one reason given for the rebellion is that the imperial forces, focussing on a civil war in Italy and the south of France, were failing to relieve the Britons from barbarian attack. It is not clear whether the barbarians in question were Picti or Germanic Saxons from beyond the sea but the rival emperor to the one whose officers were expelled wrote to the Britons telling them to arm themselves and look to their own defence. The rebellion had probably not been anti-imperial per se so much as a switching of allegiance from one rival to another. The emperor the Britons now supported, Honorius, was, however, unable to reach them and, as the northern portion of his continental territories was swallowed up by Germanic invaders such as the Franks, so Britain was cut off from relief.

Although specific evidence for what was happening in Scotland during the

fifth century does not survive, one significant point to emerge is that the dividing line between Picts and Britons that had developed during the Roman period survived into the subsequent ‘Dark Ages’, and that it seems to have been drawn along the line of the Forth (although Fife and Angus may have represented something of a grey area between the two). This emphasises the fact that the Britons between Hadrian’s Wall and the Forth had been fully part of the Romano-British world despite the fact that many of the archaeological features usually associated with ‘Romanisation’ ― house design, fine ware pottery etc. ― were largely absent from their region. One defining Roman feature that probably did distinguish the Britons from the Picts was the practice of Christianity. In the course of the fourth century Christianity had rapidly become the dominant religion of the empire and it was to prove one of the empire’s enduring legacies to its successor states. It is also probably the case that the language of the Britons, which survives today as Welsh, Cornish and Breton, was much more heavily effected by contact with Latin than Pictish was. Medieval Welsh was full of Latin loan words and the grammatical structure was very much simplified in a way

that often occurs during periods of widespread bilingualism when many speakers of the language have not learned the rules perfectly from their parents.

Before we go further with our narrative we must discuss at some length a third

people who had probably emerged on the scene in north Britain in the later Roman period. These are the people known to us as the Scots or Scotti, the Gaelic-speaking inhabitants of the kingdom of Dál Riata. It is often said that the Scots were a tribe who migrated from Ireland to Scotland, specifically Argyll. This statement is problematic on a number of levels. It is inaccurate at a most basic level in so far as the Scotti were never a tribe. Like Picti the term Scotti was coined by the Romans. In the first instance it was used to designate sea-raiders from Ireland, much as we use the term ‘vikings’ to describe the later sea-raiders from Scandinavia. Later it came to be used more generally for the Irish as a whole, becoming particularly useful when speakers of the Irish language, Gaelic, ceased to be confined to Ireland. The Latin term Hiberni was restricted to those living in or coming from Ireland (Hibernia) whilst Scotti could be used for all those of Irish speech and ethnic identity wherever they dwelt. The term was used in this way for much of the middle ages, a good example being in the Latin name of the ninth-century scientist and religious thinker Johannes Scotus Eriugena ― ‘John the Irish-born Gael’. Thus Scot simply means ‘Gaelic speaker’ and not, until the very end of the middle ages, anything else.

The second problem regarding the traditional origin story of the Scots of Dál

Riata, the Gaelic kingdom that included Argyll, is the suggestion, presented from time to time in the past, and recently (2001) argued anew by the Glasgow archaeologist Ewan Campbell in the scholarly journal Antiquity, that Gaelic language and ‘Scottish’ identity were not brought from Ireland but emerged in western Scotland simultaneously with their emergence in Ireland as part of a single continuum. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century the temptation to uncouple the Scots from the Irish was, in part at least, driven by sectarianism. In an age when Scotland was staunchly Presbyterian and Ireland fundamentally Roman Catholic the idea that the two nations were in truth but one was anathema. Such prejudice is clearly ludicrous. The period with which we are concerned here, when migrations may or may not have happened, is a thousand years older, at least, than the Reformation of the sixteenth century out of which Presbyterianism, and Roman Catholicism for that matter, were created. Campbell, however, has drawn attention to some more serious questions that should not be confused with the bigotries of an earlier age.

Both the Gaelic language and the British language from which Welsh and

Pictish derived, descended from a common ancestral language which modern scholars term Celtic and which probably branched off from the still more ancestral language, which it shared with Latin and the Germanic languages, round about 1000 BC, in the latter part of the Bronze Age. At the time of the spread of the Celtic language across much of western and central Europe (c.1000-300 BC) its dialects were relatively undifferentiated and were probably mutually intelligible ― as different, say, as American and British English today. Once the various Celtic-speaking populations had settled in their dispersed home-lands, however, a number of factors ― contact with native languages, isolation, cultural innovation and ultimately the rise of Latin as the lingua franca for inter-regional communication ― led to the gradual growing apart of their dialects. Because most of this process happened in prehistoric conditions with little being written down, and much of that little by foreigners who

were recording unfamiliar names and terms, it is impossible to chart this process of linguistic diversification with any accuracy. One aspect of it, however, was that the group of Celtic dialects we call ‘Brittonic’ grew distinct from the group we call ‘Goidelic’. It has usually been assumed that the sea which lies between Britain and Ireland formed the boundary and the main ‘isolating factor’ between these two dialect groupings and that its presence was the cause of their divergence. Campbell has suggested, however, that whilst this is clearly true in the south it is not so clearly true in the north. Kintyre and the southern Hebrides, he points out, are more easily reached across the narrow straights from northern Ireland than they are across the broad desert of the central highlands. His argument is that the original boundary between the two sets of Celtic dialects as they grew apart ran up the Irish Sea as far as the outer Clyde but then hit Britain somewhere in Cowal and continued up the great divide which separates eastern Scotland from the west coast.

Campbell’s suggestion is far from implausible. Birdwatchers will be aware

that Britain and Ireland play host to two variants of the common crow Corvus corone. One Corvus corone corone, the Carrion Crow, is entirely black whilst the other, Corvus corone cornix, the Hooded Crow, is partly black and partly pale grey. These two crows are simply races of the same species and where their ranges meet they socialise and interbreed happily. Broadly speaking the Hooded Crow is the Irish variant but it is also the most common variety found on the west coast of Scotland and occasionally turns up elsewhere in the extreme west of Britain. A distribution map indicating the range of these two bird types would look very like Campbell’s suggested distribution map for the original extent of Irish and British varieties of Celtic. Since the crows interbreed happily the maintenance of two distinct races is almost certainly the result of geographical constraints and this suggests that Campbell may be correct when he suggests that in the north the Highlands create a greater barrier to population interaction than the North Channel.

The two races of crow, as we have seen, interbreed freely in the area where

their ranges overlap, principally in the West Highlands and this should alert us to further possibilities. British Celtic has been studied mainly through a necessary focus on the Welsh of Wales, its healthiest descendant, with the largest and oldest medieval literature. Likewise ‘Irish’ Celtic, or Gaelic, has largely been studied with a focus on the Irish of Ireland for the same reasons. This may have distorted our picture of the linguistic history of Insular Celtic. On the one hand very little at all is known of the northern British dialects which became Pictish and, on the other, specifically Scottish Gaelic was not written down until comparatively recently after centuries of ‘educated’ influence from Irish bardic schools. An alternative model to the binary division of Insular Celtic would be to posit a horse-shoe shaped dialect continuum flowing, say, from Kent to Kerry in which the dialects at the south end of each island were radically distinct whereas at the middle of the horse shoe, where the two islands come closest, the differences in dialect may always have been relatively slight. Such a horseshoe exists (or did until very recently) in the local dialects of Romance around the northern shore of the Western Mediterranean where a journey from Andalusia to Calabria would take one from district to district in which bordering dialects were mutually intelligible even though the speech of southern Italy is quite distinct from that of southern Spain. Indeed linguists such as Cathair Ó Dochartaigh, Roibeard Ó Maolalaigh and Breandán Ó Buachalla have argued that many of the features traditionally thought to be diagnostic in marking out Scottish Gaelic from Irish

Gaelic, and perhaps to be derived from interference from British Celtic, and which are found in the Irish of Ulster, were perhaps native to the latter region and not the result of recent contacts with Gaelic Scotland.

Enough, for now, of the linguistic evidence. Campbell also argues his position

with reference to archaeology. Although many archaeologists have become increasingly sceptical about the relevance of material culture types in defining ethnicity it is nevertheless recognised that invasions and migrations that are recorded in the historical record do sometimes correlate with the introduction of settlement or artefact types typical of the fatherland into the new territories. Campbell notes that the two most typical Dark Age settlement types in Ireland, the ring-fort (in truth simply a farmstead with a circular earthen bank around it) and the crannóg (an artificial lake-dwelling) were not introduced into Argyll. The crannog had been present in both Ireland and Scotland in the middle Bronze Age (c. 1400-1200 BC) but had gone out of use in Ireland only to reappear in the sixth century AD whilst it had stayed in use in Scotland the whole time. The ring-fort was also a new type of site in Ireland in the Dark Ages appearing at some point between about AD 300 and 500. This evidence of settlement type is ambiguous. If the appearance of the ring-fort in Ireland post-dated any migration to Scotland we should not expect it to have been introduced by the migrants. Similarly crannóga may have been reintroduced into Ireland as a result of increased contact between Scotland and Ireland. Other archaeological evidence, such as the presence or absence of diagnostic brooch types and the ogam script, brought forward by Campbell rely upon the construction of a diagnostically Irish material culture that belies regional specificity. Inscribed stones bearing the distinctively Irish ogam script may well be absent from Argyll but they are also absent from the northeast of Ireland as whole. Campbell demonstrates that Argyll does not display a “typically Irish” archaeological record but he fails to note that the supposed homeland of the Dál Riata in Ireland, County Antrim, does not either.

The linguistic and archaeological evidence relating to the coming of the Gaels

to Scotland is ambiguous. The historical and legendary material may now be examined. It should be stressed that none of the surviving accounts is anything like contemporary with the events it describes. The basic historical background is as follows. Before the coming of the vikings Gaelic speech in Scotland was largely confined to the kingdom of Dál Riata (sometimes written Dalriada). This kingdom was in existence from at least the sixth century AD and comprised most of present day Argyll, including the southern Hebrides, and a large portion of County Antrim in Northern Ireland, between the Giant’s Causeway and Carnlough Bay. At some point the Irish and Scottish portions became detached from one another. In the past historians thought that this had probably happened at about AD 650 because a text originally composed at this time, the Senchas Fer nAlban, only describes the British portion of the kingdom. It has been pointed out, however, that there are clear signs that the Irish portions were probably in the original version of this text, which now survives only in later medieval editions. Thus we can say only that Scottish and Irish Dál Riata became detached between c.650 and c.950. Common sense suggests that the most likely period for this detachment would be at the time of the viking conquest of the Hebrides in the ninth century.

