pictart

The Picts were a group of tribal peoples known to be living north of the Forth - Clyde line between the arrival of the Romans in northern Britain c.100 AD and the mid 9th century. Their own records have perished apart from a list of their kings, though Roman, Irish and Anglo-Saxon sources give us a few details of their history. We do not even know the Picts own name for themselves: the word Pict, for long said to have been derived from the Latin Picti, meaning "the painted people" might perhaps derive from a tribal name like Pexa. Traditional lore in Scotland often refers to them as Pechts.

Showing the major peoples who inhabited early Scotland. The Picts mainly occupied the low lying fertile ground along the eastern coast of Scotland, while the Scots and Britons occupied the south west areas of Scotland.

The mysterious Picts were farmers, craftspeople, hunters, fishers and warriors who were largely converted to Christianity between the 5th and 7th centuries. They developed a superb and highly original art which chiefly survives in the form of sculptured stones: it is from these carvings that most of what we know about this ancient people is derived. A unique and mysterious series of animal, object and abstract symbols are incised on what are known as Class I Pictish symbol stones.

With the arrival of Christianity the Picts developed the intricate and beautiful Class II cross-slabs, on which the native symbols are combined with the Christian cross. These carved stones, along with the exquisite jewellery and illuminated manuscripts, such as the Book of Kells, represent some of the high points of Celtic art.

The Picts dominated what is now eastern and northern Scotland until they merged with the Scots, an event still shrouded in mystery and conjecture. The lack of Pictish written records is greatly offset by the unique heritage of their carved stones.

Due to a lack of historical resources write by the Picts themselves, they were for a long time seen as a mysterious and enigmatic people. This impression was enhanced by the fact that the unique art of the Picts was perceived as having come into existence with no obvious predecessor. References in Roman and other sources to the practice of matriliny, or descent through the mother line added a further gloss to this air of mystery.

This is a result of a process started in the 13th century when spurious histories were created to bolster English claims to Scottish territory and which led to further histories being invented in Scotland to rebut these claims. Nowadays most serious scholars see the Picts as being indigenous to Scotland, though they were undoubtedly influenced by other socities and peoples.

Sadly, apart from the Pictish King list we have no surviving indigenous material regarding the Picts. This is not to say the Picts never wrote anything down but that Scotland has been subjected to various violent political upheavals that involved wholesale destruction of early records.

Accordingly we are forced to go to external sources to find out the little historical information available about the Picts. There are several references to the Picts in Roman sources - the earliest possibly being contained in a list of forts on the Antonine wall probably compiled during the Severan Campaign of 196AD. For long the earliest reference was believed to be in the works of the Roman panegyrist Eumenius circa 297AD and the text can be accessed in Monumenta Historia Britannica, ed. T. Hardy 1848. The later Roman historians Ammianus Marcellinus and Dio Cassius who also mentioned the Picts can also be found here. One earlier source than any of these is Tacitus’s Agricola, which describes the author’s father-in-law’s campaign culminating in the battle of Mons Graupius in AD 80. This much vaunted victory for the Romans saw them leave Scotland north of the Forth-Clyde axis immediately after! Some modern historians, perceiving the Caledonians and Picts to be effectively the same people, now date the dawn of the Pictish era from this significant date rather than 297 AD - a date predicated on nothing more than a reference in a Roman text.

Later references to the Picts come from a variety of sources. These include the Irish Annals of Ulster and the Annals of Tigernach, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the early historians or pseudo-historians Gildas, Nennius, Adomnan and Bede writing in the early medieval period. In addition there are references to the Picts in a variety of sources derived from oral tradition. The most detailed bibliography of the Picts is the Pictish Panorama by Dr J Burt, Pinkfoot Press 1994

The first known literary reference to the Picts by Eumenius at the close of the third century refers to Caesar fighting Picts and Scots. Also the discovery of the probable tribal name Pexa dating from the Severan campaign of the early third century means we should put the dawn of the Pictish era considerably earlier than 297 AD which has been the standard practice. A later Roman source refers to Caledonians and other Picts and it seems fitting to date the Pictish period from the initial contact between the Romans and the then natives of what we now call Scotland.

The tribal peoples of Scotland when the Romans came were predominantly P-Celtic speaking (which means that they spoke a language akin to the ancestor of modern Welsh). In the West was the Brythonic area of Strathclyde while Central and Eastern Scotland south of Fife seem to have been under the sway of the people known as the Gododdin (earlier Votadini), one of whose battle raids is the subject of the oldest known poem from these islands. Whether the Picts were descendants of the Caledonians or the Caledonians (Caledonii) were a Pictish tribe is difficult to say but recent thinking has led to the idea that these peoples were themselves the direct descendants of the megalith builders who have left us such magnificent structures as Calanais, Stenness and awe-inspiring chambered cairns like Maes Howe.

Essentially tribes are groups of families living within specific territories and claiming descent from a common ancestor.

There is no doubt that the West Scotland and Ulster in particular were in contact for long before the Pictish period and the actual constitution of the various tribal confederations was no doubt fluid. Some scholars reckon that Gaelic must have been in use in Pictland before 500 AD. Within a century or so of this date there are grounds for believing that Anglian peoples speaking an early form of what we now know as Scots (like English, a Germanic tongue), were settling in south east Scotland. It is possible that some of the Roman auxiliary troops had spoken a Germanic language in Scotland at an earlier period.

The term Scotti - first used by Romans to describe pirates attacking the British mainland from Ireland soon became a term for all the inabitants of the emerald isle. It is generally told that the Scots came over to Pictland to found the kingdom of Dalriada in Argyll around 500 AD. However we can be sure that the populations on both sides of the Irish Sea had been in contact since Stone Age times and that they had much in common with each other. If the Gaelic speaking Scots only arrived in 500 AD they were remarkably successful in that 350 years later the Picts and Scots were united under a Scottish King, Kenneth Macalpin. This followed on the earlier successes of the Celtic Church under the leadership of Columba, whose monks and priests were Gaelic-speaking and converted much of Pictland to Christianity. There is no firm evidence for a conquest of all the Picts by Kenneth Macalpin and it is quite likely that the merging of the peoples came about through dynastic change rather than conquest. What is undeniable is that the language of the Scots of Dalriada, Gaelic, survives in placenames throughout Scotland to this day, showing the dominance of Gaelic culture in the early medieval period. This may be due mainly to the importance of the early Celtic Church in Pictland or to the dynastic supremacy of Dalriada.

The role of kingship within Pictland is the subject of much debate. The Pictish monarchs were not kings in any feudal or post-feudal sense and there has been much speculation as to how kingship was inherited.

The Pictish King Lists which have survived are notable in that no king is ever preceded by his father. Recent research suggests that in fact some of the parents of the kings mentioned might in fact have been females. This corresponds with research suggesting that sovereignty was vested in a female line and that the kings came to the throne by marrying the appropriate female. This was an ancient tribal system that came from the far distant past and underlines the continuity of occupation within the area known as Pictland. The kings married the representative of sovereignity, the queen, and could only be succeeded by their own brother or a sister’s son. Remnants of this type of succession exist as late as the 11th century when the sons of Malcolm Canmore succeeded each other on the throne of Scotland. There is also a strong suggestion that the Pictish Kingship system was matrilocal - that kings would be brought in form other tribal groupings to marry the queen. This might be the explanation for the merging of the Scots and Picts under Kenneth Macalpin. The picture is becoming clearer but we still have a lot to learn. What can be said is that kingship among the Picts was neither feudal nor followed the rule of primogeniture - inheritance by the first born son.