59.2.charles edwards

Picts and Scots

T. M. Charles-Edwards

The Innes Review, Volume 59, Number 2, Autumn 2008, pp. 168-188 (Review)

Published by Edinburgh University Press

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The Innes Review vol. 59 no. 2 (Autumn 2008) 168–188DOI: 10.3366/E0020157X08000279

Review article

T. M. Charles-Edwards

Picts and ScotsA review of Alex Woolf, From Pictland to Alba 789–10701

Of all the periods of Scottish history, 789–1070 is the most obscure as itis one of the most formative; for that very reason Alex Woolf’s success indistilling an intelligible and credible narrative makes this book a triumph.The poverty of evidence, so often a handicap, is for him an opportunity:it makes it possible to take the reader into his confidence as he seeksto weigh up the value of each witness. In evaluating his sources, he iswilling to see, and to encourage his reader to see, the merits of rivalinterpretations; and at the same time he has the capacity to perceive how,if one only looked at some piece of evidence in a new way, the wholehistorical landscape would change, often for the better.2

The book is primarily a political narrative of North Britain. ModernScotland embraces not just what, from c. 900, contemporaries calledScotland or Alba but also part of the English kingdom of Northumbria, theBritish kingdom of Cumbria or Strathclyde (earlier Dumbarton), and theWestern and Northern Isles – controlled for most of the period by Vikings.In Woolf’s hands, this transforms what might otherwise have been thetyranny of the modern political map into an opportunity to rise above thehistory of one nation. In this way he exploits the peculiar interest of whatwould eventually become Scotland: the interplay between the five peoplesof North Britain. The scope of the book – covering Picts, Gaels, English,Britons and Scandinavians – is such that Woolf needs to set North Britainin the context of the whole of Britain, Ireland and Scandinavia. This isparticularly true of Britain, since the relationship between North Britainand the new West Saxon kingdom of the English forms another importantthread in the narrative. The discussion of the Scandinavian backgroundto the Viking presence in North Britain is also exceedingly helpful. Mosthistories of Britain in the early medieval period have placed the southernEnglish in the foreground, with the peoples of North Britain relegated toa hazy distance. Woolf’s book can be enthusiastically recommended as acorrective.

1 The New Edinburgh History of Scotland, vol. 2, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh,2007.2 I am very grateful to Arkady Hodge and Fiona Edmonds for reading a draft and savingme from errors of substance and of expression.


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One central issue is raised by the title: why was it that a Pictlandflourishing in the eighth century gave way to an increasingly GaelicAlba by the tenth? The importance of the issue is evident: of the fourpeoples that Bede described as inhabiting Britain in his day – Picts,English, Britons, and Gaels – only one, the Picts, failed to survive intothe relatively well-documented twelfth century. The traditional answer,promoted since the eleventh century, at least, is that the change wasinitiated by a conquest ascribed to Kenneth mac Alpin, Cináed macAlpín. He founded a new dynasty, called Clann Chináeda meic Alpín in amedieval Irish collection of pedigrees. In essence, Woolf rejects most ofthis narrative; instead, he follows A. A. M. Duncan in suggesting that thecrucial change occurred a generation later, with Giric mac Dúngaile – andGiric was not a member of Clann Chináeda.3

Part of the problem arises from the different perspectives inherentin distinct genres of text, part also from the plain fact that, whilecontemporaries may not appreciate the significance of change, latersources are often guided by the preoccupations of their own time andso distort the meaning of earlier events. In this case, the later sourcesderive from a period after the lands north of Forth and east of DruimAlban had been given a new Gaelic identity; and one element of thatchange was a distortion of history by which a Gaelic Alba was projectedback into a distant past. The ‘Synchronisms of Irish Kings’ present asingle sequence of kings of Alba from the legendary origins of Gaelickingship in North Britain onwards to the kings of Clann Chináeda.4 Thecontemporary sources, however, were generally external to North Britainand thus may not have comprehended local conditions.

