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 fisherfolk 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 dont 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 islands 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-inlaw 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 Agricolas 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.

Agricolas 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. Agricolas 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 Agricolas 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 Crban Beag in
Badenoch). In any event Agricolas 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 couldnt 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 Abbs 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. Hadrians 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 Hadrians 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 Boness-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 Hadrians 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 Hadrians 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
Caracallas 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 Agricolas
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 anyones 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 Hadrians 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 empires
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 Dl 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 Dl
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.
Campbells 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 Campbells
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 Dochartaigh, Roibeard
Maolalaigh and Breandn 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 cranng (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 crannga 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 Dl 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 Dl 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 Giants 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
Dl 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 Mr mac Erc, a king of Dl Riata who died in AD
501, led the migration. Although Fergus Mr 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 Dl
Riata, include one Eochaid Riata thirteen generations above Fergus Mr. If we use
the average generation-length calculated by the Dark Age historian Molly Miller of
twenty-seven and a half years, then Eochaids 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 Dl Riata seem to make the significant ancestor, from whom the
kingdom took its name, someone called Eochaid. It is also clear that by Bedes time,
at least, the origins of the kingdom of Dl Riata were thought to lie far back in time.
The name Eochaid is of particular interest as the name of the ancestor figure of
Dl Riata. The apparent date of Eochaid Riatas 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 Agricolas campaigns of the 70s
and 80s are the most likely source of information.

In Ptolemys survey the two areas that were to form the Scottish portion of Dl
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 Dl 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 C Ri calls the
same place Ard Echde Headland of the Eochaids. We are left with a problem,
however, Ptolemys 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 Englishspeaking 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 Campbells hypothesis that the Gaels had always
been in Argyll, or Britons, which would stand against his argument. Campbell rightly
points out that if Ptolemys, or Agricolas, 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 Ptolemys 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
Ptolemys 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.
Ptolemys 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
Dl 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 Dl 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 U Nill, 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 U Nill and to the
east the Ulaid (the Ulstermen) in Counties Down, Armagh and Louth. This means that
during this period the lands of Dl Riata in Ireland, stretching from the Giants
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 Dl 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 Ptolemys survey was collected (perhaps in Agricolas 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 dont 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 Dl Riata and so in some sense Dl Riatas 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 Dl Riata so much of our perspective during this period is a view from
Dl 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 Newcastleupon-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, Adomnn. Adomnns Vita Columbae
also incorporated material drawn from an earlier work by Abbot Cummne written
about fifty years before and drawing, in its turn, on eyewitness accounts of episodes in
the saints 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 U Nill dynasty who were in the process of making themselves the
most powerful force in Ireland during the course of the sixth century. Columbas 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 Shamrin 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 Cruithnecn, then the Leinster master Gemmn 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 coworkers 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 Dl 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 Adomnns 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 U Nill, Columbas own family, and the Cruithni. A great
battle had been fought at Min Daire Lothair, somewhere near the river Bann on the
Londonderry Antrim border, in which the northern U Nill of Donegal came to the
aid of a Cruithnian king Baetn mac Cuinn who was leading two tuatha of the
Cruithni against the Cruithnian over-king Aed Brecc. Baetn and the U Neill won
the battle, slaying Aed Brecc and seven other Cruithnian kings. Adomnn tells us that
yet another king of the Cruithni, Eochaid Leb, 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 Magilligans Point, being handed over to the U
Nill. It seems likely that the appearance of an U Nill prince, albeit a monk, at the
court of the king of Dl 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
Min Daire Lothair.
King Conall gave Columba the island of Iona on which to found on
monastery. Iona lay in the far northwest of Dl 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 Dl
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 Conalls predecessor, Gabran, Dl 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 Brideis
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 Adomnn makes it clear that Brideis 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 Columbas 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 Columbas 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. Adomnns 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 Columbas when the monastery had just been founded.
Columba is certainly credited with converting some individual Picts by Adomnn 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 Columbas visit
to Bridei may have been diplomatic missions on behalf of the king of Dl Riata rather
than missions. In one place Adomnn tell us that Columba freed a Gaelic slave-girl
from the court of Bridei. This is particularly noteworthy because we know that
Adomnn 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 Adomnn 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. Diarmaits 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 Adomnns
time, a century after Columbas 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
Adomnns 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 Columbas early foundation became the
cosmopolis of later days but for the present we must content ourselves with
speculation. In Columbas 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, Columbas patron, died. His successor was his cousin
Aedn, the son of Conalls predecessor Gabrn. Adomnn tell us that Columba had
originally supported the claim of Aedns brother Eogann but that an angel had

shown him a book of kings prepared in heaven in which Aedns name was set down.
