Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/495

Rh EARLY CELTIC PERIOD.] SCOTLAND 473 and recovered the country between the walls, which became (368) a fifth province of Britain, called in honour of the reigning emperor Valentia. It remained so for a very brief space: the revolt of Maxim us (391), which reduced the Roman troops to two legions, led to fresh raids of the Picts and Scots. A legion sent by Stilicho drove them back to the northern wall. But it was soon recalled, and the garrisons were permanently removed prior to 409. .fleets of The Roman empire in Britain left widely different results in the toman southern and in the northern portions of the island. The former ccupa- became an organized, and in the centres of population a civilized province, in which Latin was spoken by the educated, the arts cultivated, Roman law administered, and Christianity introduced. The latter, with the partial exception of the district south of Antonine's wall, remained in the possession of barbarous heathen races, whose customs had altered little since Roman writers described them as similar to, though ruder than, those of the Celts in Gaul before its conquest. The condition of the population be- tween the walls was probably intermediate between that of the. southern provincial Britons and that of the northern savages of the same original Celtic stock, more nearly resembling the latter, perhaps not unlike the condition of the people of Wales, which the Romans in like manner overran, but could not hold, or of Afghanistan as compared with British India. No Roman towns existed, and only one or two villas have been found north of York, and quite near to that place. The camp, the altar, the sepulchral monument, possibly a single temple (the mysterious Arthur's Oven or Julius's Hof on the Carron, now destroyed, but described by Boece and .Buchanan and figured by Camden), the stations along the wall, the roads with their milestones, a number of coins (chiefly prior to the 2d century), and a few traces of baths are the only vestiges of Roman occupation in this part of Britain. So completely had Britain passed beyond the serious attention of the emperor of the East that in the beginning of the 6th century Belisarius, Justinian's general, sarcastically ottered it to the Goths in exchange for Sicily ; while Procopius, the Byzantine historian, has nothing to tell of it except that a wall was built across it by the ancients, the direction of which he supposes to have been from north to south, separating the fruitful and populous east from the ban % en serpent-haunted western district, and the strange fable that its natives were excused from tribute to the kings of the Franks in return for the service of ferrying the souls of the dead from the mainland to the shores of Britain. rets or 2. Early Celtic Period to Union of Picts and Scots by ritons. Kenneth Macalpine. It is to the Celts, the first known inhabitants of Britain, that our inquiry next turns. This people were not indigenous, but came by sea to Britain. A conjecture, not yet proved, identifies as inhabitants of Britain before the Celts a branch of the race now repre- sented in Europe only by the Basques. Amongst many names of British tribes in Latin writers three occur, two with increasing frequency, as the empire drew near its close Britons, Picts, and Scots denoting distinct branches of the Celts. Britain was the Latin name for the larger island and Britons for its inhabitants ; Albion, a more ancient title, has left traces in English poetry, and in the old name Alba or Albany for northern Scot- land. The Britons in Roman times occupied, if not the whole island, at least as far north as the Forth and Clyde. Their language, British, called later Cymric, survives in modern Welsh and the Breton of Brittany. Cornish, which became extinct in the 17th century, was a dialect of the same speech. Its extent northwards is marked by the Cumbraes the Islands of Cymry in the Clyde and Cumberland, a district originally stretching from the Clyde to the Mersey. icts or The Picts, a Latin name for the northern tribes who ruitlme. preserved longest the custom of painting their bodies, called themselves Cruithne. Their original settlements appear to have been in the Orkneys, the north of Scot- land, and the north-east of Ireland the modern counties of Antrim and Down. They spread in Scotland, before or shortly after the Romans left, as far south as the Pentland Hills, which, like the Pentland Firth, are thought to pre- serve their name, occupied Fife, and perhaps left a de- tachment in Galloway. Often crossing, probably some- times using, the deserted wall of Hadrian, they caused it 368-6th to acquire their name, a name of awe to the provincial ceut - Britons and their English conquerors. Their language, though Celtic, is still a problem difficult to solve, as so few words have been preserved. Its almost complete absorp- tion in that of the Gaels or Scots suggests that it did not differ widely from theirs, and with this agrees the fact that Columba and his followers had little difficulty in preaching to them, though they sometimes required an interpreter. Some philologists believe it to have been more allied to Cymric, and even to the Cornish variety ; but the proof is inconclusive. The Scots came originally to Ireland, one of whose Scots or names from the 6th to the 13th century was Scotia ; Gaels. Scotia Major it was called after part of northern Britain in the llth century had acquired the same name. Irish traditions represent the Scots as Milesians from Spain. Their Celtic name Gaidhil, Goidel, or Gael appears more akin to that of the natives of Gaul. They had joined the Picts in their attack on the Roman province in the 4th century, and perhaps had already settlements in the west of Scotland ; but the transfer of the name was due to the rise and progress of the tribe called Dalriad, which migrated from Dalriada in the north of Antrim to Argyll and the Isles in the beginning of the 6th century. Their language, Gaidbelic, was the ancient form of the Irish of Ireland and the Gaelic of the Scottish Highlanders. No clear conclusion has been reached as to the meaning of Briton, Cruithne, Scot, and Gael. The order of the arrival of the three divisions of the Order of Celtic race and the extent of the islands they occupied are arrival of uncertain. Bede in the beginning of the 8th century gives Celtlc the most probable account. " This island at the present time contains five nations, the Angles, Britons, Scots, Picts, and Latins, each in its own dialect cultivat- ing one and the same sublime study of divine truth. . . . The Latin tongue by the study of the Scriptures has become common to all the rest. At first this island had no other inhabitants but the Britons, from whom it derived its name, and who, carried over into Britain, as is reported, from Armorica, possessed themselves of the southern parts. When they had made themselves masters of the greatest part of the island, beginning at the south, the Picts from Scythia, as is reported, putting to sea in a few long ships, were driven by the winds beyond the shores of Britain, and arrived on the northern coast of Ireland, where, finding the nation of the Scots, they begged to be allowed to settle among them, but could not succeed in obtaining their request. The Scots answered that the island could not contain them both, but ' we can give you good advice what to do : we know there is another island not far from ours, to the east, which we often see at a distance, when the days are clear. If you go thither you will obtain a settlement', or, if any should oppose, you shall have our aid.' The Picts accordingly, sailing over into Britain, began to inhabit the northern part of the island. In process of time Britain, after the Britons and Picts, received a third nation, the Scots, who, migrating from Ireland under their leader Renda, either by fair means or force secured those settlements amongst the Picts which they still possess." "There is," he says in another passage, "a very large estuary of the sea which formerly divided the nation of the Picts from the Britons, which gulf runs from the west far into the land, where to this day stands the strong city of the Britons called Alclyth. The Scots arriving on the north side of the estuary settled themselves there as in their own country." This statement in its main points (apart from the country from which the Picts are said to have come) is confirmed by Latin authors, in whose meagre notices the Picts appear before the Scots are mentioned, and both occur later than the Britons ; by the legends of the three Celtic races ; by the narratives of Gildas and Nennius, the only British Celtic historians, the Irish Annals, and the Pictish Chronicle. It is in harmony with the facts con- tained in the Life of Columba, written in the 7th century, but based on an earlier Life, by one of his successors, Cumine, abbot of lona, who may have seen Columba, and must have known persons who had. The northern Britain brought before us in connexion with Columba in the latter XXI. 60