Dan Snow's History Hit - How and Why History: The Birth of Scotland

Episode Date: July 7, 2020

The recorded story of Scotland begins with the arrival of the Romans in the 1st century, when the province of Britannia reached as far north as the Antonine Wall. But how much further back can the history of Scotland be traced? Who were the Picts and the Gaels? And how did the Viking invasion unite them? Rob Weinberg asks the big how and why questions about the birth of Scotland to Dr. Alex Woolf, senior lecturer at the University of St Andrews.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everybody, I hope you're enjoying the new, exciting series of podcasts on History Hit called How and Why History. So you've probably worked out now that in every episode we are exploring history's big how and why questions with top historians, writers and academics. Since all over History Hit this week we're looking at the Romans in Britain, we decided to put this how and why history out about the birth of Scotland. If you like it, search for How and Why History wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe. There's new episodes on Tuesdays and Fridays.

On Friday we look into the Wall Street crash, so don't miss that. And if you really are obsessed with How and Why History, well, I've got good news for you because we have 26 episodes over on History Hit TV. So just head over there and join the revolution. Become a subscriber to History Hit TV. In the meantime, let's go back to the birth of scotland in 84 ad agricola the roman governor of britain set out to subdue the recalcitrant caledonian tribes in the north agricola's army marched into the highlands of what is now Scotland and encountered a confederation of northern clans.

He sent his fleet ahead to plunder at various points and thus spread uncertainty and terror. And, with an army marching light, which he had reinforced with the bravest of the Britons and those whose loyalty had been proved during a long peace, reached the Gropian Mountain, which he found occupied by the enemy. The Britons were, in fact, undaunted by the loss of the previous battle, and welcomed the choice between revenge and enslavement. They had realised at last that common action was needed to meet the common danger, and had sent round embassies and drawn up treaties to rally the full force of all their states. It's in this account by Agricola's son-in-law Tacitus that the peoples in the north of Roman Britannia first enter history. But how far back

can the history of Scotland be traced? Who were the Picts and the Gales? And how did the Viking invasion unite them? I'm Rob Weinberg, and to find out more about the how and why of Scottish history, I'm talking to Dr Alex Wolfe, Senior Lecturer at the University of St Andrews. This is How and Why History. history. Alex, thanks for joining me. How far back can the history of Scotland be traced? Well, if we mean history in the strict sense with written documents and so on, I guess that the earliest is probably the Roman conquest, though there was a Greek explorer called Pythaeus who came to Britain and so on in about 300 BC and his own work doesn't survive but he's quoted by a few Roman period Greek scholars so we have a few little hints but really nothing that we can really say anything meaningful about so really with the Roman invasion of Britain and most of our information starts with Tacitus and his account of Agricola's invasion in

84 AD. So first century AD and before that the odd semi-legendary account that may or may not refer to Scotland. Tell me a little bit more about Roman Britannia as it was. It went as high as the Antonine Wall. Where was that exactly in modern terms? The Romans sort of claimed to have conquered all of Britain, but evidently didn't. And the northern frontier seems to have been quite flexible. At various times, they led expeditions into northern Scotland, further north than I am here near St Andrews. But there were two walls, Hadrian's Wall that's famous, that runs across the north of England between Newcastle and Carlisle, and then, as you say, the Antonine Wall that was built about 20 or 30 years later,

and that basically runs between the Forth and the Clyde, so roughly between Edinburgh and Glasgow, although it actually starts a little bit upstream of Edinburgh, so about the other side of Edinburgh Airport, but within spitting distance. On a map of Britain as a whole, it would look like it was Edinburgh. It wasn't as big or as well-built an operation as Hadrian's Wall. It was only an earth embankment in most places with a few forts along it.

