Page:Chronicles of the Picts, chronicles of the Scots, and other early memorials of Scottish history.djvu/116

 cviii PEEFACE. resistance were suppressed by the Anglic Ealdermen ; while the existence of a Pictish population in Gal- loway at a later period is so undoubted, that the only question is how and when they came there. Chalmers maintains that they were a settlement of the Irish Cniithne in the eighth century, and he has been followed by subsequent writers ; but there is absolutely no authority whatever for this supposed settlement ; his theory having obviously been based upon passages in the " Irish Annals," in which he mistook the fort of Maghline in Ulster, which plays a great part in Irish history, for the town of Mauchline in Ayrshii-e, and applies notices of the Irish Cruithne to the latter which belong to the former ; but the language of Gildas, when he says of the last incursion of the Plots, " Omnem aquil- " onalem extremamque terrse partem pro indi- " genis murotenus capessunt," implies so strongly that they settled in these districts as permanent inhabitants, that we can hardly avoid the conclu- sion that the population of these two districts were the remains of that settlement. Bede likewise states that the Picts originally occupied the district north of the Pirth of Clyde, afterwards possessed by the Scots ; and this tradi- tion appears in the old description of Scotland in the Colbertine MS., which states that the first inha- bitants of Arregaithel were the Scoti Picti, an obvi- ous rendering Lato Latin of the Welsh name for the Picts, the Gwyddyl Ffichti.