Picts
The Picts were a group of peoples in what is now Scotland north of the Firth of Forth, in the Early Middle Ages. Where they lived and details of their culture can be gleaned from early medieval texts and Pictish stones. The name Picti appears in written records as an exonym from the late third century AD. They are assumed to have been descendants of the Caledonii and other northern Iron Age tribes. Their territory is referred to as "Pictland" by modern historians. Initially made up of several chiefdoms, it came to be dominated by the Pictish kingdom of Fortriu from the seventh century. During this Verturian hegemony, Picti was adopted as an endonym. This lasted around 160 years until the Pictish kingdom merged with that of Dál Riata to form the Kingdom of Alba, ruled by the House of Alpin. The concept of "Pictish kingship" continued for a few decades until it was abandoned during the reign of Caustantín mac Áeda.
Pictish society was typical of many early medieval societies in northern Europe and had parallels with neighbouring groups. Archaeology gives some impression of their culture. Medieval sources report the existence of a Pictish language, and evidence shows that it was an Insular Celtic language related to the Brittonic spoken by the Celtic Britons to the south. Pictish was gradually displaced by Middle Gaelic as part of the wider Gaelicisation from the late ninth century. Much of their history is known from outside sources, including Bede, hagiographies of saints such as that of Columba by Adomnán, and the Irish annals.
Definitions
There has been substantial critical reappraisal of the concept of "Pictishness" over recent decades. The popular view at the beginning of the twentieth century was that they were exotic "lost people". It was noted in the highly influential work of 1955, The Problem of the Picts, that the subject area was difficult, with the archaeological and historical records frequently being at odds with the conventional essentialist expectations about historical peoples. Since then, the culture-historical paradigm of archaeology dominant since the late nineteenth century gave way to the processual archaeology theory. Moreover, there has been significant reappraisal of textual sources written, for example by Bede and Adomnán in the seventh and eighth centuries. These works relate events of previous centuries, but current scholarship recognises their often allegorical, pseudo-historical nature, and their true value often lies in an appraisal of the time period in which they were written.The difficulties with Pictish history and archaeology arise from the fact that the people who were called Picts were a fundamentally heterogeneous group with little cultural uniformity. Care is needed to avoid viewing them through the lens of what the cultural historian Gilbert Márkus calls the "Ethnic Fallacy". The people known as "Picts" by outsiders in late antiquity were very different from those who later adopted the name, in terms of language, culture, religion and politics.
The term "Pict" is found in Roman sources from the end of the third century AD, when it was used to describe unromanised people in northern Britain. The term is most likely to have been pejorative, emphasising their supposed barbarism in contrast to the Britons under Roman rule. It has been argued, most notably by James Fraser, that the term "Pict" would have had little meaning to the people to whom it was being applied. Fraser posits that it was adopted as an endonym only in the late seventh century, as an inclusive term for people under rule of the Verturian hegemony, centered in Fortriu, particularly following the Battle of Dun Nechtain. This view is, however, not universal. Gordon Noble and Nicholas Evans consider it plausible, if not provable, that "Picts" may have been used as an endonym by those northern Britons in closest contact with Rome as early as the fourth century.
The bulk of written history dates from the seventh century onwards. The Irish annalists and contemporary scholars, like Bede, use "Picts" to describe the peoples under the Verturian hegemony. This encompassed most of Scotland north of the Forth-Clyde isthmus and to the exclusion of territory occupied by Dál Riata in the west. To the south lay the Brittonic kingdom of Strathclyde, with Lothian occupied by Northumbrian Angles. The use of "Picts" as a descriptive term continued to the formation of the Alpínid dynasty in the ninth century, and the merging of the Pictish Kingdom with that of Dál Riata.