And it probably wasn't occupied for very long, although there are various debates about how long, whether it was ever reoccupied after it was abandoned and so on. So it was a sort of attempt to make what we think of as southern Scotland more fully integrated into the empire in the middle of the second century, from about 130 to about 160 probably. And then north of the Antonine Wall were the people called the Picts or the Picti. The Picts weren't there or didn't exist at the time that the Roman walls were built. They're really a product of the walls rather than anything else. When the Romans first arrived they used the term Britons, Britanni, generally to apply to all the different peoples of Britain and Britain was divided into a series of tribal kingdoms roughly the size of a modern

county and the early accounts of what we think of as Scotland such as Tacitus's Agricola just refer to the people as Britons and then might refer to specific tribes like the Caledones or the Tectosagi and so on but they don't use the term Pict and the term Pict first appears in the 290s, about 150 years after the Antonine Wall was built. And the usual explanation for this is it's a Latin term, it's not a local ethnic term, it means painted. And it's probably a product of the Britain south of the frontier becoming more Roman-like. And so you need to be able to distinguish between them. Using the term Britain now doesn't really tell you what a person is like, because someone from Hertfordshire or Essex was almost indistinguishable from a Roman.

He was just a Roman provincial, whereas people the further north you got were a bit more wild and hairy and still painted their bodies. So we should probably imagine Picty originally as being a kind of adjective defining painted Britons as opposed to civilised Britons and then eventually just became painted as shorthand. They weren't actually a specific group to start with, it was just this pejorative term for the wild and hairies as some people in Scottish history refer to Highlanders and so on in the later period. And then with the withdrawal of Rome from Britain we have the Gaels or the Scotty colonising Western Scotland.

So where did they come from? The term Scotty is like Picty. It's one of these terms that appears in late antiquity and is probably pejorative. Unlike Picty, we don't actually know what it means. It isn't a word in Gaelic and it's not transparent as to what it would mean in Latin. So it's a bit of a mystery. not transparent as to what it would mean in Latin. So it's a bit of a mystery. And it seems to be used initially to mean perhaps only the military aspect of Irish activity. So, for example, in St. Patrick's correspondence, which was written in the 5th century, he refers to civilian Irish people who have converted to Christianity as Irish. He uses the word Iberianarchy, but when he's talking about

savage raiders and slave traders he calls them Scotty. So it may be that it was a word a bit like the word Viking, a word that originally had a very specific social category term but gradually becomes used in a more ethnic way. And it isn't specifically in the early period anything to do with northern Britain. The term Scotty is used in the early period, anything to do with northern Britain. The term Scotty is used in the early Middle Ages for all Gaelic speakers eventually, and they arrive in roughly the territory we call Argyll, and probably this is happening in the 5th and 6th centuries. It might have begun earlier. There's some debate about that. Archaeologists have difficulty pinning down an invasion.

So the use of the term Scotty for that area, it just means Irish, this is the land of the Irish or whatever. So that's how they arrived there. And it's probably part of the collapse of Roman Britain, as you mentioned. How did the Picts and the Gaels get on with each other then? There seems to have been a variety of activity. There was sporadic warfare, but we have a sort of a history of about 300 years there's battles in that period but there's long periods where there's no battles mentioned and the northern Picts at least those based around the Inverness area converted to Christianity because of missions from Argyll from the Scottish part of Britain you know famously St Columba but presumably also his

followers and their church emerged as a branch of the Irish church so that bishops from northern Pictland went to Irish church councils and so on. So there was conflict, after all this is the Dark Ages, everyone was fighting everyone, different Irish groups were fighting each other even within Dalrieta, the kingdom of the Scots in Argyll, you got faction fighting but there was no, as far as we can tell, there was no kind of great antipathy between Picts and Gaels. Then the Vikings invaded towards the end of the 8th century. What impact did that then have on the Gaelicisation, if you like, of the Pictish parts of the region? They probably had a lot of influence, but perhaps in three different ways,

