Picts
the name by which, for five people that inhabited Eastern Scotland Pictores, or Pic people that inhabited Eastern Scotland and a half centuries (A. D. 296-844), the PICTS, the name by which, for five were known. In the Irish chronicles applied to them, and their country is they are generally styled Picti, Pictones, Piccardaig, but sometimes PICTS called Cruithen-tuath, the equivalent of Latin Pictavia and Old Norse Pettland, which still survives in the name of the Pentland Firth. There were Cruithni or Cruthnig also in Ireland-never, however, called Picti. The Picts are first mentioned in connection with the campaigns of Constantius Chlorus in Britain, in 296 and 306. Caledonia is the name given by Tacitus to Scotland N. of the Firths of Forth and Clyde, and he describes the Caledonians as a noble race of barbarians, who fight in chariots as well as on foot, with long swords and short shields, and whose fair red hair and large limbs argued a German origin. Ptolemy (120) places 14 tribes in Tacitus' Caledonia, inclusive of the Caledonians themselves, and the more E. ten of these may be conclaimed as Picts. So troublesome were these Northern tribes to the Roman province that in 208 the Emperor Severus came to Britain and vainly attempted their subjugation. The temporary historians mention only two tribes N. of the Forth and Clyde wallthe Mæatæ and the Caledonii-and Tacitus's noble barbarians appear in their pages but squalid savages. Yet they had chariots and weapons as described by Tacitus, with daggers and peculiarly knobbed spears. One hundred years later the Caledonians and other Picts, as already said, were encountered by Constantius, and still 50 years later they harassed the Roman province (360) now in company with the Scots, who are first mentioned at this date, and who appeared as great seawanderers. The Picts and Scots were helped in this "continual vexing" of the Britons by the Saxons and Atecotti Theodosius the elder in 369 subdued these Northern foes and restored the district between the walls to Roman Britain, and the usurper Maximus signalized his assumption of power in 383 by an energetic campaign against the Picts and Scots. During the next quarter of a century the Romans were losing their hold on Britain, and their Northern foes pressed on the province with great persistence.
The Southern Picts were converted to Christianity by St. Ninian (about 400), and the Northern Picts over a century and a half later by St. Columba.
The year 839 saw a great defeat and slaughter of the Picts by the Danes, with confusion once again, from which emerged in 844 Kenneth MacAlpin, the Scot, as king over both nations, henceforward not to be disunited. Many things contributed to the overthrow of the Pictish kingdom; the disunion, phys- PIERCE ical and otherwise, between Northern and Southern Picts; the rule of female succession which allowed Anglic, Briton, and Scottic princes to rule in right of their mothers, and the superior culture of the Scots, Christian and literary.
We really do not know much about the isles and W. coast N. of Argyll, nor indeed of the counties N. of Inverness, till the Norsemen came. It is quite cer- from the time of Brude MacMailehon till the Norsemen came. tain that the Scots colonized these very early, and had, indeed, established themselves in Perthshire. Aidan, the son of Gubhran, made expeditions to Orkney, and fought the Picts and defeated them on the Forth, or even farther E., in Mearns.
It is quite cer- The Picts, whatever traces they show of a non-Aryan racial element, with its consequent survival of lower ideas of marriage laws, spoke a Celtic language belonging to a branch of Celtic allied to the Cymric, but dialectically different from the Welsh of Bede's time; and that this dialect of the Galo-Cymric stock was a wave of Celtic speech from the Continent previous to the Gaulish which held England when Cæsar entered Britain.