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This chapter examines the doubtful issues in Bede's account of the pre-Viking history of Britain and Ireland in his Historia Ecclesiastica (HE). It focuses on the section of the HE where Bede attributed the conversion of the Picts to the work of Columba and the Christianisation of the southern Picts to one Nynia episcopo reuerentissimo et sanctissimo uiro de natione Brettonum. The chapter explores the origins of the cult of Saint Martin of Tours and considers what evidence it might offer about the nexus of influences operating upon Bede's account of the conversion.

This chapter reviews the formation of the northern frontier of the kingdom of England from the eleventh to the later sixteenth century. Through a study of the physical and symbolic roles of the Wall, it explores the origins of the concept linking this Roman monument to the delimitation of the northern boundary of England. This theme draws upon a significant location along the Wall's line, Lanercost Priory (Cumbria). Lanercost is a medieval religious house that was founded during the later half of the twelfth century, in the contested borderlands between England and Scotland. The construction of the Priory drew both physically and conceptually upon the remains of the Picts' Wall located 700 metres to the north. During the late sixteenth century, the buildings of the converted Priory were to become the home of Christopher Dacre, one of the Elizabethan gentlemen responsible for the maintenance of order along England's northern frontier.

The Picts' Wall was a focus of considerable interest during the late sixteenth century and the first decade of the seventeenth. Late in the reign of Queen Elizabeth and during the succeeding reign of King James, playwrights, poets, historians, antiquaries, and mapmakers were intent on exploring the character and history of England and establishing an identity for the English. In this context, William Camden's influential volume Britannia used classical texts to construct an ancestral geography for the kingdom. This chapter focuses on Camden's image of the character of the Picts' Wall and compares this with the creation of a living spirit for the monument in ‘Song XXIX’ of Michael Drayton's poetical work, Poly-Olbion (1622). The chapter explores the relationship of these works to the Wall's function in bounding contemporary England, and makes some observations on the relationship between history and story in the writings of Camden and Drayton.

In 1695, a new edition of Camden's Britannia was published. Although there was little additional information on the Picts' Wall, antiquarian interest in the monument increased significantly during the early decades of the eighteenth century. This chapter explores the new interpretations of the Wall that developed during the first half of the eighteenth century, up to the Jacobite uprising of 1745–6. It examines the conceptual role of the Wall with regard to the unity and disunity of England and Scotland, the results of the Act of Union of 1707, and the concomitant revival of interest. George Smith's particular interest in the Roman fort at Castlesteads (Cumbria), exemplifies a new approach to the Wall's remains.

The story of the excavation and what it unearthed, and how. On the site of St Colman's – a sequence of nine churches from the 8th to the 20th century; in the Glebe Field, a paved road leading to a mill with workshops on either side; in the south field, a large, beautifully symmetric, bag-shaped building housing metal-workers.

This chapter is all about Pictish sculpture, one of the unsung glories of early Europe. The Picts were expert fashioners of stone and masters of line in both incised and relief carving. They had their own distinctive symbolic written language, consisting of rods, discs, crescents and animal shapes. Here we explore the form of the original monuments found broken into pieces at Portmahomack, their ornament and where they originally stood.

This chapter examines the archaeological evidence for the Early Medieval period of the historical Picts and Scots. It examines the rich archaeology from sites like Eilean Olabhat and the Udal in North Uist, exploring the cellular building forms that replace the earlier monumental roundhouses.

This chapter focuses on the close political, social and literary relations that bound the Celtic-speaking regions of Ireland and Scotland in the late Middle Ages and early modern age. It discusses the political history of Scots and Picts, early Christianity in Scotland and the languages of Scotland in the Middle Ages.