The angel then commanded Columba to ordain Aedn as king. Columba may not
have been the only one who was opposed to Aedns kingship. Shortly after the death
of Conall the Irish chronicles tell us that Conalls son Dnchad, together with many
of the friends of the sons of Gabrn, 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
Dnchad was a supporter of Eogann. One possibility is that Eogann and Aedn had
different mothers and that their maternal kindreds were the driving force in the
conflict. Aedn may, perhaps, have been born out of wedlock or in a marriage
contracted before Gabrn became king (c. 538), whereas Eogann and his brothers
may have been born to Gabrns queen whilst he was king.
Aedn mac Gabrin has developed a curious after-life. In Adomnns 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 Aedn, helping him to plot against
his rival Cano son of Gartnait (in reality Cano was actually Aedns grandson!).
Although no stories about Aedn survive from the Welsh tradition they clearly existed
and Aedn is given the unflattering nickname of bradawc wily.
Aedan mac Gabrin 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. Adomnn 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
Aedn mac Gabrin was unparalleled amongst kings of Dl 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 Aedns 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
Baetn mac Cairell (572-581), states that he received the submission of Aedn mac
Gabrin 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 Baetn at
Rinn Seimne, at some point between 574 and 581, should be considered alongside
another, far better attested and better known royal meeting that Aedn attended.
Adomnn describes a condictum regum an agreement between kings namely
Aed mac Ainmirech and Aedn mac Gabrin 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 overking of the U Nill. Taken together these two meetings put Aedn 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 Aedn was, by this point in his career, not merely king of Dl Riata but over-king
of the Cruithni as well. This point is driven home in an anecdote told by Adomnn
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 Dn Cethirn (near Coleraine). Columba said to Comgall
that the spring would one day be filled with blood when his kinsmen, the U Nill,
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 Adomnn because it was generally understood to
have been a peace agreement made between the Cruithni and the U Nill, 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.
Aedns 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 Dl 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 Dl 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 lch. 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 Ercs sons lived in Scotland but that all of lchs and half of Ercs 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 Aedn 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.

Aedn 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:
Mans mettle, youths years, courage for combat:
Swift thick-maned stallions beneath a fine striplings thighs,
Broad lightweight shield on a trim chargers 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 Marros 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 warbands 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 Clancys translation):
My place of ease, with Rhegeds 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 worlds 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.
Lands defender, battles 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.
Llwyfenydds people all entreat you,
With a single voice, the great and the small.
Taliesins 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 deaths strict demand,
I shall not be joyful unless I praise Urien.

Or was he singing of himself? The hero makes the poets 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 Aedn mac Gabrin and the Britons we can
construe little. Adomnn tell us that Aedn fought a battle against the Miathi in
which his sons Eochaid Finn and Artr 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 Adomnn
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 Adomnn refers to them as barbarians a term that usually
in this period, though not exclusively, implies paganism.
Adomnn 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.
Adomnn 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 Aedn. They suggest that Rhydderch in sending his message to Columba
was trying to get him to ward off Aedn and that though the saint tried he ultimately
failed. This is a foolish interpretation. Adomnn was writing within a hundred years
of Rhydderchs 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 Arthurs 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 Medrawds court.
He left neither food nor drink in the court;
And third unrestrained prodigality when Aedn 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
Bromwichs 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 Aedns 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 Aedns 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 Aedns following was so large, and so used to luxury, that
they carelessly ate Rhydderch out of house and home.
If we wish to link Aedns legendary visit to Dumbarton with the story
Adomnn told of Rhydderch it might be easiest to imagine that Rhydderch is under
threat from enemies other than Aedn and that he is asking the saint to appeal for
Aedns help on his behalf. Aedn comes to Rhydderchs 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 housekeepers perspective rather than that of the panegyrist.
So if Aedn 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, Glasgows 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, Bernicias founder had
been a man named Oesa or Eosa who appears in the pedigrees as the great-great
grandfather of thelfrith, the earliest truly historical king, who died in AD 617. This
ought to put Oesas 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 Hadrians 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 Oesas 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, thelfrith, son of the eldest son thelric, took the
kingdom.
thelfrith was a mighty warrior. Bede, the Bernicians own historian,
writing a little over a century after thelfriths 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
thelfrith conquered but they probably included much of Tweed dale, Teviotdale,
Dumfriesshire and Cumberland. On account of these conquests, Bede goes on,
Aedn, king of the Irish living in Britain, marched against him with an immensely
strong army. It seems likely that ethelfrith was the enemy whom Rhydderch
dreaded and that he put himself under Aedns protection. One could let ones
imagination go further and envision Aedn 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.
