Page:The dialect of the southern counties of Scotland - Murray - 1873.djvu/16

2 found their usual correlatives in Pict and Pictish, names applied to the race and language which prevailed on the east side of the Island, as far south as the Firth of Forth—perhaps somewhat farther. The quæstio vexata of the ethnological relations between the Scots and Picts does not here concern us, and we have only to notice that, when, in the middle of the 9th century, the Scottish ruler succeeded also to the Pictish throne, he retained his original title of King of the Scots, the latter word gradually acquiring a corresponding extension of meaning, so as to embrace the inhabitants of the whole country north of the Forth, or Scottis-wath (Mare Scoticum), which, as the territory subject to the king of the Scots, came in the 10th century to be spoken of by the Angle writers as Scot-land. Scot and Scottish were now opposed to Angle and English, terms embracing the Teutonic tribes who already occupied the greater part of the present England, as well as the southern part of what is now Scotland, as far as the Forth; the terms Scottish and English having thus an ethnological or linguistic value.

Even after the territory south of the Forth had, through the Northumbrian and Saxon alliances of the Scottish kings, become part of their dominions, it does not appear that it was included in Alban or Scotland. It was an outlying province of Saxonia or England (ethnologically, if not politically), over which the king of the Scots held dominion, much as, in later times, kings of England held sway over large parts of France. Thus, so late as 1091, we are told by the Saxon Chronicle, that when King Malcolm learned that William Rufus was advancing against him with an army, he proceeded with his army out of Scotland, into Lothian in England, and there awaited him (he fór mid hys fyrde ut of Scot-lande into Loðene on Engla-lande and þær abád). The simple and natural meaning of these words, which partisan writers have displayed much ingenuity in explaining away, is confirmed by the oldest Scottish laws, which show that, even a century later, Lothian was still considered "out of Scotland." In those laws Stirling is spoken of as a town on the frontier of Scotland, and provision is made as to the mode to be adopted by an "inhabitant of Scotland," i.e. a dweller north of the Firths, when he had to make a seizure or distraint, "ultra aquam de Forth."