It has recently been written of the evidence available for the periodcovered by From Pictland to Alba that ‘For a source to pass the basic testof acceptability as a witness . . . there needs to be good cause to regard itas written by someone in Scotland or with links to Scotland at or near thetime the recorded events occurred.’5 Fortunately, Woolf has not limitedhimself to material sanctioned by such a draconian pronouncement. TheAnglo-Saxon Chronicle or the Chronicle of Ireland would not pass thetest of Scottishness; and even if the latter was written at Armagh inthe ninth century – which is questionable – links between Armagh and

3 A. A. M. Duncan, The Kingship of the Scots, 842–1292. Succession and Independence(Edinburgh, 2002), 15.4 Rudolf Thurneysen, ‘Die Synchronismen der irischen Könige’, Zeitschrift für celtischePhilologie 19 (1933), 81–99.5 Dauvit Broun, ‘Alba: Pictish homeland or Irish offshoot’, in Exile and Homecoming.Papers from the Fifth Australian Conference of Celtic Studies, ed. Pamela O’Neill(Sydney, 2005), 234–75, at 237; also idem, ‘Alba as “Britain” after 900 and the Pictishantecedents of the kingdom of the Scots’, in his Scottish Independence and the Idea ofBritain. From the Picts to Alexander III (Edinburgh, 2007), 71– 97, at 72.


170 T. M. Charles-Edwards

Scotland can rarely be specified;6 and, while one may give reason to thinkthat much of the Scottish Chronicle was derived from texts close to theevents, the nature of the textual transmission can only be surmised. And,moreover, what is the ‘Scotland’ intended? If it is the modern country, itis unacceptably anachronistic. If it is just what came to be called Alba,is it really so clear that a witness from, say, Govan should be ruled outof court if we cannot document precise connections with Alba? The truthis that outsiders may sometimes be better witnesses than those directlyinvolved. Woolf’s readiness to write about North Britain as a whole andhis liberation from a narrowly Scottish approach helps to give this bookits high quality.

Irish and English sources are united in implying a change in theidentity of what had been the kingdom of the Picts c. 900. In the Aversion of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle this is marked by a shift in themeaning of ‘Scots’, Scottas: in 891, Old English Scottas was still a namefor the Irish; but in 920 the king of the Scottas and the people of theScottas are said to have chosen Edward the Elder ‘as father and lord’. It isevident from the other peoples named in this same entry that the Scottasin question were inhabitants of what had been Pictland and, hence, thatthe kingdom of the Scots had replaced the kingdom of the Picts. Thepeople had been the Peohtas, ‘Picts’, in 875, but from 920 they werethe Scots; the link between the Scottas of 891 and the Scottas of 920was an inherited Gaelic identity. In the Chronicle of Ireland the changeappears in a different form: there Cináed mac Alpín and his sons weredescribed as kings of the Picts. With the first obit of one of his grandsons,in 900, that has changed to ‘king of Alba’; and Alba, previously ‘Britain’,remains the name of the kingdom in Irish sources from that date, whileits people are named Albanaig or Fir Alban ‘the men of Alba’. Hence, theIrish source ceases to call the kings ‘kings of the Picts’ at very much thesame date as the English source starts calling them ‘kings of the Scots’.Moreover, the Scottish Chronicle indicates a similar change: the kingdomruled by Cináed and his sons is called Pictavia; it is still Pictavia nearthe beginning of the reign of his grandson, Domnall mac Constantín, butin the third year of his successor, Constantín mac Áeda, it has becomeAlbania. The agreement of the Scottish Chronicle with Irish and, thoughin a different form, English sources indicates that it was using somecontemporary material for this period.

6 The link from Dunkeld through Máel Brigte mac Tornáin to the Chronicle of Ireland,crucial for Professor Broun’s argument on Alba, ‘Alba: Pictish homeland or Irishoffshoot?’, 262, ‘Alba as “Britain”’, 85–6, is a reasonable speculation about what mighthave been, but it has not established ‘good cause’ to specify a link between the Chronicleof Ireland and Alba. Still less does it explain the general Irish use of Alba, from c. 900,for what had been Pictland.