The year 839 was marked by the defeat of the men of Fortriu and the killing by the heathens of Wen son of Onuist, king of Fortriu, his brother Bran and Áed son of Boanta, king of Dál Riata. The following sixty years would see the disappearance of the Picts from the historical record but how and why they disappeared is far from clear. This chapter begins with a brief discussion of the source material for this key period in early Scottish history. It then discusses the manuscript known as the Chronicles of the Kings of Alba; accounts of the death of Cinaed son of Alpín, rex Pictorum, under the year 858; the translation of the relics of Columba; Cinaed's war; Domnall, son of Alpín (858–62); Constantín, son of Cinaed (862–76); Áed, son of Cinaed (876–8); and Eochaid and Giric (878–89).

This chapter reviews the changes in Scotland between the mid-eighth and the mid-eleventh centuries. The most obvious change in the political landscape of northern Britain in the period under discussion was the disappearance of the Picts and their replacement as the dominant people of the region by the Scots. No contemporary source describes the events surrounding this transformation, but they do seem fairly consistent in describing Cinaed son of Alpín's sons as rulers of the Picts (862–78) and his grandsons as rulers of the Scots (889–943). The chapter also discusses language and culture in the Scoto-Pictish kingdom; the Gaelic conquest of Pictavia; and Albanian society in the tenth and eleventh centuries.

The story of Columba and the Picts is nothing like as straightforward as conventional narratives have long held. Its place in Scottish history requires careful rethinking. A fine scholar, a committed advocate of a certain kind of monastic life, and a close relative of mighty kings, Columba may have visited Moray. He may have founded monasteries there. He may have evangelised in their neighbourhoods. On balance, however, the thin evidence is rather better that Columba went to Atholl and that he behaved there much as Columbanus did in Burgundy. There can be no doubt that he consorted with kings, and that he did have a strong message for Pictish ears, if monastic ones.

The works examined above have been explored through a chronological study based upon the four overlapping themes of civility/ Romanization, the walling out of humanity, Roman incomers, and ruination, emphasized through a reading of the sources to explore how the discovery of objects and sites has helped to inform a number of contrasting interpretations that went in and out of fashion. A number of more local and fragmented tales have also been addressed in passing and it is evident that a very different account could have been articulated if I had drawn more directly upon such ideas. Tales, such as those of Onion the Silchester Giant, Graham’s creation of a breach in the Antonine Wall, King Arthur and his ‘O’on’ at Camelon in central Scotland and the activities of the devil at Rodmarton, provide information about how local people interpreted the physical remains of the Romans in Britain. The focus on elite tales in this book should not detract from the potential of local myths, but a thorough study of such material remains to be undertaken. Instead, this book has emphasized stories that have been told about the pre- Roman and Roman history of Britain that served to develop relevant national and imperial tales. The significance of the civilizing of the ancient Britons drove a particular approach to the ancient sources during the early seventeenth century that emphasized the passing on of Roman civility to people of England (or Lowland Britain). From this point of view, the ruined Roman Walls projected the territorial limit of civility, beyond which were the lands of barbarians. Towards the end of the century, a new interpretation arose that placed emphasis on the Roman settlers, their ‘stations’, and roads, reflecting the contemporary military aspect of society while envisaging England (or Lowland Britain) as the inheritor of Roman civility. This military conception was redefined and updated during the succeeding centuries as an analogy for the extension of state control over the Scottish Highlands and later for the exploration, documentation, and domination of territories in India and elsewhere.