shall we say. So the first one is they actually conquered and settled a large part of the northern territory that we think of as Pictish. So the north of the mainland, certainly Sutherland and Caithness, maybe East of Ross, and Orkney and Shetland, of course, which are famously Viking. The second effect they had is that there were major attacks on the Pictish territory which although they didn't conquer for long periods anything south of Ross they probably really screwed up the economy. There's one period in the 860s where there's a very large Viking army there for three years and they're probably pillaging, fighting battles, slave raiding so they probably create a massive kind of crisis without necessarily staying there. And then the third effect is that another area which they did manage to conquer and colonise almost entirely were the islands off the west coast, the Hebrides. And about half of the early Scottish kingdom, the kingdom of Dalriata, was based on the inner Hebrides.

So it may well have created a refugee problem. was based on the Inner Hebrides. So it may well have created a refugee problem. People coming from the islands and some parts of the coastline of Argyll fleeing into the interior of Scotland. So we may well have Scottish refugees coming into what had been Pictish territory and that might create an issue. I've wondered whether this might be a little bit like the way that Hutu militias from the Rwandan genocide ended up in

eastern Congo and have completely destabilised that region in recent times. That we might imagine war bands of Gallic warriors fleeing the Vikings and setting up territories within what had been Pictish territory in the east of Scotland. How did the Viking invasion impact then on uniting the Picts and the Gaels? The effect that the Vikings had across Britain seems to have been that a lot of the relatively long-term antagonism that you saw between different peoples seems to have been ameliorated by the late 8th century and the middle of the 9th century, which is really when things get very bad. the late 8th century and the middle of the 9th century, which is really when things get very bad, everybody else, all the natives of Britain, have been Christian for a long time, whether they're English, Welsh, Pictish or Gaels. And suddenly they're confronted with these pagan Vikings and the paganness seems more significant than any of the other differences. So down south we start seeing a lot of collaboration between English and Welsh rulers. Welsh kings

start appearing at the court of English kings which we've never really seen any evidence of before and in the north that seems to be something similar as well that we're seeing interaction between them. Now exactly what happens and how the Picts and the Scots become a single kingdom is actually very unclear. It's not really noticed by anybody at the time but it's almost certainly connected to the fact that you have both the Picts and the Scots being terribly badly impacted by the Vikings and perhaps collaborating in what seems like an ad hoc fashion to start with but it becomes something more long-term as time goes on. Presumably, though, the implication of being one kingdom is that you have one king or one ruler.

Yes, but what actually happens is that the Scots disappear from the historical record, and through the 9th century, from about 820 onwards, we don't hear of any rulers of the Scottish kingdom. And we hear of a series of rulers of the Picts, including somebody called Kenneth MacAlpin, who subsequent legendary material written hundreds of years later says was a Scottish ruler who conquered the Picts. The monarch under whom we see the united races beginning their career as the one Scottish nation, was the son of that King Alpine, whose bloody head had been affixed as a trophy of the Pictish arms to the gates of Abernethy. The dishonour put upon the father was wiped out when the son entered these same gates in triumph to fill the throne of a united people,

and stretch his sceptre from west to east across the entire country. people, and stretches sceptre from west to east across the entire country. And from the banks of the Forth to the great ocean stream that rolls betwixt the promontory of Cape Roth and the precipices of the Orkneys. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive but to conquer whether you're preparing for assassin's creed shadows or fascinated by history and great stories listen to

echoes of history a ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hits there are new episodes every week But in the contemporary records, he's simply referred to as King of the Pits, as is his brother who succeeds him, and then Kenneth's two sons who in turn succeed their uncle. And then it's the first of the grandsons of Kenneth who is the first person who is called King of Alaba by Irish sources. first person who is called King of Alaba by Irish sources. And so Kenneth's youngest son, Aith, is the last person to be called King of the Picts in any sources, but he dies in 878. So the contemporary sources, if our historical sources stopped there, if Scotland had been disintegrated at that point, we would think the Picts were still up and running in 878 and that Kenneth MacAlpin and so on was Pictish. But that's not how history turns out. The Irish sources stop using the term King of the Picts altogether.