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It has recently been argued, however, that the change from ‘king ofthe Picts’ to ‘king of Alba’ signified little because Alba may have meant,as well as ‘Britain’, ‘Pictland’.7 Essential to this claim has been, first,an argument that the Chronicle of Ireland adopted the new term becauseDunkeld (the likely source at this point for the Scottish Chronicle)adopted it, and this preference was conveyed through Máel Brigte macTornáin, ‘heir’ of both Patrick and Columba; and, secondly, a decision todiscuss the evidence of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle only later and withoutmaking any connection. The first is, as we have seen, conceivable withinits own narrow terms but no more, while it leaves unexplained the generaladoption of the new terminology across all Irish sources. It is hard to seehow the second could be defended.

The change in the names of the people and kingdom occurred eventhough Clann Chináeda ruled before the change and after it. Althoughthe name ‘Clann Chináeda’ occurs in a revised version of a collectionof pedigrees itself ascribed by Woolf to the early eleventh century (p.226), it nonetheless reflects accurately the nature of dynastic successionfrom the second half of the ninth to the end of the tenth century. Thealternation between two branches of the kindred descended from Cináed,one stemming from a son called Custantín or Constantín, the other froma son called Áed, is helpfully displayed by Woolf on pp. 223–4. ClannChináeda was thus what the Irish genealogists and lawyers called therígrad, ‘the royals’. The genealogical collections found in manuscriptsfrom the twelfth century onwards regard Clann Chináeda as an offshootof Cenél nGabráin, namely what had been the principal ruling kindredof Dál Riata, the Gaelic kingdom that had spanned the North Channel,uniting the north-eastern corner of Ireland with the lands now included inArgyll.8

There is serious doubt concerning the exact connection betweenClann Chináeda and Cenél nGabráin proposed by the genealogies (whichare not always in agreement), but there is corroboration for the notionthat there was such a link.9 First, a marginal verse in the Annals of Ulsterdescribes Áed mac Cináeda (who died as king of the Picts in 878) as‘Áed from the lands of Kintyre’, namely from the heartland of Cenél

7 Broun, ‘Alba: Pictish homeland or Irish offshoot?’, 261–3, ‘Alba as “Britain”’, 85–7;compare Woolf, From Pictland to Alba, 125–6.8 Dauvit Broun, The Irish Identity of the Kingdom of the Scots in the Twelfth andThirteenth Centuries (Woodbridge, 1999), 174–93.9 Much may depend on whether one can emend the pedigree dating from the time ofCausantín mac Culíuin (d. 997), John Bannerman, Studies in the History of Dalriada(Edinburgh, 1974), 65, on the basis of the version of the pedigree in the Poppleton MS andan entry in the Annals of Tigernach, T. M. Charles-Edwards, The Chronicle of Ireland, 2vols (Liverpool, 2006), s.a. 733.5. For different views, see ibid., i, 19; M. O. Anderson,Kings and Kingship in Early Scotland (Edinburgh, 1973), 35, 189.



nGabráin.10 As noted by Woolf (pp. 116–17) the origin of the verse islikely to be the monastery of Moville in Ulster. Secondly, part of theNotulae in the Book of Armagh, written for Torbach, abbot of Armaghbetween 807 and 808, runs as follows:11

The twelve sons of Erc. Fergus Mór. Mac Nisse.