The question that concerns us now is how the kingdom came into being. The best-known story is that Fergus Mór mac Erc, a king of Dál Riata who died in AD 501, led the migration. Although Fergus Mór was a real king the story of his migration is not recorded before the tenth century and there are hints it may have been invented then. His real significance is probably that he was the king reigning at the time that St Patrick is supposed to have been proselytising in Ireland and that a link was established between this and the origins of the Scottish kingdom. The earliest surviving story of the migration to Scotland comes from Bede, a Northumbrian monk who wrote in the 720s and early 730s. He claimed that the Irish came to Britain led by their king Reuda (his spelling of ‘Riata’) from whom the kingdom was named. The pedigrees of the later Scottish kings, who claimed descent from the kings of Dál Riata, include one Eochaid Riata thirteen generations above Fergus Mór. If we use the average generation-length calculated by the Dark Age historian Molly Miller of twenty-seven and a half years, then Eochaid’s death should occur some 357/8 years before Fergus’ in 501. This gives us a date of AD 142, during the reign of Antoninus Pius. Of course such calculations give only ball-park figures and should not be taken too seriously, but it is worth noting that Bede and his contemporaries appear to have been thinking of a history going back considerably earlier than AD 500. We should also wonder how accurate the information contained in the pedigrees is. Some Irish versions of the pedigree call the man in this position Coirpre Riata or Coirpre Rigfota. The reason for this is that Irish ‘historians’ in the Middle Ages liked to try and explain the political hierarchy of their own day by creating genealogical relations between all the rulers of their time. The higher the status of the ruler then the closer they were counted as kin to the current king of Tara, the notional king of all Ireland. Just as the various local rulers of the Gaelic world jostled for power so their pedigrees were rewritten accordingly. This did not usually effect the ‘historical’ portion of the pedigree but that of prehistoric ancestors far back in the past. It is nevertheless difficult for modern historians to be certain how reliable such pedigrees were. In real life a man needed to know his direct male line ancestry back at least six generations in order to be able to engage with the regulations governing inheritance and blood-feud. Kings and other great men probably knew their pedigrees back some way beyond this. How far is uncertain and probably varied a great deal. What is important for us is that the sources closest to Dál Riata seem to make the significant ancestor, from whom the kingdom took its name, someone called Eochaid. It is also clear that by Bede’s time, at least, the origins of the kingdom of Dál Riata were thought to lie far back in time.

The name Eochaid is of particular interest as the name of the ancestor figure of

Dál Riata. The apparent date of Eochaid Riata’s floruit is not the only thing about it that takes us back to the early Roman period. Much of our knowledge of the geography of Britain and Ireland in the early Roman era is based upon a geographical survey, perhaps intended to produce a map, carried out by the geographer Ptolemy, an ethnic Greek living in Roman controlled Egypt c. AD 150. Ptolemy wrote his survey in Greek but it was probably largely based on Latin language reports produced by the Roman army. His survey as a whole covers the entire empire and some neighbouring regions and we, for our part, are interested in his accounts of Britain and Ireland. Although he wrote in AD 150, or thereabouts, it is generally thought that his data was drawn from records of various dates. For Scotland Agricola’s campaigns of the ‘70s and ‘80s are the most likely source of information.

In Ptolemy’s survey the two areas that were to form the Scottish portion of Dál Riata, the southern Hebrides and Argyll, are dealt with in the Irish section and the British section respectively. Ptolemy ascribes Argyll to the Epidii tribe. This tribal name is a plural of the personal name Epidios which is formed from epos ‘horse’ plus a suffix –idius used to turn a common noun or deity name into a personal name, Epidios is thus a name meaning ‘The Horsey One’ or some such. Now the presence of a ‘p’ in this name marks it out, in the form Ptolemy preserves it, as a British name. We can tell this because one of the major distinguishing points between British and Irish Celtic in the earliest period was that Irish did not have the sound /p/. Originally this inability to say /p/ was a common feature to all Celtic dialects but the more easterly dialects gradually adopted it, presumably through contact with their neighbours, until only Irish and Hispano-Celtic were left without this sound. All these changes happened in prehistory however and cannot be dated. When words that had originally had /p/ in them in the Indo-European language ancestral to Celtic became Celtic words /p/ was usually dropped completely. In those dialects in which /p/ was eventually re-adopted the missing sound from the beginning of the word remained missing but all /kw/s were changed to /p/s. Thus the British and Gaulish word for horse, epos, is the equivalent to Latin equus and to Primitive Irish ekwos. If the name Epidios had existed in Primitive Irish it would have been something like Ekwidios. Between about AD 300 and AD 600 the Celtic languages of Britain and Ireland underwent a number of changes including the loss of case ending from nouns and various value changes of both vowels and consonants. The hypothetical name Ekwidios is in fact the Primitive Irish form of the medieval name Eochaid. This means that the legendary ancestor of the kings of Dál Riata had a name that was the singular form of the name of the tribe that inhabited Kintyre in the early Roman period. Further to this, Ptolemy calls the south end of Kintyre Epidion Akron (Greek for ‘Headland of the Epidii’) whilst the early Irish Saga The Death of Cú Rói calls the same place Ard Echde ‘Headland of the Eochaids’. We are left with a problem, however, Ptolemy’s form is definitely the British form while Eochaid is definitely the Irish form. In the period under discussion, both the Roman era and the Dark Ages, Irish and British Celtic were close enough that a reasonable experienced observer who was native to one language and familiar with the other could accurately switch names from one to another language. Modern historians also do this and we in the English-speaking world regularly read and write of the deeds of medieval German kings called Henry and Frederick whilst our colleagues reading and writing in German call them Heinrich and Friedrich. Similarly we are all taught at school that ‘Pierre’ is French for ‘Peter’. So the solution to the Eochaid/Epidios problem is that a name coined in one Celtic dialect has been normalised into another. Our problem is knowing which form came first. If we knew that then we would be some way to knowing if the Epidii were Gaels, which would support Campbell’s hypothesis that the Gaels had ‘always’ been in Argyll, or Britons, which would stand against his argument. Campbell rightly points out that if Ptolemy’s, or Agricola’s, informants had been British-speaking tribesman from elsewhere in Britain, as seems likely, then they probably would have translated any Gaelic forms that they related to the Romans into British as a matter of course. Is there anyway beyond this impasse?

The methodology one must adopt in a case of this sort is to survey the sources

carefully in the hope that a telltale mistake has been made. Whilst it is relatively easy for normalising habits to evolve as long as they are being carried out there are opportunities for the normaliser to make a slip and either change the foreign name

into the wrong domestic name (one could do as I once did and normalise the modern Dutch name ‘Ton’ as ‘Tom’ rather than ‘Tony’ for example) or to accidentally leave an un-normalised form (one could imagine translating a book of French History and whilst following a policy of making all the ‘Pierres’ into ‘Peters’ forgetting in one instance to do so). Such a slip or variation in practice is the give away as to which language the name was originally coined in. One place where we may start searching for such a slip is in the Irish section of Ptolemy’s survey.

As noted above the southern Hebrides are included in the survey as off shore

islands of Ireland rather than Britain and this probably reflects an Irish source for Ptolemy’s information about them distinct from his Scottish material. This is backed up by the fact that his Irish and Scottish sections do not join neatly due to errors in his grid and that the islands are accurately placed with regard to Ireland but not Scotland. Ptolemy’s Hebrides are five in number and Mull is the most northerly of them. They should probably be equated with five of the six – Mull, Islay, Jura, Colonsay, Rathlin and Arran or even with all of them if, for example, Islay and Jura were mistaken for a single island. Collectively Ptolemy calls the islands the ‘Ebudae islands’. The word Ebudae survives into medieval Irish in the adjectival form Ibdaig used in phrases such as Fir Ibdaig ‘men of the Hebrides’. This word looks very like an Irish attempt to reproduce the word Epidii phonetically rather than by ‘translating’ it into Irish. Eventually medial /p/ in British was to become /b/ in any case (the modern Welsh word for ‘colt’ is ebol from a diminutive form something like epulos) and the two sounds were easily confused as in the Latin form Britannia for the name of the island when the British word began with /p/ and was something like Pretann- (whence Welsh ‘Prydain’). If ‘Ebudae’ and its correlates is an Irish attempt to represent the name of the Epidii then it tells us two things. Firstly that the Epidii had, like the later Dál Riata, some claim to the southern Hebrides as well as to the mainland of Argyll and secondly that they were indeed British speaking rather than Gaelic speaking in origin. What then is the link between Dál Riata and the Epidii?

One of the most sensitive topics in the study of late prehistoric and early

historic Ireland is the population group known as the Cruithni. This word is the normal word used in medieval Irish for the Picts but it was also used for a group of kingdoms in the north of Ireland up until about AD 774. In origin this word is the Irish form of the British word for Britons, Pretani. In primitive Irish it would have been something like Kwreteni. Indeed this must have been the original form of the word in Celtic since initial /p/ would have been lost. The /p/ in Pretani is the result of the sound change /kw/ to /p/ which marked British off from Irish. In medieval Irish the Latin loan word Bretan was used for the Britons south of the Forth and Cruithni was reserved for the less Romanised peoples we call the Picts. At one time historians believed that the Preteni were the original inhabitants of both Britain and Ireland and that the Gaels had arrived at a very late stage. According to this argument the Cruithni of Northern Ireland were the last remnants of the native population. It has now become clear that this view is not supported by linguistic, archaeological or historical evidence. If British-speaking Celts ever settled in Ireland they must have done so subsequently to the development, in situ, of the Gaelic language. Unfortunately the idea that Northern Ireland was originally ‘British’ has proved very attractive to certain Unionist factions during the recent political troubles of the province. As a result ‘Cruithni Studies’, to coin a phrase, have become the preserve of Unionist apologists such as Ian Adamson. Serious historians of early Ireland,

tending as they do to have Nationalist sympathies or to be political neutral, have tended to steer clear of the topic. The Irish-based American scholar Jim Mallory is typical of most serious commentators when he summarises his brief discussion of the topic thus: “about the only thing the Cruthin [i.e Cruithni] hypothesis does emphasise are the continuous interactions between Ulster and Scotland. We might add that whatever their actual origins and ultimate fate, when the Cruthin emerge in our earliest texts they bear Irish names and there is not the slightest hint that they spoke anything other than Irish.”

Mallory is of course right in broad terms but is this really all that can be said?

Contemporary literary witness from Ireland begins only in the course of the century between AD 550 and AD 650 and it is true that these sources give us nothing but the name of the Cruithni, which appears in the annals periodically from 446 until 774, that suggests their foreignness. Their Irish names, however, may perhaps be misleading. Irish writers were capable of convincingly Gaelicising British names, and, as we shall see, were to do so consistently for the rulers of the Picts. It probably is the case that the Cruithni were by the sixth-century fully Gaelic but the evidence that it was certainly so is not quite as watertight as some would have us believe. At the beginning of the sixth century the western frontier of the Cruithni seems to have been in the neighbourhood of Lough Foyle although by the 570s they had been pushed back to the River Bann by the northern Uí Néill, a dynasty drawn from the Connachta of western Ireland (Connaught), who were expanding both north-eastwards and into the Irish Midlands. In the east the boundary of the Cruithni in this period was on the River Lagan, which flows into the sea through Belfast Lough. Crudely speaking their territory was made up of almost all of the modern day Counties of Antrim and Londonderry. To the west their neighbours were the Uí Néill and to the east the Ulaid (the Ulstermen) in Counties Down, Armagh and Louth. This means that during this period the lands of Dál Riata in Ireland, stretching from the Giant’s Causeway to Carnlough Bay, formed an enclave entirely surrounded on their landward side by the Cruithni. Now to me it seems odd that the people in Britain who appear to be somewhat Irish are, in their Irish territory, surrounded by the people in Ireland who appear to be somewhat British. This cannot simply be a coincidence. The simplest explanation of this paradox would be to assume that the Dál Riata and the Cruithni were in origin two parts of the same people, perhaps ultimately British in origin, who formed a political, cultural and linguistic bridge between Britain and Ireland.

