by invading the country of the Britons, one body of the Picts penetrating to the Roman Wall, from which with hooked weapons they dragged its defenders, and dashed them against the ground.
The chief passage in Gildas' narrative of this event has a peculiar bearing upon the subject which we are here endeavouring to elucidate. He says that the Picts and Scots, " learning that the Romans had departed and never meant to return, showed more than their usual audacity, and took possession, in the stead of the natives, of the whole of the northern extremity of the land up to the Wall."[1]
This passage has by some historians been interpreted to mean that the northern Picts on this occasion swept down upon the Lowlands, and took possession of the whole of the territory between the walls. But this conclusion is rendered extremely improbable by one or two considerations. In the first place, the Britons had had the advantage of being trained as soldiers by the Romans, and were left in full possession, of the numerous strengths and encampments which the Romans had built; hence they must have been, at the least, a fair match for the Pictish barbarians. Professor Rhys recognises this when he says that, before the Romans went away, "the Picts and Scots had more than once been able to carry their plundering expeditions into the heart of the province; but the comparative efficiency of the native army, which undertook the defence of the north, is proved by the fact that the only settlement worth mentioning which the northern tribes were able permanently to make within what had been Roman Britain was that effected by the Picts on the southern side of the Firth of Forth." (This is the settlement already described as including Edinburgh and the Pentland Hills.) Again, that the Picts never completely dispossessed the Britons of their territory between the walls, seems to be rendered clear by the further fact, that when history, after a long period of obscurity, again raises the curtain, we see that while the Angles have seized upon a portion of country to the east, the Britons of Strathclyde and Cumbria still occupy, as before, their old territory. Moreover, Gildas mentions, as within his own knowledge, that the Britons, with the help of the Saxons, ultimately succeeded in driving the Picts back to what he calls "the extremity of the island," where, at the time he wrote his history, they still remained, occasionally plundering and wasting the country.
From these considerations it would appear that the words of Gildas must receive a more restricted meaning. For one thing, it should be borne in mind that this ancient historian's knowledge of the geography of the island was very meagre. He knew nothing of the Wall of Antoninus between the Forth and the Clyde; and while the Wall he describes as having been made by the Romans is obviously the Southern or Hadrian's Wall, he was not aware that it was a structure of hewn stone, but says it was built of turf. His knowledge of the extent of country to the north was also limited: and from the manner
- ↑ ... "Cognitaque condebitorum reversione, et reditus denegatione, solito confidentiores omnem aquilonalem extremamque terræ partem pro indigenis muro tenus capessunt." – Hist. Gildæ, c. 19.
