Page:Chronicles of the Picts, chronicles of the Scots, and other early memorials of Scottish history.djvu/96

 lxxxviii

There can be no question that the territory forming the subsequent kingdom of Scotland was, in the seventh century, when we have sure historic data to go upon, peopled by four races, the Picts, Scots, Angles, and Britons or Welsh. For this we have the authority of Bede. Writiug of a period when his testimony cannot be questioned, he says of Oswald, king of Northumbria, who reigned from 634 to 642 : " Denique omnes nationes et provincias Brittaniæ, quæ in quatuor linguas, id est, Brittonum, Pictorum, Scottorum et Anglorum divisæ sunt, in ditione accepit" (Lib. c. ); and this statement affords us a certain basis to start from. What the earlier relations of these four races towards each other had been, we learn from a passage of the Roman historian, Ammianus Marcellinus, who describes the first great outburst of the Barbaric tribes upon the Roman province in Britain, in the year 360, when he says, under the year 364, "Picti Saxonesque et Scoti et Attacoti Britannos ærumnis vexavere continuis." The Britons were the inhabitants of the Roman province, which then extended to the Firths of Forth and Clyde, and was protected from the Barbaric tribes by the Roman