Since we have seen that the Epidii were, at the time that the information that

went into Ptolemy’s survey was collected (perhaps in Agricola’s day, c. AD 80), probably British speakers we might postulate an extension of Epidian territory into the adjacent region of Ireland at a later date. If such an extension occurred prior to the major developments in the Celtic languages which took place between AD 400 and AD 600 then the British and Irish dialects of Celtic may still have been close enough that convergence rather than replacement occurred. Linguistic convergence is a phenomenon with which everyone in Scotland is familiar, even if they don’t know it. The most widespread language in use in Scotland today is termed by linguists ‘Scots English’. This is a convergence dialect resulting from the fairly radically different Neo-Anglo-Saxon languages of Scots (best represented today by the Doric of Aberdeenshire) and Standard English (in origin a south-eastern dialect). Because Scots and Standard English are close enough that with a bit of practice a native

speaker of one can ‘get the hang’ of the other, albeit imperfectly, without formal tuition, the result of close contact between the two speech communities over a long period of time has been that a hybrid dialect has evolved. Some speakers of Scots English seem to be speaking Scots with a dash of English and others English with a dash of Scots. Indeed most speakers are able to ‘alter the mix’, so to speak, depending on the social context they find themselves in. I would like to suggest that Scottish Gaelic and the northern Irish dialects that share many of its peculiarities originated in a broadly similar fashion. It became more Irish than British in character, over time, because the Irish portions of the Epidian territory were more populous than the British and because, as Ewan Campbell and Corvus corone have demonstrated, the central Highlands formed a barrier between Argyll and the Pictish territories to the east. Just as importantly, perhaps, the Romanisation of the Britons south of the Forth, which had contributed to the development of a linguistic distinction between the Welsh of the Britons and Pictish, will have made the Outer Clyde a greater cultural barrier than it had been in pre-Roman times. In short, what I am suggesting is that the Irish language was brought to Britain by British people going to Ireland. Put the book down, make yourself a cup of tea and think about it.

I have gone into the problem of Gaelic origins and the Cruithni in some detail

for two main reasons. Firstly Scotland and the Scots ultimately take their name from the inhabitants of Dál Riata and so in some sense Dál Riata’s territory in Britain is the first Scotland. Secondly our main source for the history of north Britain in the period between AD 550 and AD 740 are entries recorded in a chronicle kept on the island of Iona and later incorporated into an Irish ‘World Chronicle’. Iona lay within the kingdom of Dál Riata so much of our perspective during this period is a view from Dál Riata. Our other major source is the Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum ― ‘The History of the Church of the Anglian Nation’ ― written by Bede a monk of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow, a monastery located not far from present day Newcastle-upon-Tyne, c .AD 731. Iona was founded as is well known by Saint Columba in the 560s. The Northumbrian Church, to which Bede belonged, was founded as a mission from Iona in the 630s.

Saint Columba (†597) is in many ways the first truly historical figure

operating in Scotland of whom we can say very much at all. Many medieval authorities mention him and we are lucky enough to have a life of him written in or shortly after 697 by the ninth abbot of Iona, Adomnán. Adomnán’s Vita Columbae also incorporated material drawn from an earlier work by Abbot Cumméne written about fifty years before and drawing, in its turn, on eyewitness accounts of episodes in the saint’s life and of his post-mortem miracles. Columba was born Crimthann son of Fedlimid in Ireland, probably Donegal, in or around AD 521. His father was a member of the Uí Néill dynasty who were in the process of making themselves the most powerful force in Ireland during the course of the sixth century. Columba’s first cousin Ainmere (†569) was king of Tara, the notional over-kingship of Ireland, and it has recently been argued by the Irish historian Ailbhe Mac Shamráin that Diarmait mac Cerbaill, king of Tara from 549 to 565, was his uncle rather than the distant cousin traditional scholarship has reckoned him. Columba was intended from the church from childhood and educated in turn by three eminent clergymen. Firstly his foster-father Cruithnecán, then the Leinster master Gemmán and finally bishop Uinniau (also known as Finnbarr or Finnian). This last was almost certainly the British monastic missionary Uinniau of Moville, now a suburb of Newtonards in

County Down, who died in 579. He is probably the same man as Finnian of Clonard in the Irish midlands and possibly, it has been suggested by Thomas Clancy, as St Ninian of Whithorn, in Galloway (Uinniau and Finnian are, respectively, the British and Irish forms of the same name. The name Nynia, the earliest form of Ninian, may have originated as a miscopying of Uinniau). Uinniau appears to have been part of a movement in the British Church in the mid-sixth century that promoted and reformed the monastic movement. Saints Gildas, David and Samson were amongst his co-workers in this field. It was from Bishop Uinniau that Columba obtained his commitment to monasticism that was to prove so important in the history of the Church in Scotland.

In 563 Columba left Ireland and went to the court of king Conall of Dál Riata

in Britain’. The context of this migration is not clear. By this time Columba was forty-two years old and had probably completed his formal education and been a priest for about a decade. Whether he had spent all that time with Bishop Uiniau or in some other monastery is not clear. Later legends claimed that he had founded monasteries at both Derry and Durrow (County Offaly) before his voyage to Scotland but a close reading of Adomnán’s Life of Columba makes it clear that both monasteries were founded later in his career. 563, however, was an important year in relations between the Uí Néill, Columba’s own family, and the Cruithni. A great battle had been fought at Móin Daire Lothair, somewhere near the river Bann on the Londonderry Antrim border, in which the northern Uí Néill of Donegal came to the aid of a Cruithnian king Baetán mac Cuinn who was leading two tuatha of the Cruithni against the Cruithnian over-king Aed Brecc. Baetán and the Uí Neill won the battle, slaying Aed Brecc and seven other Cruithnian kings. Adomnán tells us that yet another king of the Cruithni, Eochaid Láeb, escaped the battle. All told this puts at least eleven Cruithnian kings at the battle. We are not told of the results of the battle for the over-kingship of the Cruithni but it did result in lands in the north of County Londonderry, between Coleraine and Magilligan’s Point, being handed over to the Uí Néill. It seems likely that the appearance of an Uí Néill prince, albeit a monk, at the court of the king of Dál Riata was related to the new relationship of his kindred to the Cruithni and to the turmoil that must have existed among them after the disaster of Móin Daire Lothair.

King Conall gave Columba the island of Iona on which to found on

monastery. Iona lay in the far northwest of Dál Riata, but this should not surprise us as many of the most important monasteries of the Dark Age Britain and Ireland were located in border territories. The other monasteries that we can locate in Scottish Dál Riata at this period lay in Tiree and Lismore, like Iona on the northern, Pictish, frontier, and at Kingarth on Bute near the border with the Britons of the Clyde. During the reign of Conall’s predecessor, Gabran, Dál Riata had suffered a number of defeats at the hands of the powerful Pictish king Bridei son of Meilocon (†584), the first king of the Picts for whom we have reliable records. The extent of Bridei’s importance is hard to gauge. Later accounts claimed that he was king of all the Picts and that Columba converted him to Christianity. The experts hotly debate how true either of these claims might be. If the Cruithni had eleven or more kings in their little corner of Ireland, how likely is it that all of Scotland north of the Forth, broken up as it is by topography, could have formed a united kingdom at this period? Was Bridei rather an over-king like Aed Brecc or was he perhaps a powerful regional king? As for his conversion Adomnán makes it clear that Bridei’s court, by the river Ness,

harboured staunch pagans but does not claim that Columba converted the king. Was this because he was already Christian, as some scholars believe, or because Columba was unsuccessful? Was Columba that kind of missionary at all?

As a pupil of Uinniau Columba’s main concern was monasticism. The

coenobitic or monastic life was intended as a retreat from the world in which the monk contemplated God and creation and attempted to live a pure life. Such an ideology does not lend itself to proselytising. Up until about the time we are considering monks had been very isolationist. There had been a brief experiment in fifth-century Gaul when the island monastery of Lerins, near Cannes, to some extent a model for Iona, had sent monks out to take up episcopal office in neighbouring cities. One of Columba’s younger contemporaries was Gregory the Great, the first pope to come from a monastic background, so this period was one of transition in which monks were beginning to engage more with the wider world. Adomnán’s Life makes it clear that Iona was engaged in pastoral work though it is always difficult to tell when he is projecting back the conditions of his own day, when there was a bishop based on the island, to Columba’s when the monastery had just been founded. Columba is certainly credited with converting some individual Picts by Adomnán but these seem to be people who have fallen in his way. There are no accounts in the Life of his preaching to the laity. Some modern scholars have argued that Columba’s visit to Bridei may have been diplomatic missions on behalf of the king of Dál Riata rather than missions. In one place Adomnán tell us that Columba freed a Gaelic slave-girl from the court of Bridei. This is particularly noteworthy because we know that Adomnán himself, some ten years before the completion of the Life of Columba, visited the king of Northumbria to secure the liberty of slaves captured in a raid on Ireland. Once again we have to wonder if Adomnán is emphasising those activities of his saintly predecessor that would legitimise his own actions?

The original foundation on Iona consisted of Columba himself and twelve

fellow monks. We are also told, however, that Columba had a personal servant, Diarmait, who does not seem to have been one of the monks. Diarmait’s presence raises the question of the nature of the community. Did the other monks also have servants or was the abbot privileged in this respect? Should we be imagining the early Iona community as a small group of ascetics living, for the most part, by the fruits of their own labours, or as an elect spending their time in prayer, meditation and the singing of psalms whilst others provided for their physical needs? By Adomnán’s time, a century after Columba’s death, Iona was clearly a big operation, the centre of an international network of monastic houses engaged in diplomatic and theological relations with spiritual and temporal leaders across Europe. A century after Adomnán’s death, as the surviving high crosses bear witness, the monastery was able to support skilled craftsmen and to fund major projects. Future archaeological work may yet reveal the rapidity with which Columba’s early foundation became the cosmopolis of later days but for the present we must content ourselves with speculation. In Columba’s day the monks were already using the unidentified island of Hinba (perhaps Oronsay of Colonsay or Eileach an Naoimh in the Garvellachs) as a place of penance and retreat so perhaps Iona was, from the start, a busy place.

In 574 King Conall, Columba’s patron, died. His successor was his cousin

Aedán, the son of Conall’s predecessor Gabrán. Adomnán tell us that Columba had originally supported the claim of Aedán’s brother Eoganán but that an angel had

shown him a book of kings prepared in heaven in which Aedán’s name was set down. The angel then commanded Columba to ordain Aedán as king. Columba may not have been the only one who was opposed to Aedán’s kingship. Shortly after the death of Conall the Irish chronicles tell us that Conall’s son Dúnchad, “together with many of the friends of the sons of Gabrán”, was killed in the battle of Delgu in Kintyre. Exactly how this fits into the politics of the situation is not clear but it may be that Dúnchad was a supporter of Eoganán. One possibility is that Eoganán and Aedán had different mothers and that their maternal kindreds were the driving force in the conflict. Aedán may, perhaps, have been born out of wedlock or in a marriage contracted before Gabrán became king (c. 538), whereas Eoganán and his brothers may have been born to Gabrán’s queen whilst he was king.

