Paul Wagner - Pictish Warrior AD 297-841

CONTENTS

T he Picts have captured the public imagination in a manner unlike any other ancient people. Exotic and mysterious, their name conjures up images of sun-worshipping naked warriors, covered in blue body paint, storming down from the icy north to tear the Roman legionaries down from Hadrians Wall. They emerged from a murky past to dominate northern Britain for over 500 years, and then vanished just as mysteriously, becoming mere legend and leaving their successors to puzzle and argue over their curious artefacts.

A fanciful engraving of a Pict from 1590.

While there are elements of truth in this picture, the Picts hold an important place in the history of Britain for more prosaic reasons. They represent a high point of Celtic civilisation, remaining free and unconquered beyond the borders of the Roman world, and rising to become the first barbarians to form a recognisable nation.

A (slightly) better reconstruction by Robert Havell, 1815.

There is no denying that the aura of mystery that surrounds the Picts is well deserved. They are first mentioned by name in AD 297, though it is clear from the context that they had been a problem for the Romano-British for some time. But for how long? Why were they not mentioned before? Were the Picts indigenous to northern Britain, or Celtic incomers? Was Pict their native name, or a Roman nickname? Was their language Celtic? If so, was it related to British or Gaelic? Did they really adopt matrilinear succession? Did they paint their bodies? What were the meanings of Pictish symbols? Why were the symbol stones set up? Were they pagan or Christian? And how and why did the Picts disappear?

The word pict is usually said to derive from the Latin pictus, meaning painted, in reference to the Picts habit of tattooing their bodies. While there seems no reason to doubt that the Picts followed this practice, as an explanation of the word it is somewhat inadequate. There seems no need for the Romans to invent a new name for a tattooed people, for they were familiar with many such tribes, and none of the Latin descriptions actually use the word pictum to describe Celtic tattoos.

A cloaked and tartan-trousered Caledonian, from a bronze fragment dating from around AD 217.

There are several alternative interpretations of the meaning of pict. The 4th-century military historian Vegetius recorded that the British word pictas referred to a camouflaged scout boat, coloured sea-blue or pictae. In Welsh, this boat was a peithas, the sailors were peithi, and the Picts were peithwyr, while medieval Irish chronicles called it a picard, and interchange the name Picti or Pictones with piccardach or picars (pirates).

The way the Romans used the word, however, was as a tribal name, such as savage tribes of Scotti and Picti. Pict in Old Norse is Pettr, Old English Poehta and Old Scots Pecht, all of which seem to be variations on a real name, not a slang term for either painted or pirate. It thus seems likely that Picti was a proper name, and the punning reference to bodily decoration was merely a happy coincidence.

But who were the Picts? The simplest answer is the inhabitants of northern Britain from AD 297858, which might be factually accurate but is otherwise unenlightening. It does, however, draw attention to the first puzzling thing about the Picts; that they are absent, at least by name, from the first two centuries of Roman interaction with northern Britain.

In the first centuries AD the land north of the Forth was peopled by two broad cultural groups. In the central Highlands was a tribal confederacy of Britons, most notably the Caledonii, whose ancestry dated back to the 8th century BC, when timber-laced hill forts, ironworking and the other marks of Celtic culture first arrived in Scotland. In the Orkneys, Shetland, the Hebrides and the far north-west of Scotland another group built a different sort of fort, a type of circular drystone tower called a broch, of which over 500 were built between the 1st century BC and the 2nd century AD . Although the hill forts have a much longer ancestry than the brochs, both remained in use at the same time, and there were clear cultural and political divisions between the inhabitants.

Brochs were a type of circular dry stone fort with an inner courtyard of about 10 metres (32 ft) in diameter, containing a central well. The 3.6 metre-thick (12 ft) walls had internal stairs and chambers, and there may have been wooden floors or balconies on the upper levels and a thatched or hide roof. Brochs are sometimes compared to medieval castles, but perhaps a better parallel would be the similarly sized stronghouses of the 16th century Border Reiver clans.

Roman dealings with the Orkneys, recorded by Pliny the Elder and Tacitus, indicate that the broch-dwellers petitioned to be allies of Rome. The Orkneys made formal submission to Rome in AD 43, and later sent envoys to ask for Roman protection, the direct result of which was Agricolas invasion of Scotland and the battle of Mons Grampius in AD 84. After the battle, Agricolas fleet went on to receive the formal submission of Orkney. The brochs have yielded a rich diversity of high status Roman artefacts and local copies of Roman objects, suggesting Roman support and a sophisticated trading network, which could not have existed without Roman acquiescence.

Following Agricolas withdrawal, the Caledonian tribes fought a successful guerrilla war against the Romans, which eventually resulted in the construction of Hadrians Wall and the Antonine Wall. The following centuries saw escalating Caledonian raids until, in AD 208, Emperor Septimus Severus himself came to Britain to deal with the barbarians. Severus did not try to bring the Caledonians to battle, but aimed to wipe them out by systematic devastation of the landscape, hanging the native chiefs, burning the crops, killing the livestock, and destroying the hill forts by setting the timber-laced walls on fire, melting or vitrifying the stone. Severus policy, in other words, was nothing short of ethnic cleansing, and it seems to have been extremely successful. There was nearly a century of peace, and when Scotland once more entered history it was ruled by the Picts.

Pictish predators. The top-left wolf, from 4th-century Orkney, is one of the earliest known Pictish carvings.