United States or Mauritania ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Still there is no doubt, difficult as it may be to realise the idea, that at the times with which we are dealing, Ireland enjoyed a kind of civilisation, which enabled its princes and its priests to look down on Pictland, and even on Saxon England, as barbarian.
The three marriages were intended to secure to Malcolm the south, the middle, and the north of Pictland through the fathers of Duncan, Macbeth, and Thorfinn respectively; and we may note that from Thorfinn are descended all subsequent Jarls and Earls of Orkney and Shetland and Caithness of the so-called Norse line.
About the same time Kentigern, or St. Mungo, a Briton of Wales, carried on missionary work in Strathclyde and in Pictland, and even, it is said, sent preachers to Orkney.
For in the yeere following, the said Egfride had lead an armie into Pictland against Brudeus king of the Picts, and being trained into straits within hils and craggie mounteins, he was slaine with the most part of all his armie, in the yeere of his age 40, and of his reigne 15, vpon the 13 kalends of June.
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.
St Columba himself was of the royal line in Ulster, was learned, as learning was then reckoned, and, if he had previously been turbulent, he now desired to spread the Gospel. With twelve companions he settled in Iona, established his cloister of cells, and journeyed to Inverness, the capital of Pictland.
The great Northern Pictland was divided into seven provinces, or sub-kingdoms, while there was an over-King, or Ardrigh, with his capital at Inverness and, later, in Angus or Forfarshire. The country about Edinburgh was partly English, partly Cymric or Welsh. The south-west corner, Galloway, was called Pictish, and was peopled by Gaelic-speaking tribes.
About the year 664, the wars in the south with Northumbria resulted in the introduction by its king Oswy into south Pictland of the Catholic instead of the Columban Church, a change which Nechtan, king of the Southern Picts, afterwards confirmed, and which long afterwards led to the abandonment throughout Scotland of the Pictish and Columban systems, and to the adoption in their place of the wider and broader culture, and the politically superior organisation and stricter discipline of the Catholic Church, as new bishoprics were gradually founded throughout Scotland by its successive kings.
As the Romans never occupied Sutherland or Caithness or even came near their borders, their inhabitants were never disarmed or prevented from the practice of war, and thus enfeebled like the more southerly Britons. After the departure, in 410, of the Romans, St. Ninian sent his missionaries over Pictland, but darkness broods over its history thenceforward for a hundred and fifty years.
Later, after an age of war and ruin, Oswald, the convert of Iona, restored Christianity in northern England; and, after his fall, his brother, Oswiu, consolidated the north English. In 685 Oswiu's son Egfrith crossed the Forth and invaded Pictland with a Northumbrian army, but was routed with great loss, and was slain at Nectan's Mere, in Forfarshire.
Word Of The Day