And they use this term Alba, which is the Irish word for the island of Britain originally. It's now come to mean in both Scottish Gaelic and Irish Scotland. And in fact, it's been borrowed into Welsh where Erlalban is the Welsh word for Scotland but that's quite a gradual transition and probably it was a term that was already in use in a more circumscribed sense in Irish when talking about the Scots in Britain in the same way that when we talk about America we nearly always just be in the United States and it really annoys Spanish-speaking Americans. I remember traveling in Latin America. And whenever I referred to someone from the United States as American, they'd say, we are American too. But I think a lot of people are very

ethnocentric. And when Irish people said, you know, I've got a cousin in Britain, no one had to ask which bit of Britain. I mean, why would you have a cousin in England or in Pickland? I mean, or Wales? I mean, why would anyone want to go there? The food's horrible. You know, that's the way they would have thought. And so for them, Britain meant the Irish bit of Britain, because it's the only bit of Britain where proper people lived and spoke a proper language and did proper things. And so Scotland becomes Britain in that sense. But the slightly complicating factor is that exactly the same time as this change happens, the English sources start referring to the people in the kingdom that had been the Pictish kingdom as Scotters, which is Old English for Scott. So they obviously saw something

happening. They mention Picts for the last time at exactly the same occasion as the Irish do in 878, when the Vikings kill the sons of Kenneth MacAlpin and that's the last reference to Picts in Anglo-Saxon sources and after that they refer to people as Scotters and the first person to be called a king of the Scotters is Constantine's son of Aith but his father is the last person to be called king of the Picts. So it's a bit of a mystery as to why the English suddenly thought these people were Scots. I think the simplest solution, but maybe not the correct one, would be to think that the language of the court was now Gaelic rather than Pictish. That's probably the easy answer, but it may not

be the right one, but it's the best we've got for the present. Did a uniform Scottish identity begin to develop under Constantine II? As far as we can tell, after this period there are almost no mentions of Picts at all. The term Scot seems to be used for everybody. There's a little bit of evidence that's mostly from place names that Scottish Gaelic in this early period had a lot of Pictish loanwords in it, but they seem to get smoothed out. It gets more standardised with general Irish, and that's very common in kind of colonial situations. So, for example, if you'd gone to Ireland in the 18th century and talked English to peasants, they probably would have had a lot of Irishisms in their English. But now, because of state education and TV and everything,

everyone in Ireland speaks standard English with just a tiny odd word borrowed from Irish. So there does seem to be a fusion. We don't really know what happened to the Picts. The curious thing is that nobody mentions them disappearing until the middle of the 12th century when an English writer called Henry of Huntingdon is writing a history of the English in recent times, and he plagiarises his introduction from the Venerable Bede. And Bede had famously listed the fact that there were four nations living in the island of Britain. The English, the Britons, by which he means the Welsh, the Scots and the Picts. And Henry sort of slavishly copies this out and then says but the Picts have

completely disappeared even their language has gone God must have hated them and that's the first time anyone mentions their disappear but if you look at texts being produced in Scotland at about the same period they seem to regard their kingdom as being a direct continuation of the Pictish kingdom so a king will give land to a church like St Andrews or Dunkeld and refer to the fact that the church was founded by his predecessors and will name people who we know are Pictish kings. So there seems to be a sense that the kingdom at least was a continuation of the Pictish kingdom.