The significance of these three notes emerges, as is usual for the Notulae,from a comparison with the somewhat later Tripartite Life (the Notulaeoffer sequences of highly abbreviated references to a full version of theLife of St Patrick very similar to, but not identical with, the TripartiteLife). There we have in succession brief passages on (a) Mac Nisse, thepatron saint of Connor (in Dál nAraidi), who is said to have learnt hispsalms when in the company of Patrick, (b) a statement that Patrick waswelcomed (in Dál Riata) by the twelve sons of Erc, and (c) a conversationbetween Patrick and one of the twelve sons, namely Fergus Mór (ancestorof two royal kindreds in Dál Riata, Cenél nGabráin and Cenél Comgaill).In the Tripartite Life, therefore, Mac Nisse seems to have been transposedfrom after the story of Patrick and Fergus Mór to before the welcomegiven by the twelve sons of Erc, but otherwise it is unlikely that thenarrative behind the brief indications given in the Notulae has beenchanged significantly in the Tripartite Life.12 This is because there isenough to indicate that the whole conforms to one of the standard patternsof Patrician hagiography: the saint meets a group of brothers from theruling kindred, is favourably treated (or especially favourably treated)by one of them, and promises that he will be the ancestor of the laterkings, the rígrad of the genealogists. Since, however, Fergus Mór wasthe ancestor of Cenél nGabráin and Cenél Comgaill, and since the storywas an addition to the late seventh-century narrative found in Tírechán,the note in the Book of Armagh implies that either Cenél nGabráin orCenél Comgaill was the rígrad in the early ninth century (or conceivably

10 The Annals of Ulster (to 1131), ed. and trans. Seán Mac Airt and Gearóid Mac Niocaill(Dublin, 1983), 332–3; the aicill rhyme in the first stanza between flatha and Macha(e)is characteristic of Middle Irish and would not, in the ninth century, be acceptable instrict verse, but such rhymes were allowed in a less formal style, as in ‘The Scholar andHis Cat’, in a manuscript of the second half of the ninth century. On the significance ofthese two quatrains, compare Patrick Sims-Williams, ‘Heroic need and literary narrative:a caveat from ninth-century Wales’, Welsh History Review 17 (1994–5), 11–20.11 Notulae, no. 10, Bethu Phátraic. The Tripartite Life of Patrick, ed. Kathleen Mulchrone(Dublin, 1939), 97; that ‘sons’ is understood after ‘twelve’ emerges from the TripartiteLife; Ludwig Bieler’s edition, The Patrician Texts in the Book of Armagh (Dublin, 1979),180, has ‘m(acc) Nise’, perhaps not appreciating that mac was part of the name of thepatron saint and founder of Connor.12 Mac Nisse in the Notulae was not the alternative name for Fergus Mór found in SenchasFer nÉrenn: Bannerman, Studies in the History of Dalriada, 41, line 11.


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it might have embraced both kindreds, but this is much less likely). Inits historical context, the reference is very likely to have been to CenélnGabráin.

The date of the Book of Armagh lies in the middle of what is, in ourother sources, the most obscure period in the history of what had beenDál Riata; indeed, the name ‘Dál Riata’ does not occur in the Irish annalsbetween 792 and 986.13 As Woolf notes (p. 62), it looks as if a latereditor had to fill out this section of the Dál Riatan list from the Pictishlist. Whether this is correct or not, the evidence of the Book of Armaghindicates that this problem arose from the state of the regnal list availableto later generations rather than from the disappearance or collapse ofCenél nGabráin itself. The latter remained important enough to deservespecial attention from the apostle of the Gaels both in the Notulae andthe Tripartite Life. To the question posed by Woolf (p. 96), ‘Is it possiblethat Cináed was a Pict?’, the answer has to be ‘Not unless the survivingevidence, both ninth-century and later, is wholly misleading’.14

What Patrick is made to say in the Tripartite Life reflects a situationthat cannot be much later than 808. It is part of a short dialogue betweenthe saint and Fergus mac Eirc:15

Fergus Mór mac Eirc said to Patrick: ‘If my brothers were to countme in when dividing their land, I would make an offering to you’;and Patrick offered that share to Bishop Olcán, namely AirtherMaige [the main episcopal church of the Irish portion of Dál Riata].Patrick said to Fergus: ‘Although your brothers do not think youimportant today, it is you who will be king; it will be from you thatkings will be descended till Doomsday in this land and (ruling)over Fortriu.’ And that was accomplished in the person of Áedánmac Gabráin who took Albu by force.

