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The Picts, or whoever they were, might assuredly use charm stones, and the only objection to the idea that they might engrave archaic patterns on them is the absence of record of similarly inscribed small stones in Britain.
From the time that the Britons called upon the Saxons to assist them against the Picts and Scots, about A.D. 410, the domination of the hardy Teutonic people in England was a foregone conclusion. The Britons had become exhausted through their long exposure to Roman influences, and in their state of enfeeblement were unable to resist the attacks of the rude highland tribes.
So they killed him quickly too, in their rage, and the secret of the heather ale died with him. Though he liked the story, the obstinate man argued that the last of the Picts were not really killed in this or any other way; that they had slowly died out as a race, and had married with the Scots, leaving a strain of their blood in the land to this day.
Gratian, who, since the death of Valentinian I. , had been the ruler of the West, summoned the valiant Theodosius from his estate in Spain, to which he had been banished, to sustain the tottering empire. Gratian made him regent in the East. His father had cleared Britain of the Picts and Scots, and restored it to the empire. Under him the son had learned to be a soldier.
These were connected by a skeleton of great roads which were and are the bones of Britain. But with the weakening of Rome the bones began to break under barbarian pressure, coming at first from the north; from the Picts who lay beyond Agricola's boundary in what is now the Scotch Lowlands.
"Nay, father, with whom am I to brawl, or how should I curse in your good company? Find you Scots so froward?" "But now, pretending to be our friends, a band of them is harrying the Sologne country . . . " "They will be Johnstons and Jardines, and wild wood folk of Galloway," I said. "These we scarce reckon Scots, but rather Picts, and half heathen.
"May this hand," he cried, "never grow old." Oswald's lordship stretched as widely over Britain as that of his predecessor Eadwine. In him even more than in Eadwine men saw some faint likeness of the older Emperors; once indeed a writer from the land of the Picts calls Oswald "Emperor of the whole of Britain."
Their southern neighbors have felt, and perhaps exaggerated, the cruel depredations of the Scots and Picts; and a valiant tribe of Caledonia, the Attacotti, the enemies, and afterwards the soldiers, of Valentinian, are accused, by an eye-witness, of delighting in the taste of human flesh.
It is more certain that these Milesians were Kelts, and were in early times called Scots. A colony of them conquered the Picts; drove the Caledonians into Galway, and gave North Britain, or Albin the name of Lesser Scotland, while their own country, or Greater Scotia, returned to its former name of Erin, called by the Romans Hibernia, and by the English, Ireland.
The King of the Picts received baptism at his hands; the Kings of the Scottish colony, his kinsmen, received the crown from him on their accession. The islet of I., or Iona, as presented to him by one of these princes.
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