Page:Chronicles of the Picts, chronicles of the Scots, and other early memorials of Scottish history.djvu/198

 cxc PEEFACE. calls Kenneth the first king of the men of Erin. It is true that the " Pictish Chronicle " states of Kenneth, " Iste vero, biennio antequam veniret " Pictaviam, DaMete regnum suscepit ;" but this chronicle places the accession of Kenneth in a year corresponding to the twelfth year of his reign according to the " Chronicle of Huntingdon," or 844, and this would place his accession to the kingdom of Dabiada in the year 842, three years after the great battle in which Euganan mac Angus, a king of the Picts, and Aed mac Boanta, king of Dalriada, were slain. The expression. in the "Pictish Chro- " nicle," " Pictavia autem a Pictis est nominata ; " quos, utdiximus, Cinadius delevit," implies that it had originally contained some account of the de- struction of the Picts which has been omitted by subsequent transcribers. The two authors to whom the documents of which transcripts are preserved in the Colbertine MS. appear to have been known are Giraldus Cambrensis and Ranulph Higden. In the treaty " De Instructione Principum" by the former, there is preserved an account of the destruction of the Picts (No. xxvii.) In this account the Scots are said to have been settled in Galloway, and to have slain the chief men of the Pictish nation by a stratagem, at a meeting to which they were invited by the Scots. The same account is given in an abridged form by Ranulph Higden, and is repeated in precisely the same terms in the chronicle (No. XXXIX.) In the two latter it immediately pre-