One should distinguish here between what Patrick is made to say andthe statement about the fulfilment of his prophecy. That the future gloryof Fergus’s descendants lay across the North Channel in Britain is verylikely to be reflected in the Notulae, since it was known that Dál Riatain Ireland was subject to serious invasion from Dál nAraidi from themid-seventh century.16 The presupposition behind what Patrick promises

13 The evidence of the Notulae and Tripartite Life is also significant for assessing thecase put forward by Dauvit Broun, ‘Pictish kings 761–839: integration with Dál Riata orseparate development?’, in The St Andrews Sarcophagus. A Pictish Masterpiece and itsInternational Connections, ed. Sally M. Foster (Dublin, 1998), 71–83.14 The proposal to make Cináed a Pict derives from Professor D. N. Dumville, TheChurches of North Britain in the First Viking-Age, Fifth Whithorn Lecture 1996(Whithorn, 1997), 35–6, and has been maintained by Broun, ‘Alba: Pictish homelandor Irish offshoot?’, 264–8.15 Bethu Phátraic, ed. Mulchrone, 97.16 Bethu Phátraic, ed. Mulchrone, 99.



to Fergus Mór is, however, that Fortriu was still the dominant powerin North Britain, a situation which, as we shall see, is unlikely to haveendured beyond the Viking defeat of the men of Fortriu in 839.17 On theother hand, the reference to Áedán mac Gabráin may have entered thetext later. Moreover, we cannot be sure whether Albu in this sentencereferred to what had been Pictland or, more probably, to something morelike the North Britain over which Óengus mac Forgusso had enjoyed anhegemony from at least 741 to 750.18

One of the striking features of the period up to the defeat ofFortriu by the Vikings in 839 is that the regnal succession practices inthe kingdom of the Picts had changed to the extent that a son couldsucceed a father.19 Scholars of an earlier generation, and also BenjaminHudson in this, were inclined to associate this change with growingGaelic influence on the kingdom of the Picts and even with a changeof dynasty.20 Both they and Woolf thus reject the testimony of what isthe most important source from within Alba, a source which claims thatCináed mac Alpín conquered Pictland. This is the chronicle which hasbeen called ‘The Scottish Chronicle’. Woolf, however, adopts the nameproposed by Professor Dumville, ‘The Chronicle of the Kings of Alba’,even though one reason why it is objectionable is noted.21 One of the

17 F. J. Byrne and Padraig Francis, ‘Two Lives of Saint Patrick’, Journal of the RoyalSociety of Antiquaries of Ireland 124 (1994), 5–117, at 7, detect a major chronologicalhorizon in the Tripartite Life in the first half of the ninth century, when the main substanceof the text assumed its final form, although there was subsequent minor updating and,probably, further translation from Latin into Irish. Broun, ‘Alba: Pictish homeland orIrish offshoot?’, 264–5, treats the evidence of the Tripartite Life as coming from the latertenth century, but without attending to the Notulae, to the argument of Byrne and Francis,or to the significance of the use of Fortriu.18 T. M. Charles-Edwards, ‘The Continuation of Bede, s.a. 750: high-kings, kings ofTara and “Bretwaldas”’, in Seanchas: Studies in Early and Medieval Irish Archaeology,History and Literature in Honour of Francis J. Byrne, ed. Alfred P. Smyth (Dublin, 1999),137–45.19 On this, see now Nicholas Evans, ‘Royal succession and kingship among the Picts’, IR59 (2008), 1–48, at 43–8.20 H. M. Chadwick, Early Scotland. The Picts, the Scots and the Welsh of SouthernScotland (Cambridge, 1949), 127–32; Anderson, Kings and Kingship, 188–95, and‘Dalriada and the creation of the kingdom of the Scots’, in Ireland in Early MediaevalEurope. Studies in Memory of Kathleen Hughes, ed. Dorothy Whitelock, RosamondMcKitterick and David Dumville (Cambridge, 1982), 106–32; John Bannerman, ‘TheScottish takeover of Pictland and the relics of Columba’, IR 48 (1997), 27–44, reprintedin Spes Scotorum, Hope of Scots. Saint Columba, Iona and Scotland, ed. Dauvit Brounand Thomas Owen Clancy (Edinburgh, 1999), 71–94; M. Miller, ‘The last century ofPictish succession’, Scottish Studies 23 (1979), 39–67; Benjamin T. Hudson, Kings ofCeltic Scotland (Westport, CT, 1994), 29–33.21 Dumville, The Churches of North Britain, 36; idem, ‘The Chronicle of the Kings ofAlba’, in Kings, Clerics and Chronicles in Scotland, 500–1297, ed. Simon Taylor (Dublin,2000), 73–86. For the objection, Woolf, From Pictland to Alba, 91–2.