Aedán mac Gabráin has developed a curious after-life. In Adomnán’s work he

is presented as a devout supporter and friend of Columba yet in the later legendary literature that developed in Ireland he is presented as in some ways malign. In one story he tempts Columba by asking him if he wants to sleep with a beautiful girl. When Columba admits that he does the king accuses him of hypocrisy. The saint replies that although he desires to sleep with the girl he does not intend to do so and that that self-control is the key to his sanctity. In another story, in which Columba is absent, Satan appears as a friend and counsellor of Aedán, helping him to plot against his rival Cano son of Gartnait (in reality Cano was actually Aedán’s grandson!). Although no stories about Aedán survive from the Welsh tradition they clearly existed and Aedán is given the unflattering nickname of bradawc ― ‘wily’. Aedan mac Gabráin has a clear existence beyond legends, however, and was a major figure in the politics of his day. The chronicles record battles fought in Orkney, Manaw (a territory including Falkirk, Stirling and Clackmannan), ‘Leithri’ (unidentified), and perhaps two battles against the Angles of Bernicia. Adomnán adds a further battle in ‘Circinn’, the Pictish name for a province roughly equivalent to Angus and Mearns. As a military leader active across the whole of north Britain Aedán mac Gabráin was unparalleled amongst kings of Dál Riata. To understand the secret of his success, and indeed of his relationship with Columba, we have to return briefly to the north of Ireland. Unless the battle of Leithri was fought there, none of Aedán’s recorded battles took place in Ireland, yet he was active there. A very late little narrative attached to a collection of genealogies of the kings of the Ulaid, in summarising the career of Baetán mac Cairell (572-581), states that he received the submission of Aedán mac Gabráin at Rinn Seimne (Island Magee, the promontory that protects Larne from the open sea). There is no other account of such a meeting and we should be very wary of the partial interpretation that an Ulster genealogist is likely to have put on it. The location, Island Magee, lies very close to the boundary between the Ulaid and the Cruithni, and meetings on boundaries were more likely to have been meetings between kings treating on a more or less equal footing. The meeting with Baetán at Rinn Seimne, at some point between 574 and 581, should be considered alongside another, far better attested and better known royal meeting that Aedán attended. Adomnán describes a condictum regum ― an agreement between kings ― “namely Aed mac Ainmirech and Aedán mac Gabráin” at a place called Druim Cett (a ridge by the river Roe, just outside Limavady). Although the Annals of Ulster date this meeting to 575 Michael Meckler has demonstrated that this particular entry was

probably added as late as the twelfth century and Richard Sharpe has pointed out that Aed did not become a king until 586 when he succeeded as King of Tara and over-king of the Uí Néill. Taken together these two meetings put Aedán at the eastern and western borders of the Cruithnian territory respectively dealing with the over-kings of the two neighbouring tribal confederations. The obvious inference to be made was that Aedán was, by this point in his career, not merely king of Dál Riata but over-king of the Cruithni as well. This point is driven home in an anecdote told by Adomnán concerning Columba and his friend Comgall, abbot of Bangor, himself a Cruithnech. The two saints were on their way back to the coast when they stopped to rest by a spring near the fortress of Dún Cethirn (near Coleraine). Columba said to Comgall that the spring would one day be filled with blood when his kinsmen, the Uí Néill, fought against those of Comgall, the Cruithni, at that place. The battle he was prophesying was to take place in 629 but it is also likely that the connection with the condictum regum has been made by Adomnán because it was generally understood to have been a peace agreement made between the Cruithni and the Uí Néill, perhaps even brokered by the two abbots. Their sanctity is underpinned by the proposal that in their lifetimes the peace process could progress whereas in modern times, as it were, lesser kings, bereft of the counsel of saints, have returned like dogs to their vomit. Aedán’s military adventures in Britain can to some extent be accounted for by the twofold benefit of the situation in the north of Ireland. Firstly he seems to have reached an accommodation with the two major over-kings in the region, who were at this time more interested in conflict in the Irish Midlands, which left that flank protected. Secondly he was able to call on a much larger military following than most subsequent kings of Dál Riata through his over-kingship of the Cruithni. This extended overlordship in Ireland is also hinted at in the first portion of the Senchas fer nAlban. This text, which was mentioned briefly earlier, survives only in four late medieval manuscripts from the west of Ireland. It is however a rather badly put together compilation of the tenth to twelfth centuries which in some sense seeks to link Dál Riata of the sixth and seventh centuries with the Kingdom of Alba of the post 900 period. It does appear to include genuine seventh century material although this has been selectively edited. The first part is a typical fictional genealogical framework explaining the political relationships of the seventh century. At its head is a man named Eochaid Munremar. He is given two sons, Erc and Ólchú. Each of these are, in turn, given about twelve sons (the precise figures vary slightly in the MSS. But a symmetrical structure was probably intended in the original). We are then told that six of Erc’s sons lived in Scotland but that all of Ólchú’s and half of Erc’s set up home in Ireland where their descendants still live. Eochaid Munremar is clearly some kind of doublet of Eochaid Riata, the original ‘Epidios’, and what we are looking at is a genealogical explanation of the over-kingship that the Aedán and his descendants claimed. As David Dumville, the latest editor of the text, has pointed out, the fact that eighteen out of the twenty-four grandsons of Eochaid established kindreds in Ireland, a fact that later editing of the text obscured by only following up a handful of the lines who remained active in Scotland, suggests that the kingdom it represented was not just Argyll (apparently populated by the descendants of three grandsons only, and at most six) and a toe-hold in Ireland. It is far more likely that the original seventh century version of this text traced the descent of all the grandsons of Eochaid and explained the political hierarchy amongst the different tuatha of the Cruithni.

Aedán military campaigns act, for us, like a searchlight swinging across Scotland from literate Iona. Between the outer Clyde and the Forth lay the myriad kingdoms of the Britons. Christian now for generations and Roman in their pretensions we know surprisingly little about them. A series of historical accidents has meant that no chronicles or other prose text composed in their territory has survived into the present and for the most part we are dependent upon battle poetry preserved in medieval Wales. A great deal of the heroic literature of Wales deals with these territories in the north of England and southern Scotland which the Welsh termed yr Hen Gogledd ― the Old North. The kings of the sixth and seventh century were seen as model rulers whom later Welsh kings and princes sought to emulate. Most of the literature concerning the Old North was composed in Wales between the ninth and thirteenth centuries but a handful of poems may have originated in the northern British kingdoms themselves, though they have only come down to us in modified form. The most famous of these is Y Gododdin ― The Gododdin ― said to have been composed by the poet Aneirin around about AD 600. The Gododdin is often written and talked about as if it were an epic narrative. It is not. It survives in two versions the longer of which contains about eighty-three stanzas or gorchanau. Each gorchan is an individual praise poem describing the brilliance of a different warrior. In most of the gorchanau it is clear that the address is post-mortem. The first gorchan of the longer ‘A-text’ gives a good impression of the whole. Here it is as translated by Joseph Clancy in his son Thomas’ anthology of early Scottish poetry The Triumph Tree:

Man’s mettle, youth’s years, courage for combat: Swift thick-maned stallions beneath a fine stripling’s thighs, Broad lightweight shield on a trim charger’s crupper, Gleaming blue blades, gold bordered garments. Never will there be bitterness between us: I do better by you, in song to praise you. The blood-soaked field before the marriage feast, Foodstuff for crows before burial. A dear comrade, Owain, wrong, his cover of crows. Sad wonder to me in what land Marro’s one son was slain.

And so it goes on. Many of the warriors praised appear to have ‘ridden to Catraeth’, a place frequently, though not certainly, identified with Catterick in North Yorkshire. Modern editors and commentators have tended to construct a narrative from clues in the text. They hypothesise that all the men praised in the poem died at a single battle at Catraeth following a heroic ride south from Gododdin, the territory of the Uotadini in Lothian. A king or ruler of Gododdin, variously identified as Mynyddog (which may be an adjective ― ‘mountainous’― rather than a name) or Urfei, gathered a force from all over the British world and after feasting them for a year in his halls at Eidin (Castle Rock, Edinburgh), led or sent them on an ill-fated attack on the Saxon kingdoms of the south. From this attack, one, or three, alone survived. This traditional interpretation, however, is not the only reading of the text. John Koch, its latest critical editor, has suggested that the expedition was aimed at a British kingdom based on Catraeth and that Saxons fought as allies on both sides. It has to be said that all such narrative reconstructions are stretching the evidence to its full. Whilst there are a number of gorchanau that mention Catraeth, Mynyddog, Eidin and Gododdin,

many do not at all and could easily be independent elegies from elsewhere in the British world which have become attached to the core text. The real historical value of this poetry lies not so much in its [in]ability to provide a narrative account of events in the period as in its ability to give us a flavour of the values of aristocratic men in British society. The poetry is almost entirely concerned with warfare. Success in warfare guaranteed status, wealth (from plunder) and above all reputation. The poetry is full of explicitly Christian allusions but it is secular in its form and function. The language includes many Latin loan words and warriors are presented as reclining on couches to eat and behaving in other ways that are as much Roman as native. They tell us of the importance of alcohol, wine, ale and mead, in the entertaining of war-bands by their lords and of the rewards meted out in land and horses to retainers and poets. Above all perhaps they indicate the importance of praise poetry and the court poet himself. Taliesin sings of his lord Urien (again in Clancy’s translation):

My place of ease, with Rheged’s men: Respect and welcome and mead in plenty. Plenty of mead for celebration, And splendid lands for me in abundance. Great possessions and gold and wealth. Wealth and gold and high honour. High honour and fulfilled desire. Desire fulfilled to do me good. He slays, he hangs, supplies, provides. Provides, supplies, foremost he slays. He gives great honour to the world’s poets. The world for certain submits to you. At your will God, for your sake, Has made lords groan, fearing destruction. Rouser of battle, defender of the land. Land’s defender, battle’s rouser, Constant around you hooves stamping, Stamping of hooves and drinking of beer. Beer for the drinking and a splendid dwelling, And a splendid garment was handed to me. Llwyfenydd’s people all entreat you, With a single voice, the great and the small. Taliesin’s praise song will entertain them. You are the best whose qualities ever I have heard of, And I will praise all that you do. And until I die, old, by death’s strict demand, I shall not be joyful unless I praise Urien.