Aedns army was indeed a multinational force. It contained not only
his own forces from Dl Riata but other Cruithni, perhaps including Fiachna Lurgan
king of Mag Line, and one Maeluma mac Baetin, an U Nill prince. Most
interesting of all is that Hering the son of thelfriths predecessor as king of Bernicia,
Hussa, was also in Aedns 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 rgdamnae in Gaelic and thelingas 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 Herings 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 Aedn for help. Presumably this is more evidence of Aedns
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
Aedn their expedition was not a success. Bede tells us that Aedans escaped with
only a remnant of his army and Adomnn tells us that he left his son Domangart dead
on the field. Bede also tells us that thelfriths 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 Aedn. The
Annals of Tigernach also claimed that Maeluma mac Baetin slew Eanfrith brother of
thelfrith 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 Aedn 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
Dagsastn, 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 Dagsastn effectively brought Aedns active career to an
end though it may not have been as catastrophic as Bede suggested. thelfriths
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 Rdwald of East
Anglia who slew him in battle in 617 and replaced him with Eadwine, a Deiran
theling, who took over the combined kingdoms of Deira and Bernicia, and continued
thelfriths policy of expansion at the expense of the Britons.
Meanwhile Aedn, in the ripeness of old age, died (c. 608) and was
succeeded by his son Eochaid Buide. Eochaid seems to have maintained his fathers
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
Eochaids 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 Eochaids
descendants had become by his time kings of the Picts and made a simple error.
Eochaids reign was, so far as we know uneventful. In 626, however, Aedns old ally
the Cruithnian king of Mag Line Fiachna Lurgan was slain by his namesake Fiachna
mac Demin king of the Ulaid. Connad Cerr, Eochaids 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 Demin.
The supremacy of Dl 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 Aedn. The leader of
the enemy is described in the annals as Mael Cich, king of the Cruithni. This man
appears to have been the brother of Congal Clen 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, Dl 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 Clen, Mael Cichs brother, fought the battle against the U Nill at Dn
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 Clen, the Dl nAraide over-king of the Cruithni, seems to
have influenced the succession in Dl 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. Eadwines death prompted the return of the sons of thelfrith 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 Clen
that he had received the support that had allowed him to return home victorious.
The alliance between Dl Riata and Dl nAraide was, however, shortlived and in 637 at Mag Rath just to the southwest of Belfast Congal Clen paid the
ultimate price for his defiance of the U Nill. 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. Dl Riatas influence and control in Ireland began to slip away. At some

point in the 640s the bishop of Dl 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 Dl nAraide based at Connor in Mag
Line. Later in the century the bishopric would be relocated again to Iona which,
under Adomnn (abbot from 679 to 704), had become far and away the premier
church of the kingdom. Dl 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 Dl 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. Dl 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 brothers 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, Oswalds son
thelwald, as king. In 653 another nephew Talorgan son of Eanfrith became king of
the Picts, perhaps with Oswius 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.
Talorgans kingship raises the same question that we encountered with
Columbas 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 Adomnns location of Brideis 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
fathers 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 sisters 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 Dl 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 Dl 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 Dl 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, Oswius
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 Dl Riata in
the 640s. More importantly he was Ecgfriths cousin on his mothers side. Bridei
almost certainly owed his position to the patronage of his Bernician cousin although
Belis father Naiton was probably the same Naiton who appears in the Pictish kinglists in the early seventh century (c. 602-621), giving him some claim to the kingship.
For most of the 670s Ecgfriths 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
Ecgfriths younger brother lfwine, sub-king of Deira, was killed in battle by
thelred of Mercia at the river Trent. Lindsey, the kingdom around Lincoln, passed
from Bernician to Mercian overlordship and all around the fringes of Ecgfriths
empire the natives began to get restless. Civil war broke out in Kintyre and a number
of sieges occurred in Pictland at the unidentified Dn 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 cousins 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 Dn 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 Brideis nephew Elffin (apparently named after
lfwine of Deira!) became king of Dumbarton. Ecgfriths 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 Adomnn. 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 Brideis
blessing, to take over his brothers 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 Adomnns 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 Adomnns 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 Adomnn was active across Ireland, visited Northumbria where
his protg Aldfrith was king and was clearly concerned, in his Life of Columba with
emphasizing Ionas role in the lands of the Picts. According to the Life of Adomnn
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 bishops seat, possibly at Rosemarkie,
where later bishops were certainly based. Curetn 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 Dn Nechtin with the triumvirate of
Adomnn, 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 AngloSaxons 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 Adomnn, 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 Adomnn and the Bernician and
Verturian kings pushed Dl 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 cenla, 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 cenla, that claiming descent from Fergus Mr mac Erc, had
segmented into two, Cenl nGabrin (descending from Aedns father, Gabrn) and
Cenl Comgaill (descending from Gabrns brother Comgall). The Senchas also
claims that at some point a portion of Cenl Oengusa, one of the Irish cenla, 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 Dl 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 Dumvilles 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 cenla was at the
expense of others; the territories of Cenl nGabrin in Kintyre and Cenl Comgaill in
Cowal (whence the name), taken together, are far too extensive to represent the onesixth of the whole that their shared descent from Fergus Mr would seem to indicate.
