Page:The dialect of the southern counties of Scotland - Murray - 1873.djvu/24

10 resolved, in opposition to the advice of his nobles and the forebodings of his bishops, among whom was the famous Cuthbert, to invade the Pictish territory. He is supposed to have passed the Forth below Abercorn (at the modern Queensferry), and destroying everything before him, plunged into the forests of Caledonia. After laying waste the Scottish and Pictish capitals of Dunadd and Dundurn, he crossed the Tay into Angus. Bredei, the Pictish king, feigning flight, retired before the invaders till he had drawn them into the recesses of the country, where he attacked them in a narrow pass in the Sidlaw Hills, at Nechtans-mere, near Dunnechtan (now Dunnichen in Forfarshire), on the 20th May, 685. The Angle army was defeated with great slaughter, and the king was himself slain by the hand of Bredei. Ecgfrid's body was carried to Iona, and there buried; and few of his followers returned to Northumbria to tell of his defeat." As a result of their victory, according to Bede, who wrote 46 years after the event, "not only did the Picts recover possession of their land which the Angles had seized, but the Scots and even a considerable part of the Britons regained their freedom, which they continued to hold at the date of his writing; while a great number of the Angle race perished by the sword, were reduced to slavery, or driven to a hasty flight from the land of the Picts; amongst others, the venerable man of God, Trumwine, who had received the bishopric among them, withdrew with his companions from the monastery of Æbbercurnig, situated indeed in the Angle territory, but in the immediate vicinity of the Firth which divides the land of the Angles from the land of the Picts—and took his abode at Strea-næs-healh" (Whitby), where he remained till his death. This expulsion of Angle settlers from the land of the Picts, with Bede's careful distinction between what was Pict-land and what Engla-land, and his care to explain that Abercorn was not in Pict-land, though dangerously near to it, imply that, during the victorious period of Eadwin, Oswald, Oswiu, and Ecgfrid, numerous Angles had crossed the Forth and settled in the Pictish territory beyond. An attempt of the Angles in 699 to avenge their defeat was again repulsed, but in 710, Berhfred, the general of King Osred, defeated and overcame the Picts, slaying their king Bredei.

From this date, for more than a century, we hear of a few or no hostilities between the Angles and Picts or Britons, and the former held undisputed possession of what is now the south-east of Scotland, the elevated range distinguished as the Peht-land or Pentland Hills, indicating probably the north-western frontier. Along the Solway their dominions evidently extended farther west, since from the contemporary words of Beda, in closing his history, we learn that "in the province of the Northumbrians, of which Ceolwulf is king, there are now ( 731) four Bishops, to wit,—