Or was he singing of himself? The hero makes the poet’s fortune but the poet makes the hero. The warfare of the Britons celebrated in this poetry is mostly internecine warfare amongst themselves or warfare against the new people on the island, the Anglo-Saxons. The Picts and the Gaels feature but little though there is the occasional reference to them. Whether this reflects the real circumstances of the sixth and seventh centuries is less clear. It may well be that the concerns of our surviving poetry reflect the concerns of the Welsh of Wales who had little contact with Gaels of Picts in the central middle ages. Of the relationship between Aedán mac Gabráin and the Britons we can construe little. Adomnán tell us that Aedán fought a battle against the Miathi in which his sons Eochaid Finn and Artúr were slain, though he gained the victory. Most scholars think that this battle was the same battle as that which the chronicles say was fought in Manaw in 582. This supposition is based on two inferences. Firstly that the name Miathi lies behind the place names Dumyat, a hill fort above Bridge of Allan, and Myot Hill, not far from Carron Bridge, and secondly that the Miathi are the same as the Maeatae of Cassius Dio. The question that concerns us is whether these people should be considered Picts or Britons. Because they appear in so few sources, yet are clearly regarded as significant both by the third century Cassius Dio and by Adomnán in the seventh century it has often been suggested that their name may be an alternate name for one of the other peoples of whom we know. The two chief possibilities are the Uotadini/Gododdin and the Verturiones/Fortriu. The ninth century Historia Brittonum suggests that Manaw was viewed as being part of Gododdin by using the phrase ‘Manaw Gododdin’ but this may be an over simplification. Manaw was also the name for the Isle of Man in Welsh and it could be that the Historia Brittonum, written in Gwynedd where the nearby island was more familiar to people than the Scottish central belt, simply stuck Gododdin on the name for clarification of location at a time when the Welsh understanding of the now defunct political geography of the Old North was not too accurate. One argument in favour of the Miathi being Picts rather than Britons is that Adomnán refers to them as ‘barbarians’ a term that usually in this period, though not exclusively, implies paganism. Adomnán does name one British king in his Life of Columba, Rhydderch map Tudwal of Dumbarton (then ‘Al Clut’ ― ‘The Rock of the Clyde’). This king, whom, we are told, was a friend of the saint, sent a secret message to Columba asking whether he would be ‘slaughtered by his enemies’. The saint cross examined the messenger about the king and his kingdom and then said “He will never be delivered into his enemies hands but will die in his own home with his head on his pillow.” Adomnán then goes on to tell us, unsurprisingly, that this is exactly what happened. Historians have read a great deal into this very short episode. They refer to a Welsh ‘triad’ which they claim suggests that Rhydderch was defeated in battle and perhaps killed by Aedán. They suggest that Rhydderch in sending his message to Columba was trying to get him to ward off Aedán and that though the saint tried he ultimately failed. This is a foolish interpretation. Adomnán was writing within a hundred years of Rhydderch’s death the truth about his fate would have been well known and the point of the story is to show that Columba knew what everybody now knows long before it happened. It is also the case that the Welsh triad, which has never been cited in full by Scottish historians, probably does not bear the burden that has been set upon

it. So here it is, adapted from the translation by Rachel Bromwich in her edition of the Welsh Triads, Trioedd Ynys Prydein:

Three Unrestrained Prodigalities of the Island of Britain The first of them when Medrawd came to Arthur’s Court at Celliwig in Cornwall; he left neither food nor drink in the court that he did not consume. And he dragged Gwenhwyfar from her royal chair and then he struck a blow on her; The second unrestrained prodigality when Arthur came to Medrawd’s court. He left neither food nor drink in the court; And third unrestrained prodigality when Aedán the Wily came to the court of Rhydderch the Generous at Dumbarton; he left neither food nor drink nor beast alive.

It should be quite clear that these unrestrained prodigalities (or ‘ravagings’ in Bromwich’s original translation), ― Welsh drut heirfa ―, are not military attacks but unrestrained ‘guestings’. The main method by which kings and other great lords in the early Middle Ages obtained sustenance from their people was by visiting them with their retinues and staying to supper and having bed and breakfast afterwards. This allowed the ruler to maintain his following and family at the expense of his subjects whilst still allowing them to feel that they were being honoured. It was also a way for the ruler to get to know his subjects well for they too would sit down and eat with him. Welsh and Irish law had strict guidelines laid down to make sure that kings did not abuse this right, each subject was responsible for only so-many night of the year and the size of the royal retinue was limited. In fact kings spent much of their time travelling around in this fashion staying some nights on their own estates, where a steward would play host, and sometimes in the homes of their subjects. Similar practice would apply when rulers visited each other. Sometimes these visits were as between equals but usually some sense of a pecking order was established with one ruler being either acknowledged as over-king or as senior partner in an alliance. Again elaborate rules were set for this so that everyone would know their place. Now what the triad cited above seems to be describing are events known from legend (the triads date to the twelfth or thirteenth century) in which kings behaved badly when visiting one another. What we are really being told about Aedán’s visit to Dumbarton is not that he was attacking it but that he took too large a retinue or that he and his men kept asking for second helpings, or drank too much or raped the maid servants and so forth. If we imagine for a moment that this legend is based on a real event we might see it either as a deliberate policy of Aedán’s to demonstrate that he is the senior king ―“If I am really rude to this guy,” he might be thinking, “in front of all his mates and my mates, and he lets me get away with it, everyone will know I that am the big man”― or it might be that Aedán’s following was so large, and so used to luxury, that they carelessly ate Rhydderch out of house and home. If we wish to link Aedán’s legendary visit to Dumbarton with the story Adomnán told of Rhydderch it might be easiest to imagine that Rhydderch is under threat from enemies other than Aedán and that he is asking the saint to appeal for Aedán’s help on his behalf. Aedán comes to Rhydderch’s aid and either before or after seeing off his enemies he eats Rhydderch out of house and home to emphasize the imbalance in their relationship. In a sense this is another take on the framing story that has been inferred for the Gododdin in which king Mynyddog of Eidin feasted

warriors in his hall for a year before sending them off to fight his enemies. This time, however, we have the housekeeper’s perspective rather than that of the panegyrist. So if Aedán was not the enemy of the king of Dumbarton who was? There are a number of possibilities. Perhaps the most likely one is that they were fellow Britons. Precisely how the British kingdoms of the Old North were organised is not clear. Gododdin certainly takes its name from the Roman period tribe of the Uotadini and the Pictish kingdom of Fortriu preserves the name of the Verturiones but the origins and extent of other kingdoms is less clear, indeed it is not certain that these two were actually unified kingdoms rather than confederacies of chieftains as they had been in Roman times. The Kings of Dumbarton are always called just that, named from a royal fortress, not a territory although they claimed descent from a mythical figure Dyfnwal Hen (‘Old Donald’) whose name, originally something like Dumnowallo, may be connected with the Dumnonii who occupied much of central Scotland in Roman times. Other kingdoms, like Aeron, are named from rivers (the Ayr in this case) and other have names which we cannot now locate, or even be certain that they really are kingdom names, like Rheged and Goddau. Shared Britishness seems more important than tribal loyalty, perhaps this is part of the Roman heritage or perhaps it reflects the lenses we see these people through, hostile accounts by the English and the reworking of their traditions by late medieval Welshmen. One possibility is that we should imagine lots of royal centres like Dumbarton Rock, Castle Rock Edinburgh, Dun Donald (near Troon), Tynron Doon in Nithsdale and so on, whose rulers were constantly jockeying for position as ‘top king’. This might fit the account in the Historia Brittonum of the campaigns of four British kings, Urien and Rhydderch, both of whom we have met, together with Gwallog and Morgann, against the nascent Anglian kingdom of Bernicia. At the point of victory, while besieging the Anglian king on Lindisfarne Urien, the greatest of these warriors, is murdered on the orders of Morgann out of jealousy. Morgann also appears in the Life of St Kentigern, Glasgow’s patron saint, as wicked ruler who drives the saint away. In this story, surviving only in a late twelfth century version, Morgann is eventually replaced by Rhydderch who invites Kentigern, also known as Mungo, back home and endows the Church of Glasgow most generously. If Rhydderch was not living in fear of his British kinsmen it is most likely that his enemies would have been the Angles of Bernicia. They have been noted in passing once or twice but not dwelt upon in detail yet though they will come to dominate our story for a while. The Angles seem to have been the latest arrivals in Scotland and their history here is often treated as an appendix to the history of England, which takes its name from them as Scotland does from the Gaels. The peoples we call Anglo-Saxons originated, by and large, as immigrants to Britain from the continent. The earliest stages of the colonisation process are very poorly understood but by about 600 there were about ten or twelve ‘Anglo-Saxon’ kingdoms in Britain. These kingdoms can be divided into three groups, Angles, Saxons and Jutes, on the basis of the apparent tribal identity of their founding fathers. Our story only really concerns the Angles although in the early period they were probably the most numerous tribe. There first homeland on this island seems to have been in the area that we call East Anglia from whence the spread westwards to Mercia in the north midlands of England and northwards into Lincolnshire and East Yorkshire to form the kingdoms of Lindsey and Deira. During the late-fifth, sixth and early seventh centuries we can distinguish the Anglian territories from those of the Britons

and the other Germanic peoples (the Saxons and Jutes) because of preponderance towards cremation as a burial rite and towards certain types of metalwork used in female dress fastenings. In the course of the seventh century Mercia sent out its own colonies into the west midlands to form two or three further kingdoms. Mercia and its colonies were known collectively as the West Angles. The kingdom that most concerns us is the most northerly of the Germanic kingdoms in Britain known as Bernicia. According to the traditions of the kingdom, Bernicia’s founder had been a man named Oesa or Eosa who appears in the pedigrees as the great-great grandfather of Æthelfrith, the earliest truly historical king, who died in AD 617. This ought to put Oesa’s death in the first decade or so of the sixth century. Bernicia, however, although always counted as an Anglian kingdom has slightly odd features when compared to the others. Typically Anglo-Saxon burials and cremations are very rare from the region and, unlike the other Angles, they, like their British neighbours, ruled their territories from hill-top citadels like Bamburgh (Northumberland) and the Mote of Mark (Kirkcudbright). By the end of the eighth century at least they had also adopted the Pictish practice of tattooing. The Bernicians then, though certainly Anglian or English in speech, had a lot more of the native about them. Their kingdom seems to have originated along the line of Hadrian’s Wall and one is tempted to explain their non-Anglian character by suggesting that they originated not from the fifth-century Anglo-Saxon invasions but from some earlier plantation of Germanic mercenaries by the Romans but there is no hard evidence for this. By the middle of the sixth-century, under Oesa’s grandson Ida, they had expanded north into the lower Tweed basin where Bamburgh became one of their main royal centres. They were probably expanding into Dumfriesshire at about the same time but we lack any account of this. Bernician expansion was entirely at the expense of the Britons in this period. Ida was succeeded by a whole string of sons each reigning in turn. It was some of these sons who were besieged on Lindisfarne by Urien. At the death of the last of his sons to reign, Hussa, Æthelfrith, son of the eldest son Æthelric, took the kingdom. Æthelfrith was a mighty warrior. Bede, the Bernicians’ own historian, writing a little over a century after Æthelfrith’s death, said of him “no ruler or king had subjected more land to the Anglian nation or settled it, having first exterminated or conquered the natives.” Unfortunately Bede does not catalogue the lands that Æthelfrith conquered but they probably included much of Tweed dale, Teviotdale, Dumfriesshire and Cumberland. On account of these conquests, Bede goes on, “Aedán, king of the Irish living in Britain, marched against him with an immensely strong army”. It seems likely that Æethelfrith was the enemy whom Rhydderch dreaded and that he put himself under Aedán’s protection. One could let one’s imagination go further and envision Aedán gathering a great fleet from his British and Irish territories and, having disembarked at Dumbarton on route to Bernicia, caused something of a domestic crisis for Rhydderch. Aedán’s army was indeed a multinational force. It contained not only his own forces from Dál Riata but other Cruithni, perhaps including Fiachna Lurgan king of Mag Line, and one Maeluma mac Baetáin, an Uí Néill prince. Most interesting of all is that Hering the son of Æthelfrith’s predecessor as king of Bernicia, Hussa, was also in Aedán’s army. This underlines a major factor in Dark Age