And of course by this time most of the original Scottish kingdom in Argyll isn't really under the control of the Scottish kings anymore. Vikings and local chieftains run Argyll, and Argyll has to be reconquered in the 13th century. It's really that somehow the Pictish kingdom becomes Scottish rather than the two become united, but it is a bit of a puzzle. How different was the Christianity that developed in Scotland from the Roman Catholic Church and then how did Scotland come to conform with Rome? Scotland was never formally, and Ireland, were never formally out of communion with Rome. They always recognised the Pope as the head of the church but what you have is a series of changes

over time. So the famous one is the Easter controversy that reached its head in the late 7th century and continued to the early 8th and this was the fact that Britons, the Welsh that is, and the Irish and therefore also the Picts and the Scots in Britain were using an older form of a calendar for calculating the date of Easter. Easter is of course a movable feast and it's quite complicated. It's almost impossible for people like you and I to predict when Easter will be next year without looking it up, because there's complicated tables.

And the tables that were being used by the Britons and the Irish in the 7th century had been designed in Gaul, in southern Gaul, in about 400 by a man called Sulpicius Severus. And they've been the standard form that had been used across the West at that point. But because of southern England disappearing after the Roman Empire and being conquered by the English, who were pagan for a while, these churches were cut off. And when the mechanisms for updating Easter happened they weren't passed on. So it's a little bit like missing your upgrade on your word. You might have a colleague in a

developing world country or in a poorer institution who's still on word 8 when you're on word 10 simply because they haven't got the upgrade because they weren't in contact they weren't online or they didn't have a subscription at that point. So the Irish Easter which causes all this problem is in fact the Easter that everyone was using a few generations before but they take a while to be persuaded to change because they're sort of wedded to the view that if it ain't broke why fix it and also part of the problem was that some of the criticism of the old Easter implied that people using it had themselves been bad. And particularly St Wilfrid, an English advocate of the new Easter, says that St Columba was a heretic for using it. And so the church on Iona, the leading church for the Picts and the Scots in Britain and many of the Irish in Northern Ireland, couldn't agree with that.

They couldn't agree with that. They couldn't say, well, we're going to accept what Sir Wilfrid says, because he's saying our founder was a heretic, which is completely not true. And it's interesting that Iona eventually switches to the New Easter the same year that Wilfrid dies. And I think they just weren't going to give him the satisfaction. They kind of knew he was right, that everyone should be doing the same thing. But they wait till he dies till they actually accept the New Easter, so he won't think he's won personally. And then you have a series of changes like that over later periods, at the time when St Margaret comes to Scotland from southern England in the late 11th century, probably in 1068, there are various upgrades that need to be done. But essentially, the way that the

Roman church worked in the Middle Ages is that you got reform mod packages that developed in the centre, usually in northern Italy or the Rhineland, and were then spread out. And they often reach places quite slowly on the edges of Europe. So places like Portugal were often also a little bit behind. So rather than think that the Scottish church or the Irish church was somehow different, it's just a bit slower getting upgrades. At any one generation, there may be some point in which people in Canterbury are at odds with people in Armagh or Iona, but it'll be a different issue every time. It's simply ripples coming out from Rome that reach the North Atlantic coast later than anywhere else. So there is no Celtic church. That's something people are very keen on popularly,

but there never was a Celtic church. These people all think they're in communion with Rome. They're just a bit slow on getting the upgrades. The border between Scotland and England seems to have been quite fluid. When did it become fixed as it is today? The simple answer to that is 1237. There was a treaty done and a group of knights from both sides walked along the border. But it's part of a longer process. The kind of Antonine Wall and the Firth of Forth are the traditional boundaries.

And during the period leading up to the Viking Age and the Firth of Forth are the traditional boundaries and during the period leading up to the Viking Age in the early Viking Age the area around Edinburgh and Dunbar was part of England no one would have thought it strange to call it anything else everyone spoke old English there were royal villas there there were English monasteries the whole of what we think of as South East Scotland and also the north coast of the Solway Firth, the area west of Carlisle. There was an English bishopric of Whithorn in Galloway, which is about halfway between Carlisle and Belfast. So most of what we think of as southern Scotland was part of England. The bit that wasn't was the extreme northwest corner of that around Glasgow, the Greater Glasgow area, which was still Welsh