Scotland was the part of Britain that adopted the Three Age System most rapidly and completely. This chapter will argue that there were probably two main reasons for this. The first was that there were some intellectual similarities between Scotland and Denmark, and there had for a long time been strong links between the archaeologists of Edinburgh and Copenhagen—far stronger than ever existed between London and Copenhagen. The second was that, like Denmark, Scotland was seeking an identity rooted in its past. Scotland and Denmark share a number of characteristics. Both were (and are) small northern nations overshadowed by larger southern neighbours, and both were (and are) using their early history to protect their national identities. Although the Romans made inroads into Scotland, neither country had been incorporated into the Roman Empire, so their emergence into history was much more gradual. As scholars looked back through time, there was therefore a more gradual ‘greying out’ of historical knowledge, rather than an abrupt and brightly lit Roman threshold preceded by darkness. Both therefore had a greater willingness to use archaeological materials to shed light in the ‘grey-out’. This is probably one reason for the many archaeological links that had been established between Denmark and Scotland long before Worsaae’s visit. One important link between two key individuals worked in a rather different way, however: the friendship between the Norwegian Peter Andreas Munch and Daniel Wilson was partly based on their common mistrust of Copenhagen’s mid-century archaeological hegemony. But there were also differences between Scotland and Denmark, and these also had their effect on the course of events. The seeking of an identity rooted in the past was in Scotland an endeavour that was potentially fraught with problems. The deposed Stuart monarchy had last invaded Britain only a century before, and many Scots, particularly from the Gaelic-speaking Celtic Highlands, had supported the claim of Charles Stuart, ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’, in his bid to become King Charles III. His defeat at the Battle of Culloden did not immediately remove the threat of a renewed invasion, and Jacobite agents remained active in the Highlands for some time afterwards (Maclean 1982).

This book examines the impact of the discovery of physical evidence for Roman Britain between the late sixteenth and the early twentieth centuries. My earlier work, Roman Officers and English Gentlemen, explored how the Roman past of Britain was articulated as an aspect of ‘imperial discourse’ in British late Victorian and Edwardian society, how the Roman history and monuments of Britain were used to construct an imperial ancestry for contemporary Britain. The Roman empire, and Roman Britain in particular, were drawn upon to provide powerful contrasts and comparisons between the superpowers of their respective ages, drawing out morals and lessons for the contemporary imperial age. This book seeks to address the value of ideas derived from Roman Britain in the construction of British nationhood and in the context of empire-building, but with a far longer chronological perspective. Before the later sixteenth century, people in Britain had thought and written about the Roman past, but conventional wisdom suggests that it is only from this time that a self-critical and conscious appreciation of the classical writings that addressed Britain emerged. It is also from this time that the value of past objects and sites started to be recognized. In studying the ways that objects and remains from the pre-Roman and Roman past were received, we shall see that the increasing comprehension of the significance of ancient objects was itself a result of the gradual acceptance of the authority of the classical texts that referred to pre-Roman and Roman Britain. Knowledge of the culture and history of ancient Britain prior to this time was communicated through a series of mythical tales that presented a heroic picture of the ancient past. For the English, this ‘old British history’ presented what Philip Schwyzer has called a ‘grand and sprawling narrative’, derived mainly from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (The History of the Kings of Britain, c.1136). These powerful ideas related the initial peopling of these islands to Brutus and his followers who had fled the sack of Troy. During medieval times, various associated stories had been elaborated around mythical and semi-mythical ancient rulers of Britain, including Cymbeline and Lear.

This chapter argues that another explanation is available to the meaning of Alba: one in which the Britishness of Alba is fully acknowledged without supposing that this meant a claim to be the predominant king of the whole island, and in which continuity with the Picts is seen not as a historiographical device, but as a fundamental facet of the kingship's identity. It notes that Alba was originally a Gaelic word for ‘Britain’, and that it acquired its modern meaning of ‘Scotland’ through its use as the Gaelic term for the kingdom of the Scots since the tenth century. What lies at the heart of both is the compelling logic of the landmass between the Forth and the north coast as a concept that could legitimise the kingship's claim to be the highest secular authority in northern Britain.

This chapter scrutinises the role of the unfortunate Picts, who were as much of an embarrassment to medieval historians as they have proved a ‘problem’ to their modern successors. When Scots were content to trace their origins to Ireland the Picts were useful as the objects of conquest, but by the later thirteenth century they had to be integrated into the proto-history of Scotland, a feat ultimately accomplished by John of Fordun using materials assembled a century before he wrote.