warfare. The most successful campaigns were nearly all those in which the attacker had a claimant to the kingship of the target kingdom on side. This was not difficult to arrange. Because all the peoples whom we have been dealing with practised the kind of royal succession that is sometimes called tanistry in which the kingship did not automatically pass to the eldest son of the outgoing king but could be held by any physically fit son, or in special circumstances grandson, or a previous king. This meant that brother-to-brother or uncle-to-nephew succession was more common than father to son succession since sons were often relatively young and inexperienced when their fathers died. Royal princes, called rígdamnae in Gaelic and æthelingas in Anglian, might be quite happy to gain experience and wait when they were young but as they got older they might worry that their chance would go. Sons of the ruling king might be maturing and there was the added family pressure that if they forwent their chance to be king their own sons or grandsons would have still less chance. What is instructive about Hering’s choice of backer in his bid for the Bernician kingship is that he was clearly not influenced by ethnic considerations. Although the Bernicians spoke a Germanic language and were still pagans he went to the Christian Gael Aedán for help. Presumably this is more evidence of Aedán’s unparalleled military power. Hering might have sought refuge and succour from a fellow Angle to the South but he chose not to do so. Unfortunately for Hering and Aedán their expedition was not a success. Bede tells us that Aedan’s escaped with only a remnant of his army and Adomnán tells us that he left his son Domangart dead on the field. Bede also tells us that Æthelfrith’s brother Theobald, with all of his army, was also destroyed in this conflict. What is not clear is whether Theobald like Hering was at odds with his brother or, as seems more likely, that the campaign comprised of two battles, an early Anglian defeat followed by a defeat of Aedán. The Annals of Tigernach also claimed that Maeluma mac Baetáin slew Eanfrith brother of Æthelfrith at this battle. Whether this is an error for Theobald or not is unclear. What is clear is that this battle was one of the great turning points of northern British history. Success for Aedán may well have heralded a Gaelicization of the whole of southern Scotland. Though Bede tells us that the battle was fought at a place called ‘Dagsastán’, and various historians have put forward suggestions as to where this might be located, no consensus as to the location has been reached. The defeat at Dagsastán effectively brought Aedán’s active career to an end though it may not have been as catastrophic as Bede suggested. Æthelfrith’s career went from strength to strength, however, with his conquest of Deira, in East Yorkshire, the following year and military campaigns as far afield as Chester. He was finally stopped by an alliance of the other Anglian kings led by Rædwald of East Anglia who slew him in battle in 617 and replaced him with Eadwine, a Deiran ætheling, who took over the combined kingdoms of Deira and Bernicia, and continued Æthelfrith’s policy of expansion at the expense of the Britons. Meanwhile Aedán, in the ripeness of old age, died (c. 608) and was succeeded by his son Eochaid Buide. Eochaid seems to have maintained his father’s position as over-king of the Cruithni. A ninth or tenth century glossator of the chronicle which lies behind the annals of Ulster added the title rex Pictorum to Eochaid’s name at his obituary. This seems to be a rare example of the word Cruithni as applied to the Irish people of that name being translated into Latin as Pict, something that was regularly done when the same Irish word was used for the Picts of

Scotland. It is likely that the glossator living some time after the Irish people had ceased to use the name (the last recorded instance is in 774) knew that Eochaid’s descendants had become by his time kings of the Picts and made a simple error. Eochaid’s reign was, so far as we know uneventful. In 626, however, Aedán’s old ally the Cruithnian king of Mag Line Fiachna Lurgan was slain by his namesake Fiachna mac Demáin king of the Ulaid. Connad Cerr, Eochaid’s tanist and perhaps his son, was despatched to avenge the Cruithni and in 627 defeated the Ulaid at Ard Corann, near Lough Larne, and killed their king Fiachna mac Demáin. The supremacy of Dál Riata was not to survive Eochaid Buide. Two years after the battle of Ard Corann Eochaid died and was succeeded by Connad Cerr but within three months he too was dead. Connad seems to have come into conflict with the Cruithni of Mag Line and at the battle of Fid Eoin (‘Bird Wood’, site unknown) He was slain along with a number of the grandsons of Aedán. The leader of the enemy is described in the annals as Mael Cáich, king of the Cruithni. This man appears to have been the brother of Congal Cláen who succeeded Fiachna according to the king-lists, and it was not that unusual for brothers to share the kingship from time to time. It seems that the coincidence of the deaths of Fiachna Lurgan and Eochaid Buide opened the way for a younger generation who were not prepared to accept the status quo. From now on the over-kingship of the Cruithni passed to the dynasty from Mag Line and it is their dynastic name, Dál nAraide which gradually supplants the term Cruithni as the loose tribal confederation became bound into a secure kingdom. It was, incidentally, in the same year as the battle of Fid Eoin that Comgal Cláen, Mael Cáich’s brother, fought the battle against the Uí Néill at Dún Cethirn, which Columba had predicted to Comgall forty years previously. The Cruithni were defeated in this battle by Domnall mac Aeda, king of Tara. Congal Cláen, the Dál nAraide over-king of the Cruithni, seems to have influenced the succession in Dál Riata for the next king Domnall Brecc (‘Freckled Donald’) son of Eochaid Buide was consistently his ally. This new Cruithnian confederation seems likely to have played a part in events in Britain. In 633 Eadwine king of Deira, who had been ruling Bernicia also, was killed by a British king Cadwallon. Eadwine’s death prompted the return of the sons of Æthelfrith of Bernicia who had been living in exile amongst the Gael. The first of these sons Eanfrith was murdered whilst visiting Cadwallon under truce and his brother Oswald, who slew Cadwallon in battle near Hexham, replaced him. Oswald and his brothers had been converted to Christianity while in exile and he claimed that his victory had been secured through the aid of St Columba. In return he sent to Iona to ask for missionaries to be provided for the establishment of a church in Bernicia. Bishop Aidan was sent and founded his first monastery on Lindisfarne, a tidal island within sight of the royal fortress of Bamburgh. The fact that Oswald sent to Iona for his missionaries suggests that it was from Domnall Brecc and his over-lord Congal Cláen that he had received the support that had allowed him to return home victorious. The alliance between Dál Riata and Dál nAraide was, however, short-lived and in 637 at Mag Rath just to the southwest of Belfast Congal Cláen paid the ultimate price for his defiance of the Uí Néill. Domnall Brecc escaped with his life but was forced to seek protection elsewhere and Oswald of Bernicia, now ruler of Deira as well, turned the tables on his erstwhile patron and became ‘top-king’ in northern Britain. Dál Riata’s influence and control in Ireland began to slip away. At some

point in the 640s the bishop of Dál Riata, who had been based at Armoy, on the river Bush in Antrim, moved his seat to Kingarth on Bute and much of his parochia in Ireland fell under the sway of the bishop of Dál nAraide based at Connor in Mag Line. Later in the century the bishopric would be relocated again to Iona which, under Adomnán (abbot from 679 to 704), had become far and away the premier church of the kingdom. Dál Riata still maintained control of most of the Antrim coast but its kings seem to have tried to keep out of mainstream Irish politics as much as possible. Without their Cruithni allies the kings of Dál Riata also ceased to be major players in Britain. Domnall Brecc himself was killed by the king of Dumbarton, Ywain son of Beli, at Strathcarron in Stirlingshire in the fifteenth year of his reign. Very much a case of the worm turning. Dál Riata descended into a period of internecine strife. For a generation the Bernicians came to dominate the north. Oswald had been killed fighting his southern neighbours. His successor was his brother Oswiu who began his reign under the shadow of Penda king of Mercia, his brother’s killer and leading king amongst the Angles. In 644 however, Oswiu won a signal victory against the Britons and his star began to rise. In 651 he attacked Deira, his southern neighbour, killing its king, Oswine, and installing his nephew, Oswald’s son Œthelwald, as king. In 653 another nephew Talorgan son of Eanfrith became ‘king of the Picts’, perhaps with Oswiu’s help but perhaps not. The fact that he has a Pictish name suggests that he may have grown up in Pictland and that his mother may have been of Pictish royal blood. Talorgan’s kingship raises the same question that we encountered with Columba’s contemporary Bridei son of Meilocon. Is it realistic to think of the Picts as unified kingdom stretching from the Forth to the Pictland Firth, or even beyond? Should we instead be thinking of a series of competing kingdoms recognising a lose over-lord of the kind we have seen with the Cruithni or the Angles? Or even more than one of these, perhaps one on each side of the Mounth? Our knowledge of the Pictish kings and their succession is based upon surviving king-lists compiled, so far as we can tell, between the 720s and the 870s. By the end of this period there was an effective over-kingship, perhaps even a unitary kingdom, of the Picts, but who were the earlier kings in the list. The very early section is clearly legendary but from about the time of Bridei son of Meilocon we can identify most of the kings in the lists from references to their activities, in most cases just their deaths, in the Irish chronicles. On important question is now was the king-list for the period between c. 580 and c. 725 compiled, presuming it was indeed compiled retrospectively from that point. There are perhaps three strong possibilities. 1. The king-list was compiled from an Irish chronicle (that kept at Iona?) and based on the obituary notice of kings of the Picts. If this is the case then we have to be very careful about its value for the Irish chronicles use terms like ‘king of the Britons’ or ‘king of the Saxons’ for any rulers of that ethnicity even though both Anglo-Saxons and Britons had many kingdoms in this period. 2. The king-list is a broadly accurate list of the kings of one regional kingdom, perhaps Fortriu. Fortriu certainly provided the home base for the dynasty that later ruled all Pictland. 3. The king-list is a broadly accurate list of over-kings of the Picts drawn from a number of local kingdoms.

There is no clear way of deciding between these options. In favour of the first is the fact that average reign length of the kings between 556 and 724 is only twelve years. This is a bit shorter than one would normally expect on a broad comparative basis but it is not so much shorter as to be certainly abnormal. Shortness of reign-length, however, could be a product of counting kings from different kingdoms together if reign-length is simply calculated by the interval between obituaries. In favour of the second argument is Adomnán’s location of Bridei’s fortress near the river Ness. The ease of access through the Great Glen would probably have made the Inverness area, the probable location of Fortriu, the best-known Pictish region to the inhabitants of Iona. In favour of the third option is the oft-noted absence of kings who were the sons of kings before the mid eighth century. Options one and three are not entirely incompatible with one another. The fact that sub-kings of Orkney and Atholl are each noted on one occasion only suggests both that over-kingship did exist amongst the Picts and that outside observers were not particularly interested in the sub-kings. The absence of father to son succession amongst the Picts cannot be explained simply with reference to tanistry. Amongst the Gaels and the Angles most kings were the sons of kings they simply did not often succeed directly upon their father’s death but were more likely to be immediately preceded by an uncle or brother. Amongst the Picts, on the other hand no king before the 780s appears to have been the son of a previous king. This phenomenon has usually been explained with reference to the supposed practise of matriliny by the Picts. It is argued that the kingship passed through the female line and that if one only had the information then one might see that succession passed from brother to brother (which it certainly did on occasion) and from uncle to sister’s son (which we cannot know as the maternity of most kings is not recorded). Against the suggestion that the Picts practised matriliny can be raised the problem that all Pictish kings (with the possible exception of the two sons of Derile) seem to be known by patronymics. Thus, for example, we have Bridei son of Meilocon and Talorgan son of Eanfrith, both Meilocon and Eanfrith being masculine names. If their status came from their mother would they not be labelled as sons of their mothers? The whole idea that the Picts practised matriliny seems to stem from two contemporary accounts. Most importantly Bede claims that in times of doubt as to the succession the Picts chose their kings in the female line. Importantly Bede writes, “when the succession was in doubt”, implying that it normally went through the male line. Secondly there was an Irish legend that when the Cruithni arrived in Ireland they had no women of their own and married Irish brides. This latter story probably originated as an attempted to explain the Gaelicization of the Irish Cruithni but was, after they had disappeared in the later eighth century, transferred to the Picts who were also called Cruithni in Irish. It might also be pointed out that the king list of the Dál nAraide found in the Book of Leinster lists seventeen kings from Aed Dub (†588) to Flathroe mac Fiachrach (†774) ―the last man to be styled king of the Cruithni in the Irish chronicles― only two of whom appear to be sons of previous kings noted in the list. Genealogical tracts, however, make it clear that the Dál nAraide were a patrilineal dynasty but that they chose their kings from a very widely spread royal kindred. The question of Pictish succession and the nature of their kingship remains open but it is likely that in the sixth century there were one or more lose confederations and that territorial and dynastic centralisation emerged gradually during the seventh and eighth centuries.

