They form quite a contrast to the characteristic Celtic nomenclature of the Donalds, Kenneths, Duncans, Malcolms, and Ferguses, who had hitherto occupied the throne, and mark the turning point from which the Scottish royal family may be looked upon as an Anglo-Saxon line, and the history of Scotland that of its Teutonic element. This element continually increased, through the policy of Malcolm and his successors, in encouraging English settlers north of the Forth, affording refuge to the fugitives from the Norman conquest, and displacing the ancient troublesome chiefs by a nobility personally attached to the sovereign, of Saxon, Flemish, and Norman origin. The Celtic portion of their subjects, who had formed the original germ of the kingdom, did not submit to be thus ousted from the first place without many a struggle, and in the reign of Malcolm's immediate successors, it seemed doubtful for a while whether the Celt or the Saxon should eventually gain the predominance. The struggle was scarcely decided before the year 1100, and after fortune finally declared in favour of the latter, backed as they were by their kinsmen in England, the work of Saxonizing the seaboard country north of the Firths went on rapidly under Edgar, Alexander, and David I.; or, as Wyntown puts it:—
"Þe Saxonys and þe Scottis blude
In natyownys twa before þan ȝhud, (i.e. went)
Bot þe Barnetyme off þat Get
Þat Malcolme had off Saynt Margret,
To-gyddir drw full vnyowne
To pass syne in suceessyowne."—(Book VII. iii. 163.)
§ 5. Having traced the course of events by which the Angles of Northern Bernicia became politically connected with the ancient kingdom of the Celtic Scots, and a leading element in the later Scottish nationality, we approach the question of the language. At the arrival of the Teutonic invaders on the east coast, the territory between the walls, now forming the south of Scotland, was like England, British; that is, Celtic, of the Cymric or Welsh division. The names of the princes with whom the invaders leagued or fought, of the principalities and places mentioned in the record of the wars, are all Cymric. It is in an ancient form of "Welsh, and by the care of the Welsh bards, that the poems of Taliesin, bard of Urien and Owain, princes of Reghed, of Lliwarch Hen, son of Elidir, chief of Argoed, both divisions of ancient Cumbria, and of Aneurin, a native of Strath-clyde, and probably of Alclwyd, or Dumbarton, have come down to us with contemporary delineations of the great events of the struggle.[1] It was among their kinsmen in Wales or Brittany that all the three northern bards ended their lives; to Wales also that many
- ↑ Les Bardes Bretons.—Poemes du vie siecle, traduits pour la première fois, en Français, avec le texte en regard revu sur les manuscrits. Par le Vicomte Hersart de la Villemarque, Nouvelle Edition. Paris, 1860.
