Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time | Page 4

races, tongues and Churches. For information about the Picts we have at first to rely on the researches of some of our trustworthy arch?ologists, and at a later date on the annals, largely Irish, collected by the late Mr. Skene in his Chronicles of the Picts and Scots, and in the works of Mr. Ritson, into which it is no part of our purpose to enter in detail. All the authorities for early Scottish history have been ably dealt with by Sir Herbert Maxwell in his book on the Early Chronicles Relating to Scotland, reproducing the Rhind lectures delivered by him in 1912. At the end of our period reliable references to charters from the twelfth century onwards will be found in Origines Parochiales Scotiae, and especially in the second part of the second volume of that valuable work of monumental research, produced, under the late Mr. Cosmo Innes, by Mr. James Brichan, and presented to the Bannatyne Club by the second Duke of Sutherland and the late Sir David Dundas. There are also the reprints, often with elaborate notes, of Scottish Charters by Sir Archibald C. Lawrie, The Bannatyne Club, The Spalding Club, The Viking Society, Mr. Alan O. Anderson, and others. The first volume of the Orkney and Shetland Records published by the Viking Society is prefaced by an able introduction of great interest.
By way of introduction to Norse times, we may attempt to state very shortly some of the leading events in Caledonia in Roman, Pictish, and Scottish times from near the end of the first century to the beginning of the tenth, so far as they bear on the agencies at work there in Norse times.
The first four of the nine centuries above referred to had seen the Romans under Agricola[4] in 80 to 84 A.D. attempt, and fail, to conquer the Caledonians or men of the woods,[5] whose home, as their name implies, was the great woodland region of the Mounth or Grampians. Those centuries had also seen the building of the wall of Hadrian between the Tyne and Solway in the year 120, the campaigns of Lollius Urbicus in 140 A.D. and the erection between the Firths of Forth and Clyde of the earthen rampart of Antonine on stone foundations, which was held by Rome for about fifty years. Seventy years later, in the year 210, fifty thousand Roman legionaries had perished in the Caledonian campaigns of the Roman Emperor Severus, and over a century and a half later, in 368, there had followed the second conquest of the Roman province of Valentia which comprised the Lothians and Galloway in the south, by Theodosius. Lastly, the final retirement of the Romans from Scotland, and indeed from Britain, took place, on the destruction of the Roman Empire in spite of Stilicho's noble defence, by Alaric and the Visigoths, in 410.
From the Roman wars and occupation two main results followed. The various Caledonian tribes inhabiting the land had then probably for the first time joined forces to fight a common foe, and in fighting him had become for that purpose temporarily united. Again, possibly as part of the high Roman policy of Stilicho, St. Ninian had in the beginning of the fifth century introduced into Galloway and also into the regions north of the Wall of Antonine the first teachers of Christianity, a religion which, however, was for some time longer to remain unknown to the Picts generally in the north. But, as Professor Hume Brown also tells us in the first of the three entrancing volumes of his History, "In Scotland, if we may judge from the meagre accounts that have come down to us, the Roman dominion hardly passed the stage of a military occupation, held by an intermittent and precarious tenure." What concerns dwellers in the extreme north is that although the Romans went into Perthshire and may have temporarily penetrated even into Moray, they certainly never occupied any part of Sutherland or Caithness, though their tablets of brass, probably as part of the currency used in trade, have been found in a Sutherland Pictish tower or broch,[7] a fact which goes far to prove that the brochs, with which we shall deal later on, existed in Roman times.[8]
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. Picts, Scots of Ireland, Angles and Saxons swarmed southwards, eastwards, and westwards respectively into England, and ruined Romano-British civilisation, which the Britons, unskilled in arms, were powerless to defend, as the lamentations of Gildas