To some extent the centralisation of Pictland and the rise of Fortriu was stimulated by the military pressure exerted on the Picts by the Bernicians. Oswiu seems to have asserted his control of almost all the Britons of the north either through direct conquest or by exacting tribute and he claimed over-lordship over Dál Riata. Gwriad, the king of Dumbarton who died in 658 or 659, was remembered in Wales as one of the ‘three base born kings of the Britons’, and he may well have been a puppet ruler. After his death Dumbarton may have been under direct Anglian rule for a generation. After the death of Talorgan, at about the same time, Oswiu seems to have conquered a significant portion of Pictland, although how far direct rule extended beyond the Forth, and to what extent the surviving Pictish kings, Gartnait son of Domnall (657-663) and his brother Drest (663-672), paid tribute to him is unclear. The relationship with Bernicia will inevitably have helped to create a sense of Pictish identity whether through tributary networks of tax collectors and royal stewards imposed to service the foreign overlords’ demands or through effective resistance movements led by the native kings over a sustained period of time. Just as the Roman presence had stimulated the development of political leadership in early centuries so the Bernician imperium played a similar role in the seventh century. When Oswiu died in 671 King Drest attempted to overthrow Bernician overlordship and to reconquer the lost territories. Within a year, however, Oswiu’s son and successor Ecgfrith led an expedition north and defeated Drest at the battle of the two rivers (site unknown) and drove him out of his kingdom. The new Pictish king was another Bridei; this time he was the son of a king of Dumbarton, Beli, and the brother of that Ywain of Dumbarton who had killed Domnall Brecc of Dál Riata in the 640s. More importantly he was Ecgfrith’s cousin on his mother’s side. Bridei almost certainly owed his position to the patronage of his Bernician cousin although Beli’s father Naiton was probably the same Naiton who appears in the Pictish king-lists in the early seventh century (c. 602-621), giving him some claim to the kingship. For most of the 670s Ecgfrith’s over-lordship was uncontested in the north. In 679, however, his fortunes began to change. As so often the Bernicians were contesting the leadership of the Angles with the kings of Mercia and in this year Ecgfrith’s younger brother Ælfwine, sub-king of Deira, was killed in battle by Æthelred of Mercia at the river Trent. Lindsey, the kingdom around Lincoln, passed from Bernician to Mercian overlordship and all around the fringes of Ecgfrith’s empire the natives began to get restless. Civil war broke out in Kintyre and a number of sieges occurred in Pictland at the unidentified Dún Baitte and at Dunottar in the Mearns. Unfortunately the chronicles do not say who was besieging whom but in 681 or 682 Bridei ‘destroyed’ Orkney. The following year Dunadd in Knapdale and Dundurn in Strathearn were also besieged. We cannot be certain whether all these actions are connected but Bridei appears to have thrown off his cousin’s over-lordship for in the spring of 685 Ecgfrith, against the advice of his friends, led an army into Pictland. Bridei, we are told, had ceased to pay the agreed tribute and Ecgfrith was bent on restoring the relationship. It would be interesting to know what Ecgfrith thought he was doing. If his relations with Bridei to date had been amicable and mutually beneficial, as seems likely, he may have thought that a show of strength would help his cousin to extract tribute, presumably mostly cattle and horses, from his own subjects and that no fighting would be required. In the event this was not what transpired. At Dún Nechtain, (either Dunnichen Moss, near Forfar or Dunachton in Badenoch) on the afternoon of May 20th 685 Ecgfrith and almost his entire army were

wiped out. This was the first defeat that the Bernicians had suffered from non-Anglian foes since Urien besieged them on Lindisfarne a century before. Many of their British subjects rose against them and Bridei’s nephew Elffin (apparently named after Ælfwine of Deira!) became king of Dumbarton. Ecgfrith’s body, if we are to believe a later chronicle, was taken to Iona for burial and it was there too, apparently, that his illegitimate brother Aldfrith was studying under Adomnán. Aldfrith, who was probably half Irish and who had spent most of his adult life in monastic education at various places in Britain and Ireland was sent to Bernicia, apparently with Bridei’s blessing, to take over his brother’s kingdom. At his death in 693 Bridei is styled ‘King of Fortriu’ by the Irish chroniclers. He is the first king to be so styled although the name Fortriu is clearly derived from the Roman period tribal name of the Verturiones. Under his rule Fortriu, probably located on the shores of the Moray Firth, seems to have become a centralized kingdom on a par with the other major kingdoms of Britain and Ireland. For a while at least the Picts seem to have been the leading power in the north as well. It is an interesting coincidence that the king of the Picts in Adomnán’s early years as abbot of Iona had the same name as the king of the Picts at the time Columba founded the monastery, and it may be that Adomnán’s descriptions of Bridei son of Meilocon were modelled on his experience of his younger namesake. It is almost certainly to this period that we should ascribe the increased influence of Iona throughout the Pictish kingdom for Adomnán was active across Ireland, visited Northumbria where his protégé Aldfrith was king and was clearly concerned, in his Life of Columba with emphasizing Iona’s role in the lands of the Picts. According to the Life of Adomnán written in the tenth century, Bridei, like his cousin Ecgfrith, was buried on Iona. During the period of Bernician over-lordship an Anglian bishop based in Abercorn just south of the Forth had administered much of the Pictish church. The fact that his see was actually in Bernicia rather than Pictavia must surely tell us something of the tensions in the Anglian overlordship. After the battle of Dunnichen the bishop of Abercorn, Trumwine, gave up his see and moved south to Whitby in Deira. Bridei probably established his own bishop’s seat, possibly at Rosemarkie, where later bishops were certainly based. Curetán bishop of Rosemarkie attended the synod of Birr in 697 and a ‘Brecc of Fortriu’, presumably a bishop, appears in a list of churchmen who died in 725. The new order that was established after Dún Nechtáin with the triumvirate of Adomnán, Bridei and Aldfrith dominating northern Britain heralded the phenomenon which has often been described as a ‘cultural commonwealth’ in which the art and learning of the various nations of the region flowed across traditional ethnic boundaries. The deep-seated ethnic hatred that existed between Britons and Anglo-Saxons in the south of the island put severe constraints on cultural exchange. A letter written by Aldhelm of Malmesbury, a West Saxon prince and abbot who was an almost exact contemporary of Adomnán, makes it clear that British priests in Domnonia (Devon and Cornwall) felt the need to sterilise Church-plate that had been touched by English priests! Whilst Anglo-British relations in the north may still have been strained the presence of the Gaels and the Picts, and their willingness to deal on an even basis with both Britons and Angles, made cross-cultural interaction far easier. Tensions existed, in the political sphere obviously, but also in the religious. The controversy over the mechanism for determining the date of Easter, which had broken

out in the 650s and 660s, rumbled on but it seems to have been largely regarded as a ‘single-issue’ disagreement that did not affect other aspects of collegiality between the clergy of the various regions. Most if not all the art and literature surviving from this period is of ecclesiastical origin so we are inevitably left to wonder about the extent to which these ‘liberal’ attitudes extended to the laity but the engagement of kings in the exchange is easily demonstrable and their values, presumably, reflect those of the higher aristocracy. Indeed the leading churchmen were drawn from the same families as the kings and duces. Whilst the new collaboration between Adomnán and the Bernician and Verturian kings pushed Dál Riata into the cultural limelight in the later seventh century, the same cannot be said for its political star. As we have seen the Senchas fir nAlban, divided the descendants of Eochaid Munremar into twenty-four groups each descended from a putative grandson. Of these kindreds, or cenéla, six were said to live in the Scottish territories of the confederation and eighteen in the Irish. This division probably reflects the reality at about the middle of the seventh century when the earliest stratum of the Senchas seems to have been composed. By the end of the century one of these cenéla, that claiming descent from Fergus Mór mac Erc, had segmented into two, Cenél nGabráin (descending from Aedán’s father, Gabrán) and Cenél Comgaill (descending from Gabrán’s brother Comgall). The Senchas also claims that at some point a portion of Cenél Oengusa, one of the Irish cenéla, also moved to Scotland, though whether this had happened this early is a unclear. It seems quite possible though that by the 680s the Scottish territories of Dál Riata were occupied by as many as eight kindreds each of which may have had its own king. The oft-reproduced map, which John Bannerman devised thirty years ago, dividing the whole territory between only four kindreds, was inspired by the fact that the Senchas gives a detailed discussion of only four. David Dumville’s more recent edition of the text demonstrates that the survival, or addition, of these four detailed descriptions reflects a much later stage in the editorial process and does not reflect seventh-century realities. Nevertheless it may be that the expansion of successful cenéla was at the expense of others; the territories of Cenél nGabráin in Kintyre and Cenél Comgaill in Cowal (whence the name), taken together, are far too extensive to represent the one-sixth of the whole that their shared descent from Fergus Mór would seem to indicate. Indeed the confusion in the Senchas and elsewhere as to whether Domangart, the father of Gabrán and Comgall, was a son of Fergus Mór or of his brother Mac Nisse Mór, may indicate that the lands and political identity of two originally separate cenéla had come together. The other major political force in Scottish Dál Riata was Cenél Loairn, who gave their name to Lorne. The remaining cenéla were much smaller. Islay, for example, was divided between Cenél Conchride and a portion of Cenél Oengusa. In the late seventh century the chronicles recount the individual actions of the various cenéla in a way that they have not before. The question that begs is whether it demonstrates disunity within Dál Riata or whether it simply reflects a more detailed and sophisticated approach to chronicle writing in Adomnán’s Iona where most of this information originated. We are told, for example, under the year 688 of the killing of Cano mac Gartnait, a Cenél nGabráin dynast who never made it to the kingship, and in 690 of the death of his daughter Coblaith, one of the few women of Dál Riata whose name survives, and in 705 of the killing of his son Conomail. Coblaith seems to have died of natural causes but although both Cano and his son were killed we are not told who their killers were. This interest in a particular family is curious but not immediately explicable. Much later a saga was composed

