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Updated: June 20, 2025
Fortunately, every one was weary at night, and went early to rest, and she found little difficulty in getting outside the town without notice; and one of the ponies on the common took her speedily across the moor. Late as it was, twilight lingered over the silent moor, with its old Pictish mounds and burial places, giving them an indescribable aspect of something weird and eerie.
And from there his eager, wandering priests carried the story far and wide, northward to the fortress of the Pictish kings, and southward to the wild Saxons who dwelt amid the hills and uplands of Northumbria. To this story of love and gentleness the wild heathen listened in wonder. To help the weak, to love and forgive their enemies, was something unthought of by these fierce sea-rovers.
Scotland had come to be thought of as a single country; and the court of London transferred to the whole of it those claims of direct feudal suzerainty which at most applied only to Strathclyde, while the court of Edinburgh looked on the English Lowlands as holding no closer relation to England than the Pictish lands beyond the Forth.
Scandalous chronicles aver that Marie was chosen as Queen of Spain for the levity of her character, and that the Crown was expected, as in the Pictish monarchy, to descend on the female side; the father of the prince might be anybody. What was needed was simply a son of the Queen of Spain.
When the conquerors settled in the land, they enslaved such of its inhabitants as remained among them for a time, and gave to the best coastal lands and lower valley farms the Norse names which they still bear, but they left the heads of the river valleys and the hills mainly to the Moddan family and their Pictish followers and clansmen, who held them tenaciously and extended their holdings, as the Norse became less hostile through inter-marriage, or less strong.
The old Pictish kingdom across the Firth of Forth, the original Scot kingdom in Argyle, the district of Cumbria or Strathclyde, and the Lowlands which stretched from the Firth of Forth to the English border, had become united under the kings of the Scots; Pictland by inheritance, Cumbria by a grant from the English king Eadmund, the Lowlands by conquest, confirmed as English tradition alleged by a grant from Cnut.
The old Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus puts this view of the kingship very clearly in the mouth of Hermutrude, a legendary queen of Scotland. Thus her sceptre and her hand went together." The statement is all the more significant because it appears to reflect the actual practice of the Pictish kings.
In 844, Kenneth, king of the Scots, the small North Irish sept which, as stated above, had crossed over from Erin and held the Dalriadic kingdom of Argyll with its capital at Dunadd near the modern Crinan Canal, succeeded in making good his title, on his mother's side, to the Pictish crown by a successful attack from the west on the southern Picts at the same time as their territory was being invaded from the east coast by the Danes.
The Pictish monarch was so impressed with a sense of his wisdom and worth that he held him in the highest honor, and the neighboring chiefs and princes sought his counsel and availed themselves of his judgment in settling their disputes. When Columba landed on Iona he was attended by twelve followers whom he had formed into a religious body, of which he was the head.
But I told you, didn't I, that if the book went on I'd have to put you into it? There's a lot of silly rot there. Poetical license!" "The thing that made the most impression on me was the part about the red hair," I said. "The description sounded so nice. Who was Circe, please? Was she Scottish? It's a name a Pictish princess might have had."
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