Page:Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography Volume I Part 1.djvu/456

 438 BBITANNICAE INSULAE. I 18 never found in the ezcIosiYelj and undoubtedly Gaelic country of Ireland, mver is unknovm in Wales. Both occur in Scotland. But how are they distributed? Mr. Kemble, who has best examined the questbn, finds that the line of separation ** be- tween the Welsh or Pictish, and the Scotch or Irish, Kelts, if measured by the occurrence of these names, would run obliquely from SW. to NE., straight up Loch Fjme, following nearly the boundary between Perthshire and Argyle, trending to the NE. along the present boundary between Perth and Inverness, Aberdeen and Inverness, Banf and Elgin, till about the mouth of the river Spey." On the one side are the ^6er-coms, ^frer-deens, and ^^-dours, which are Welsh or British ; on the other the Inver- arys and /nver-aritys, which are Irish and Gaelic. Now, assuredly, a British population which runs as far nortli as the mouth of Spey, must be considered to have been the principal population of Caledonia. How far it was aboriginal and exclusive is another question. The external evidence comes in here, though it is not evidence of the best kind. It lies in the following extract from Beda : " procedente autem tempore, Britannia, post Brittones et Pictos, tertiam Sootorum nationem in Pictorum parte re- cepit, qui duce Beuda de Hibemia progrestd vel amicitia vel forro sibimet inter eos sedes quas hac> tenus habent vindicamnt : a quo videlicet duce usque hodie Dalreudini vocantur; nxmi lingua eorum passage is generally considered to give us either an Irish or a Scotch tradition. This may or may not be the case. The text nowhere connects itself with anything of the kind. It is just as likely to give us an inference of Beda's own, founded on the fact of there being Scots in the north-east of Ireland and in the south-west of Scotland. It is, also, further com- plicated by the circumstance of the gloss dal being not Keltic, but None^ i. e. Danish or Norwegian. The evidence, then, of the present Gaelic popula- tion of Scotland being of Irish origin, and the cor- responding probability of the earhest occupancy of Caledonia having been British, lies less in the so- called tradition, thaa ia the absence of the term sliabh » fMUfOcan; the distribution of the forms in aher; and, above all, the present similarity between the Irish and Scotch Gaelic — a similarity which suggests the notion that the separation is compara- tively recent. They are far, however, from deciding the question. That South Briton was British, and Ireland Gaelic, is certain. That Scotland was ori- ginally British, and afterwards Gaelic, is probable. The Gaels and Britons are the fundamental popu- lations of the British Isles. PThc Picts were either aboriginal or intrusive. Ifaboriginal, they were, like the Gaels and Britons, Keltic!) Whether, how- ever, they were Gaelic Kelts or'^ritish Kelts, or whether they constituted a third branch of that stock, is doubtful. If it were absolutely certain that every word used on Pictish ground belonged to the Pict form of speech, the inference that they were aborigines rather than intnisive settlers, and Britons rather than Gaels, would be legitimate. The well-known gloss penn fahel == caput vcUli is a gloss from the Pict district, of which the first part is British. In Gaelic, the form s= pen B heeui is cecum. Neither does this stand alone. The evidence in fkrowr of the British affinities can be strengthened. But what if the gloss be Pict, only in the way that /cUher or mother, &c. are Webh; i e. woids belonging to some other tongue BRITANNICAE INSULAE. spoken in the Pict country? In such a case the Picts may be Gaels, Germans, Scandinavians, &c. Now the word dal, to which attention has already been drawn, was not Scottish, i. e. not Gaelic. It probably was strange to the Scottish language, not- withstanding the testimony of Beda. If not Soot, however, it was almost certainly Pict Yet it is, and was, pure Norse. Its existence cannot be got over except by making either the Soots or Picts Scjodiiiavi^. T!ii^b altern ative has its difficultie s; fS e latter The fewest Siicb are the reasons for jeving that Che Picts are less unequivocally British than the researches of the latest and best investigators have made them. And Beda, it should be remem- bered, derives them from Scythia; adding that they came without females. This, perhaps, is only an inference; yet it is a just one. The passage that he supplies speaks to an existing custom: **Cumque uxores Picti non habentes peterent a Scottis, ea solum conditione dare consenserunt, ut ubi res per- veniret in dubium, magis de foeminea regum prosapia quam de masculina regem sibi eligerent: quod usque hodie apud Pictos constat esse servatum." {Hist, Eccles. i.) Now, whatever may be the value of this passage, it entirely neutralises the evidence embodied in a well-known Ibtof Pict kings. Here the names are Keltic, — chiefly British, — but, in two or three cases, Gaelic Whichever they were, they were not Pict The Picts, then, may or may not have been in- trusive rather than aboriginal. The ancestors of the present English were certainly in the former cate- gory. Wlience were they? When did their in- trusion begin? They were Germans. This is cer- tain. But how were they distributed •tonongst the different divisions and subdivisions of the German populations? The terms Saxon and Frank tell us nothing. They were general names of a somewhat indefinite import. It is, perhaps, safo to say, that they were Frisians and Angles, rather than aught else; and, next to these, Scandinavians. This the;^ may have been to e certain extent, even though the Picts were Keltic. The date of their intrusion, in some form or other, was long earlier than the aera of Hengist and Horsa; and it is only by supposing that an author in the unfavourable position of Gildas was likely to be cor- rect in the hazardous delivery of a negative assertion, and that in the very face of the notioe of Eumenius and others, that the usual date can be supported. In proportion as their invasions were early their progress must have been gradual. In the opinion of the pre- sent writer, the Saxons and Franks of the later classics are certainly the lineal predecessors of the Angles of England; the Picts j70««»&fy the lineal prede- cessors of the Northmen, — i. e. on the /others side. The ethnology, then, of Britain takes the follow- ing forms: — 1. In Hibemia, a Gaelic basis suflfers but slight modification and admixture; whereas,— 2. In Britannia, — a. Soutli Britain is British, and Britanno-Roman, with Phoenician, Gaelic, and Gcnnanic elements, — the latter destined to replace all the others; whilst,-— b. North Britain is British, and Gaelic, with Pict elements -~ whatever they were — of admixture in larger proportions than South Britain, and Roman elemente in smaller. The Roman element was itself complex; and, in minute ethnology, it may, perhaps, be better to speak of the Legionary population rather than of the Latin. This is because a Roman population might be any- ^J^,tjJ:tU.J/^c^y^j Cc<^^^Z^^^/,nrC/.^2Jjj.
 * Dal' partem significat." {Hist. EccUs, i.) This