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Updated: June 20, 2025
Now and then a big fellow made an offer, and held out his hand for a little Pictish grazier to give it a slap a cattle bargain being concluded by a slap of the hand but the Welshman generally turned away, with a half-resentful exclamation. There were a few horses and ponies in a street leading into the fair from the south. "I saw none sold, however.
On an enforced visit to Cornwall, he found that King Alef, a petty British chief, had betrothed his fair daughter to a terrible Pictish giant, breaking off, in order to do it, her troth-plight with Prince Sigtryg of Waterford, son of a Danish king in Ireland. Hereward, ever chivalrous, picked a quarrel with the giant and killed him in fair fight, whereupon the king threw him into prison.
Nor was the perfection in this ornamental industry a new thing, for the daughters of the Pictish kings confined in the castle were adepts in it; neither was it left altogether to paid sempstresses, for great ladies spent their time in it, and emulation quickened both the genius and the diligence.
One result that a miscellany of racial heterogeneities was washed up into the peninsular and island extremities of the continent. In the British you had four Celtic and a Pictish remnant, not to mention Latins galore, pressed on by three or four sorts of Teutons.
Moray was divided among Normans and "trustworthy natives," and the scattering of its Pictish population gave the Mackays to Sutherland, and, largely blended with the Norse, they still occupy the greater part of it.
Hereward had hoped to find giants in Cornwall: and behold he had found one at once; though rather, to judge from his looks, a Pictish than a Cornish giant; and, true to his reckless determination to defy and fight every man and beast who was willing to defy and fight him, he turned on his elbow and stared at Ironhook in scorn, meditating some speech which might provoke the hoped-for quarrel.
Further, Christian though he had been long before Viking times, the Pict of Cat derived his Christianity at first and chiefly from the Pictish missions, and later from the Columban Church, both without reference to Papal Rome; and his missionaries not only settled on islands off his coasts, but later on worshipped in his small churches on the mainland; and many a Pictish saint of holy life was held in reverence there.
In Strathnavern and in the upper valleys of its rivers, and also in Caithness in the uplands of the river Thurso, and in a large part of Sudrland the Pictish family and clan of Moddan in its various branches subsisted all through the Norse occupation, and it is hoped to show good reason for believing that the family of Moddan, with the Pictish or Scottish family of Freskyn de Moravia in later times, was the mainstay of Scottish rule in the extreme north until the shadowy claims of Norse suzerains over every part of the mainland were completely repelled, and avowedly abandoned.
It occupies a commanding position on a point of land extending far into the sea and almost surrounded by water at high tide. We visited it in the fading twilight, and a lonelier, more ghostly place it would be hard to imagine. From this old castle was taken the stone of destiny upon which the Pictish kings were crowned, but which is now the support of the coronation chair in Westminster Abbey.
The nine centuries, above referred to, of Roman invasion, intestine war, and ecclesiastical rivalry between the Pictish, Columban and Catholic Churches had now, under Malcolm II, produced a kingdom of Scotland, throughout which the Catholic was in a fair way to become the predominant Church, and in which the authority of the Scottish Crown was for the time being, nominally, but in the north merely nominally, supreme on the mainland from the Tweed to the Pentland Firth.
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