speaking and had a separate independent Welsh kingdom up until about 1050, when that gets conquered by the Scots. What seems to happen with the far north of England as it was in that period is that during the 11th century, with the conquest of England first by Cnut and secondly by William Conqueror, Conquest of England first by Cnut and secondly by William Conqueror. These new regimes are very much based in the south and they have difficulty enforcing their control on the fringes of the kingdom. And it leads to both Welsh kings and the Scottish kings expanding their territory. And what happens in southeast Scotland is that the native northern English earls of Northumbria,

who had had their base at Bamburgh near Lindisfarne, just north of Newcastle, put themselves under the protection of the Scots, and they become the ancestors of the earls of Dunbar, and they lose some of their territory eventually, but they become great landholders in Scotland. But it's been a transition where there hasn't been a settlement of Scottish conquerors it's essentially a northern English baron has switched his allegiance and what that leads to is a period up to that treaty in 1237 that I started with from about 1066 to 1237 there's this complicated idea that the southeast is both England and Scotland simultaneously so one of

the churchmen from the monastery of Dryburgh which is near Kelso on the Tweed describes the location of Dryburgh as in terra anglorum in regnum scotorum in the land of the English in the kingdom of the Scots so you might think of it as Scottish England might be a way of thinking about it. So it's a sort of semi-detached area. It has its own laws, its own language. And it's only really in the course of the 13th century, and particularly probably during the Wars of Independence, that it fully becomes Scottish, because up to the Wars of Independence, you might have someone travelling around in South East Scotland,

and some of the people he meets will be Scots, i.e. Gaelicaelic speakers and some will be English but they'll be the King of Scotland's men. But during the wars between England and Scotland nobody who was a loyal follower of the King of Scots was going to say to a Scottish soldier oh I'm English because that might send off the wrong signals. So at that point Anglo-Scotsots, if we can call them that, start calling themselves Scots rather than English. And that's really the transition. It's gradual. They've been increasingly thinking that what was perhaps thought in the 11th century as a temporary measure, that they have more in common with the Scots. And of course, at the same time, the Scottish royal court and Scottish government is becoming more influenced by English habits anyway so there's a kind of merging together and you have English language towns being founded along

the east coast of Scotland so the two cultures merge together at that point but the 13th century is the key point for the border being fixed. What are the words or traditions that might still be in existence today that we can trace right back to the time of the Picts and the Gaels? The thing that people always point to first is some of the place names of Scotland. So all those place names that have Pitt in them, like Pitt Lockery, that's actually a Pictish word. It doesn't actually mean Pict. It's a coincidence that it sounds a bit similar. But it's a word meaning an estate or a territory held in lordship. And it seems to have been borrowed into Gaelic very early and it's kept there. The other thing, of course, that is the

real clue to who the Picts really were is all those places on the east coast of Scotland that have Aber as the first element, like Abernethy or Aberdeen, Abertae. It's the Welsh word for river mouth. And what that tells us is that the language of the Picts was probably almost identical to Welsh. So a number of our major churches date back to that period. So Aberdeen, which has a cathedral, St Andrews and so on, they date back to the Pictish period. The ancient churches of Scotland north of the Forth, the main cathedral sites, nearly all had their foundation in Pictish period and so that's really the continuation of the church through that period. Otherwise it's very hard to be certain. Scottish Gaelic seems to have been increasingly Irishised and become more like

standard Irish as time went on. So by the time we get to the big decline of Gaelic in the early modern period, the kind of Gaelic you'd learn at school would be identical to the Gaelic you'd learn in Ireland. And it's only with the revival in the late 19th century that you get a distinct idea of Scottish Gaelic as opposed to modern Irish, when both languages are revived on what's usually called classical Irish, that was the language for about the 14th to the 17th centuries would have been the same in both countries. Alex Wolfe, thank you very much for joining us. My pleasure.

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