region from Forth to Humber. In 617 Æthelfrith fell in battle with the English of East Anglia, and his sons, Eanfrid and Oswald, fled to the North. Eanfrid, by his marriage with a Pictish princess, became the father of the Pictish king Talorcan, while Oswald was baptized into the Columban church at Iona. In a season of war and turmoil Oswald won the crown of the north-east English kingdom, stretching to the Forth, with its capital at Eadwinsburgh (? Edinburgh, a dubious etymology), and in that kingdom St Aidan, from Iona, erected the Columban churches under the auspices of Oswald, whose brother Oswin dominated Strathclyde and Pictland up to the Grampians; the English element, for the time, extending itself and anglicizing more and more of the Scotland that was to be.
Thus the Dalriadic Scots had handed on the gift of Irish Christianity, with such literature as accompanied it in the shape of Latin, and reading and writing, to the northern English from Forth to Humber. The ecclesiastical constitution thus introduced was one of missionary monastic stations, settled in fortified villages. The Celtic church, unluckily, differed from the Roman on the question of the method of calculating the date of Easter, the form of the tonsure, and other usages, one of them apparently relating to a detail in the celebration of the Holy Communion. From a letter to Pope Boniface IV. of an Irish saint Columbanus, who led twelve Irish monks into Gaul and Burgundy, the Celtic church appears to have denied that the papal jurisdiction extended beyond the limits of the Roman empire. Consequently Rome would have no jurisdiction in the affairs of the Irish church established in Scotland and the north of England. The results would be the severance of these regions from the main current of western ecclesiastical ideas. Conceivably these sentiments of Columbanus never wholly died out in the Scottish kingdom of later history, whose kings were always apt to treat Rome in a cavalier manner, laughing at interdicts and excommunications. A papal legate, in Bruce's time, was no more safe, if his errand was undesirable, than under John Knox, when Mary Stuart wore the crown. “All the world errs, Rome and Jerusalem err, only the Scoti and the Britones are in the right” is quoted as the opinion of the Scoti and Britones in 634. It appears that Scotland was naturally Protestant against Rome as soon as she was Christian.
Meanwhile Rome was too strong, and in 664, in a synod held at Whitby, St Wilfrid procured the acceptance of Roman as against Celtic doctrine in the questions then at issue. The English Christians overcame the Celtic divines of Iona, and in 710 even in Pictland they came into the customs of western Christianity. The church of the Celtic tribe thus yielded to the church of the Roman empire.
There followed an age of war in which the northern English were routed at Nectan's mere, in Forfarshire, and driven south Wars of Picts and Scots. of Forth. In the quarrels of Picts and of Scots of Argyll, the Pictish king, Angus MacFergus (ob. 761), was victorious while in his prime, and then consolidated Pictland; but (802-839) the Scandinavian sea-rovers began to hold large territories in Scotland, weakened the Picts, and made easy their conquest by Kenneth MacAlpine of Kintyre, the king of the Dalriad Scots of Argyll. In 860 this Scot became king of the Picts. Old legends represent him as having exterminated the Picts to the last man; and the Picts become, in popular tradition, a mythical folk, hardly human, to whom great feats, including the building of Glasgow cathedral, are attributed, as the walls of Tiryns and Mycenae in Greece were traditionally assigned to the energy of the Cyclopes. In 1814 Sir Walter Scott met a dwarfish traveller in the Orkneys, whom the natives regarded as a “Pecht” or Pict.
There was, of course, in fact, no extermination of the Picts, there was merely a change of dynasty, and alliance between Picts and Scots, and that change was probably made in accordance with Pictish customs of succession. Kenneth MacAlpine, though son of a Scottish father, was probably, though not certainly, a Pict on the mother's side, and in Pictland the crown was inherited in the female line. The consequence was that what had been Pictland came to be styled Scotland. The king of Alban was a Scot in the paternal line. His conquest was not achieved at a blow, but his language, Gaelic, prevailed. Henceforth, despite the incursions of the Scandinavians, and partly because of them, the ecclesiastical and royal centres of life are moved to the south and the east, though the king of Alban (Ardrigh) is not always master of his Ri, or subordinate princes of the seven provinces (Mortuath). His position is rather that of an overlord, or Bretwalda, like Agamemnon's among the Achaean anaktes. He allies himself with Cymric Strathclyde, and by constant raids, and thanks to English weakness caused by Danish invasions, he extends his power over English Lothian. A marriage of the daughter of Kenneth MacAlpine with the Welsh prince of Strathclyde gives Scotland a footing in that region; in short, Scotland slowly advances towards and even across the historic border.
Through this contact with and actual tenure of English lands arose the various so-called “submissions” of kings of Scotland Connexions with England. to the English crown. Thus (924) the English Chronicle asserts that Constantine, king of Scotland, “chose Edward King to father and lord.” It is impossible with here to analyse the disputes as to whether, in Freeman's words, “from this time to the 14th century” (he means, to Bannockburn) “the vassalage of Scotland was an essential part of the public law of the Isle of Britain.” In fact this vassalage was claimed at intervals by the English kings, and was admitted by Scottish kings for their lands in England; but as regards Scotland, was resisted in arms whenever opportunity arose. Each submission “held not long,” and the practical result was that 945) Malcolm acquired northern Strathclyde, “Cumberland, Galloway (?) and other districts,” while another Malcolm (1018) took Lothian, the northern part of Northumbria, after winning a great battle at Carham on the Tweed.
The Celts, Scoto-Picts, of Alban, had thus annexed a great English-speaking region, which remained loyal to their dynasty, the more loyal from abhorrence of the Norman conquerors. The English or anglicized element in Scotland was never subjugated by England, save during the few years of the Cromwellian Commonwealth, and was supported (with occasional defections, and troubles caused by dynastic Celtic risings) by the Celtic element in the kingdom during the long struggle for national independence. Scotland, in short, was too English to be conquered by England. Poor, distracted, threatened on occasion by the Celts on her flank and rear, anglicized Scotland preferred her poverty with independence, to the prosperity and peace which England would have given, if unresisted, but never could impose by war. Her independence, her resistance, curbed the conquering ambitions of England abroad; and it went for something in securing the independence of France, and the success of Protestantism, where it succeeded.
A sturdy and stoical temper was developed in the nation, which later helped parliamentary England in the struggle against the crown (1643-1648). Habits of foreign adventure and of thrift were evolved, which were of advantage to the empire when, too long after the union of 1707, Scottish men were admitted to participate in its privileges and in its administration. Such were the consequences, in the sequel, of what seemed a disastrous event, the absorption, by a Celtic kingdom, of a large and fertile region of northern England.
The English element in the realm of Malcolm II. (1005-1034) was the conducting medium of western ideas which naturally Dynasty of Malcolm II. appealed to the interests and the ambitions of that prince. On looking at the genealogical tree of the dynasty of Kenneth MacAlpine, we see that from the date of his death (859) to the accession of Duncan on the death of Malcolm II. (1034) no monarch is succeeded by his own son or grandson. The same peculiarity appears in the list of the ancient kings of Rome, but these are entangled in mythology. In the dynasty of Kenneth the succession to the crown alternated thus: he was succeeded by his brother Donald, who was followed. by his nephew, Kenneth's son, Constantine; Constantine's brother, Aodh, followed; and henceforth till 957, the kings were alternately chosen from the houses of Constantine