Indeed the confusion in the Senchas and elsewhere as to whether Domangart, the
father of Gabrn and Comgall, was a son of Fergus Mr or of his brother Mac Nisse
Mr, may indicate that the lands and political identity of two originally separate
cenla had come together. The other major political force in Scottish Dl Riata was
Cenl Loairn, who gave their name to Lorne. The remaining cenla were much
smaller. Islay, for example, was divided between Cenl Conchride and a portion of
Cenl Oengusa. In the late seventh century the chronicles recount the individual
actions of the various cenla in a way that they have not before. The question that
begs is whether it demonstrates disunity within Dl Riata or whether it simply reflects
a more detailed and sophisticated approach to chronicle writing in Adomnns Iona
where most of this information originated. We are told, for example, under the year
688 of the killing of Cano mac Gartnait, a Cenl nGabrin dynast who never made it
to the kingship, and in 690 of the death of his daughter Coblaith, one of the few
women of Dl 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 Dl Riata in this period seems to have
been an attempt to seize the over-kingship by the kings of Cenl Loairn. It is difficult
to see how successful they were because the ultimate success of Cenl nGabrin
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 Cenl Loairn who may have
been over-king of Dl 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 Cenl nGabrin 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 Dl 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 Cenl 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 Dl nAraide interleaved into it in a most unhelpful way because twelfthcentury Dl nAraide kings were attempting to exert their authority over the Ulaid and
wished to claim a precedent. In the early eighth century one of Ferchars sons,
Selbach, does seem to have succeeded in successful resting the over-kingship from
Cenl nGabrin, 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 Cenl Loairn may reflect the increasing importance of the
northern frontier as the interests of Dl Riata in Ireland declined and the situation in
the south of Scotland became more stable. Dl 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 Cenl 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, Curetn, who is also sometimes called Boniface (although there were
numerous Bonifaces in the Middle Ages), together with Bridei, endorsed the Cin
Adomnn, Adomnns Law of Innocents, a tract condemning the killing of noncombatants in warfare which was proclaimed at Birr, by the Shannon, in 697 and
endorsed by a vast array of Irish kings and churchmen. Brideis 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 Adomnns 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
Adomnn 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 Eilpn, who
reigned less than two years himself. Eilpn 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 kings 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 Eilpn 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 Naitons
restoration initially probably means that he was not himself closely related to the
royal house. On Naitons 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 Dl Riata. It may be that an agreement was reached by the superpowers 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 Cenl Loairn Dngal son of Selbach. Dngal seems to have followed his
father into the over-kingship of Dl Riata in 723 but to have been expelled in favour
of Eochaid mac Echdach of Cenl nGabrin in 726. In 731, however, he re-appeared
burning the Cenl nGabrin fortress at Tarbert in Kintyre, probably whilst the main
host of Dl Riata was in Ireland fighting Dl nAraide. Two years later Dngal reappears 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 Cenl Loairn to his cousin Muiredach. The context
for these events seem to have been a civil war amongst the U Nill in which the fleet
of Dl Riata went to the aid of the king of Tara, Flaithbertach mac Loingsig (729734), and fought a naval battle at the mouth of the river Bann against the Cenl
nEgain 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 Flaithbertachs
home territory in Donegal it seems possible that Bridei had been in the allied fleet and
that Dngal, as an exile from Dl Riata, had been operating alongside the Cenl
nEgain. The following year we read, Dn Leithfinn is destroyed after the
wounding of Dngal; and he fled to Ireland from the power of Onuist. Dngals
flight was only temporary, in 736 Onuist laid waste the regions of Dl Riata and
seized Dunadd and burned Creich, in Mull, seizing Dngal and his brother Feredach.
In the same campaign Onuists brother Talorgan defeated the main host Dl Riata at
Ederline by Loch Awe, sending Muiredach son of Ainbcellach into flight.
Up to this point all Onuists actions against Dl Riata appear to have
targeted Cenl Loairn and it would not be impossible to imagine he might actually
have been working with Cenl nGabrin though this cannot be demonstrated. Indeed
after the elimination of the Cenl Loairn protagonists Onuist seems to have left Dl
Riata alone for five years. In 741, however, when Dl Riata were fighting Dl
nAraide again in Ireland, we read of the smiting of Dl Riata by Onuist son of
Uurguist. This marks the end of our detailed history of Dl Riata. The question we
are left with is whether this is because Onuist effectively put an end to Dl 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 Dl 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 Tuathalans 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 Adomnn and Bede. By the second half of the eighth century
Onuists successors, in all the kingdoms of the north, would not consider the
possibility of a secular kingship for a moment.