Etymology
The Latin word Picti first occurs in a panegyric, a formal eulogising speech from 297 and is most commonly explained as meaning 'painted'. This is generally understood to be a reference to the practice of tattooing. Claudian, in his account of the Roman commander Stilicho, written around 404, speaks of designs on the bodies of dying Picts, presumably referring to tattoos or body paint. Isidore of Seville reports in the early seventh century that the practice was continued by the Picts. An alternative suggestion is that the Latin Picti was derived from a native form, perhaps related etymologically to the Gallic Pictones.The Picts were called Cruithni in Old Irish and Prydyn in Old Welsh. These are lexical cognates, from the proto-Celtic *kwritu 'form', from which *Pretania also derives. Pretani is likely to have originated as a generalised term for any native inhabitant of Britain. This is similar to the situation with the Gaelic name of Scotland, Alba, which originally seems to have been a generalised term for Britain. It has been proposed that the Picts may have called themselves Albidosi, a name found in the Chronicle of the Kings of Alba during the reign of Máel Coluim mac Domnaill.
Origins
The origin myth presented in Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People describes the Picts as settlers from Scythia who arrived on the northern coast of Ireland by chance. Local Scoti leaders redirected them to northern Britain where they settled, taking Scoti wives. The Pictish Chronicle, repeating this story, further names the mythical founding leader Cruithne, followed by his sons, whose names correspond with the seven provinces of Pictland: Circin, Fidach, Fortriu, Fotla, Cat, Ce and Fib. Bede's account has long been recognised as pseudohistorical literary invention, and is thought to be of Pictish origin, composed around 700. Its structure is similar to the origin myths of other peoples and its main purpose appears to have been to legitimise the annexation of Pictish territories by Fortriu and the creation of a wider Pictland.A study published in 2023 sequenced the whole genomes from eight individuals associated with the Pictish period, excavated from cemeteries at Lundin Links in Fife and Balintore, Easter Ross. The study observed "broad affinities" between the mainland Pictish genomes, Iron Age Britons and the present-day people living in western Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and Northumbria, but less with the rest of England, supporting the current archaeological theories of a "local origin" of the Pictish people.
History
The area occupied by the Picts had previously been described by Roman writers and geographers as the home of the Caledonii. These Romans also used other names to refer to Britannic tribes living in the area, including Verturiones, Taexali and Venicones.Written history relating to the Picts as a people emerges in the Early Middle Ages. At that time, the Gaels of Dál Riata controlled what is now Argyll, as part of a kingdom straddling the sea between Britain and Ireland. The Angles of Bernicia, which merged with Deira to form Northumbria, overwhelmed the adjacent British kingdoms, and for much of the 7th century Northumbria was the most powerful kingdom in Britain. The Picts were probably tributary to Northumbria until the reign of Bridei mac Beli, when, in 685, the Anglians suffered a defeat at the Battle of Dun Nechtain that halted their northward expansion. The Northumbrians continued to dominate southern Scotland for the remainder of the Pictish period.
Dál Riata was subject to the Pictish king Óengus mac Fergusa, and although it had its own kings beginning in the 760s, does not appear to have recovered its political independence from the Picts. A later Pictish king, Caustantín mac Fergusa, placed his son Domnall on the throne of Dál Riata. Pictish attempts to achieve a similar dominance over the Britons of Alt Clut were not successful.
The Viking Age brought significant change to Britain and Ireland, no less in Scotland than elsewhere, with the Vikings conquering and settling the islands and various mainland areas, including Caithness, Sutherland and Galloway. In the middle of the 9th century Ketil Flatnose is said to have founded the Kingdom of the Isles, governing many of these territories, and by the end of that century the Vikings had destroyed the Kingdom of Northumbria, greatly weakened the Kingdom of Strathclyde, and founded the Kingdom of York. In a major battle in 839, the Vikings killed the King of Fortriu, Eógan mac Óengusa, the King of Dál Riata Áed mac Boanta, and many others. In the aftermath, in the 840s, Kenneth MacAlpin became king of the Picts.
During the reign of Cínaed's grandson, Caustantín mac Áeda, outsiders began to refer to the region as the Kingdom of Alba rather than the Kingdom of the Picts, but it is not known whether this was because a new kingdom was established or Alba was simply a closer approximation of the Pictish name for the Picts. However, though the Pictish language did not disappear suddenly, a process of Gaelicisation was clearly underway during the reigns of Caustantín and his successors.
By a certain point, probably during the 11th century, all the inhabitants of northern Alba had become fully Gaelicised Scots, and Pictish identity was forgotten. Henry of Huntingdon was one of the first historians to note this disappearance in the mid-12th century Historia Anglorum. Later, the idea of Picts as a tribe was revived in myth and legend.