about Cano but it is full of chronological impossibilities and it would be foolish to try and use it to elucidate the real life of its protagonist. The main theme in the history of Dál Riata in this period seems to have been an attempt to seize the over-kingship by the kings of Cenél Loairn. It is difficult to see how successful they were because the ultimate success of Cenél nGabráin means that they controlled the production of the king-lists and the chronicles are rarely explicit in the outcome of the events they record. Thus, for example, the death of Ferchar the Tall is recorded in 697. He was a king of Cenél Loairn who may have been over-king of Dál Riata. The king-lists accord Ferchar a reign of twenty-one years, which would put the start of his reign back to 676 or 677, however at least two other kings, the sons of Conall Crandoma of the Cenél nGabráin have to be fitted in here. Possibly Ferchar contested their kingship, and may even have been responsible for the killing of Domnall in 696, and subsequently counted his reign length from the day he threw his hat into the ring even though he reigned without opposition for less than a year. Yet, if this is true, and the Dál Riata were in turmoil in the early 690s it is odd that in 691 they organised a major and apparently quite successful campaign in the north of Ireland aimed at both the Cruithni and the Ulaid, presumably part of an attempt to re-assert their authority over the Cruithni. Perhaps Ferchar never contested the over-kingship and his reign-length in the king-lists is simply that of his reign as king of Cenél Loairn. It would not be without precedent if famous kings from other dynasties had been added to the king-list at a later date. The twelfth-century list of the over-kings of the Ulaid preserved in the Book of Leinster, for example, has had the kings of Dál nAraide interleaved into it in a most unhelpful way because twelfth-century Dál nAraide kings were attempting to exert their authority over the Ulaid and wished to claim a precedent. In the early eighth century one of Ferchar’s sons, Selbach, does seem to have succeeded in successful resting the over-kingship from Cenél nGabráin, but not without recurring opposition. Our problem with looking at this confusing material lies in our inability to assess to what extent the confusion is caused by the appearance of a level of detail that we were not exposed to earlier. In reality over-kings probably did not exert much authority over sub-kings except in terms of leading major foreign expeditions and occasionally turning up with their retinue in the expectation of being feasted. The rise of Cenél Loairn may reflect the increasing importance of the northern frontier as the interests of Dál Riata in Ireland declined and the situation in the south of Scotland became more stable. Dál Riata may have found that the most fruitful area for expansion lay up the west coast of Britain towards Skye and the adjacent mainland. Unfortunately these regions lay beyond the interests of most of the writers of our period, although it is interesting to note that a colony from the great Irish monastery of Bangor was established at Applecross under Saint Maelrubhai in about 673. From 697 to 724 Fortriu, the kingdom of the Picts, was ruled by two brothers Bridei (†706) and his brother Naiton. They are usually described as the sons of Derile, which seems to be a feminine name, and their father may have been called Dairgart and was possibly a member of Cenél Comgaill. Their succession may have been that alluded to by Bede when he claimed that the Picts chose their kings through the female line. It may have been this Bridei who founded Rosemarkie as a monastic centre and probably a bishopric in the north of the Pictish kingdom. The first bishop

of Rosemarkie, Curetán, who is also sometimes called Boniface (although there were numerous Bonifaces in the Middle Ages), together with Bridei, endorsed the Cáin Adomnán, Adomnán’s ‘Law of Innocents’, a tract condemning the killing of non-combatants in warfare which was proclaimed at Birr, by the Shannon, in 697 and endorsed by a vast array of Irish kings and churchmen. Bridei’s involvement in this indicates the Gaelic or perhaps Iona centred way of thinking that marked out this period of Pictish history. His brother Naiton who took over the kingship in 706, three years after Adomnán’s death, eventually distanced himself from Iona and led the Pictish church back into closer communion with the church of Northumbria, as the now fully unified kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira were increasingly being called. By the early eighth century Iona and its daughter churches were the only community in the Gaelic World to preserve the old style method of calculating the date of Easter. As far as one can make out the sticking point was simply a sense of loyalty to Columba. Changing to the Universal method would be an admission that Columba himself was in error and Iona could not bring itself to do this, although Bede seems to claim that Adomnán had been in favour of the change. King Naiton wrote to abbot Ceolfrith of Monwearmouth-Jarrow, in Bernicia, for advice and adopted the Universal Easter for the Pictish Church ordering all the old Easter tables to be destroyed. This event is probably connected with the ‘expulsion of the Family of Iona across Drumalban’ that is recorded in 717. Modern historians are often tempted to look for secular political motives behind religious reformations but in this case it may simply have become clear to Naiton that the conservatism of Iona had become damaging in a world that was getting increasingly international in its outlook as Christianisation promoted pilgrimage, scholarship and diplomacy. Within a year or two of this event Iona itself finally took the plunge and there is no reason to think that there was long term break between Iona and its Pictish daughter houses. Under Naiton the Pictish Church had reached maturity and was no longer forced to choose between being an appendage of either the Church of Northumbria or Iona. Pictavia was now a fully paid up member of Christendom. Naiton himself retired into religion in 724 but as so often happened after strong reigns, his succession was disputed. His successor, Drust, imprisoned Naiton in 726 and was, in the same year, driven from his kingdom by one Eilpín, who reigned less than two years himself. Eilpín in his turn was expelled from the kingdom following a battle at Monaid Craoib (perhaps Moncreiffe in Perthshire) in which his conqueror was one Onuist son of Uurguist. Onuist seems to have rescued the aged Naiton from prison and restored him to the throne and at a great battle at Monith Carno (unidentified) slew the old king’s persecutors. In the same year, 729, Onuist also defeated and killed Drust who had re-emerged from exile. The re-emergence of Naiton from his monastic retreat had probably been prompted by his supporters rather than himself, the failure of either Drust or Eilpín to establish a stable regime had probably encouraged folk to look back to the golden age of the sons of Derile. Onuist may have been one of these dreamers. The fact that he had supported Naiton’s restoration initially probably means that he was not himself closely related to the royal house. On Naiton’s death in 732, however, he took the kingship upon himself. Despite the fact that Onuist son of Uurguist was to reign for the better part of thirty years he was not a young man when he came in to the kingship, for his own son Bridei commanded an army in a civil conflict in 731. This probably puts Onuist in his forties, at least, at the start of his reign. It seems likely that he was a

military commander or regional ruler closely associated with Naiton who had lost his patience with the incompetent rulers of the late 720s. From his time onwards an extremely prominent motif in Pictish art is the image of the Biblical king David, the boy of humble stock who rose up to become the faithful general of king Saul who was eventually forced to turn his military prowess against his master when the latter became jealous of him. It seems very likely that Onuist identified closely with David, the Godly usurper and smiter of gentiles. Onuist son of Uurguist (732-761) made the kingdom of the Picts into the greatest kingdom of northern Britain. He seems to have maintained good relations with the Northumbrians but to have fought quite extensively against the Britons of Dumbarton and the Dál Riata. It may be that an agreement was reached by the ‘super-powers’ about their relative spheres of influence and that they pursued complimentary foreign policies. His main energies seem to have focused on pursuing the very active king of Cenél Loairn Dúngal son of Selbach. Dúngal seems to have followed his father into the over-kingship of Dál Riata in 723 but to have been expelled in favour of Eochaid mac Echdach of Cenél nGabráin in 726. In 731, however, he re-appeared burning the Cenél nGabráin fortress at Tarbert in Kintyre, probably whilst the main host of Dál Riata was in Ireland fighting Dál nAraide. Two years later Dúngal re-appears again this time forcibly removing Bridei (probably the son of Onuist) from the sanctuary of the monastery of Tory Island Donegal. In the same year, however, he seems to have lost his kingship of Cenél Loairn to his cousin Muiredach. The context for these events seem to have been a civil war amongst the Uí Néill in which the fleet of Dál Riata went to the aid of the king of Tara, Flaithbertach mac Loingsig (729-734), and fought a naval battle at the mouth of the river Bann against the Cenél nEógain and their allies. Flaithbertach and his allies were heavily defeated losing many men. Since Tory lies on the sea route between the battle site and Flaithbertach’s home territory in Donegal it seems possible that Bridei had been in the allied fleet and that Dúngal, as an exile from Dál Riata, had been operating alongside the Cenél nEógain. The following year we read, “Dún Leithfinn is destroyed after the wounding of Dúngal; and he fled to Ireland from the power of Onuist”. Dúngal’s flight was only temporary, in 736 Onuist laid waste the regions of Dál Riata and seized Dunadd and burned Creich, in Mull, seizing Dúngal and his brother Feredach. In the same campaign Onuist’s brother Talorgan defeated the main host Dál Riata at Ederline by Loch Awe, sending Muiredach son of Ainbcellach into flight. Up to this point all Onuist’s actions against Dál Riata appear to have targeted Cenél Loairn and it would not be impossible to imagine he might actually have been working with Cenél nGabráin though this cannot be demonstrated. Indeed after the elimination of the Cenél Loairn protagonists Onuist seems to have left Dál Riata alone for five years. In 741, however, when Dál Riata were fighting Dál nAraide again in Ireland, we read of ‘the smiting of Dál Riata by Onuist son of Uurguist’. This marks the end of our detailed history of Dál Riata. The question we are left with is whether this is because Onuist effectively put an end to Dál Riata as a significant power and that its subsequent existence was as a sub-kingdom of Fortriu, or whether the silence is simply because the strand of entries that made it into the Irish chronicles from an Iona chronicle dry up at this point, presumably because they are based on a copy of the Iona Chronicle that was sent to a monastery in Ireland at about this time. The situation is not helped by the fact that Bede published his great history

in 731 and died in 735. From now on, at least for the duration of the period covered in this chapter we hear only of the most significant events in northern Britain. Onuist continued to rule until his death in 761. The world had by then moved on considerably from the world encountered by St Columba when he first crossed to Britain. The Britons who had occupied most of the area south of the Forth in 563 were now confined to Dumbarton and its immediate environs. The Angles and the Picts, from being pagan barbarians had developed into centralised and increasingly bureaucratic Christian kingdoms. The Gaelic provinces of Dál Riata in Scotland had ceased to be the northern fringe of a major Irish confederacy and had become far more closely involved with their Pictish neighbours. In cultural terms monasteries, which had begun the period as communities of a handful of ascetics had developed into the richest and most populous centres across the region. The sculpture found at sites like Meigle, St Vigeans, Iona and Ruthwell really begins to take off in the middle of the eighth century, although it continued being produced into the ninth. The great Class II Pictish cross-slabs mark a level of craftsmanship and resource management that was not to be paralleled before the twelfth century. The masterpiece of this sculptural tradition remains the Saint Andrews Sarcophagus. St Andrews itself appears to have been founded by Onuist son of Uurguist, it is first noticed in 747 when abbot Tuathalan’s obituary appears and the sarcophagus, in fact a ‘box-shrine’ decorated with a magnificent image of David and intricate lion-hunting scenes, is considered by many to have been produced some time after his death to house the translated relics of King Onuist. The sarcophagus symbolises the symbiotic relationship between king and church striven for, perhaps, by Columba and constructed by men like Adomnán and Bede. By the second half of the eighth century Onuist’s successors, in all the kingdoms of the north, would not consider the possibility of a secular kingship for a moment.