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characteristics of this text, as we have seen, is that it regards the kingdomas Pictauia, ‘Pictland’, until the earlier part of the reign of Domnall macCausantín, who died in 900, but adopts the name Albania, ‘Alba’, veryearly in the reign of his successor. Even though the text as it was copied inthe fourteenth century is an explicit adherent of the claim that Cináed macAlpín gained power at the expense of the Picts, it does not use the latername of the kingdom until much the same date as our two external andcontemporary sources made their changes. The two titles of the chronicle,old and new, are thus both subject to the same objection, namely that theypass over this change c. 900 as if it never happened; but the new titleis worse than the old in that it makes an unjustified claim to a superioraccuracy. ‘The Chronicle of the Kings of Alba’ is also open to objectionon another front: the term Albania is only used once in the entire textas we have it. The term Scotti, on the other hand, is used ten times, andmoreover in the first reign as in the last. The older title, ‘The ScottishChronicle’, is thus on two counts a more accurate indication of the scopeof the text. It is unfortunate, therefore, that the new title was used in thisbook, and Scottish historians would do well to abandon it. The unity of thechronicle is, first, that it uses as a frame a list of kings from Cináed macAlpín (d. 858) to Cináed mac Maíl Cholaim (d. 995) and, secondly, thatits contents are markedly more king-centred than most contemporary Irishchronicles. It is, therefore, fair to call it a chronicle of kings, but it is – asWoolf notes (p. 119) – with one exception, a chronicle of the kings froma particular dynasty, Clann Chináeda, providing one includes not justCináed himself but also his brother, Domnall; and the dynasty is treatedas ‘Scottish’ even though the kingdom was first Pictavia and later Alba.

One of the merits of Woolf’s treatment of the period is that he usesthe Scottish Chronicle but does so with discrimination. The problem isthat we only have the text in a fourteenth-century copy and it is likelyto have been edited between its late tenth-century end-point and the dateof the manuscript. The Scottish Chronicle has the form of a plateful oftwelve sandwiches, some little, some larger. The two pieces of bread are,first, a statement of the form, ‘Cináed son of Alpín reigned for sixteenyears’, and, secondly, there is usually, but not always, a concludingsentence about the king’s death; for example, ‘He died in the palace ofCinnbelathoir on the Ides of April’. The combination of the name ofthe king, the length of his reign, and a brief record of his death, is afeature sometimes found in Irish and Scottish regnal lists: some containonly the name, some the name and the length of the reign, but othersinclude a third element, the death of the king, and even a fourth, the placeof his burial.22 The sandwich shape is, then, the norm in the Scottish

22 Compare Do Fhlaithesaib Hérend iar Cretem (The Book of Leinster, ed. O. J. Bergin,R. I. Best, M. A. O’Brien and A. O’Sullivan, 6 vols (Dublin, 1954–83), i, 94–9) where



Chronicle – sufficiently so, indeed, as to justify the inference that the textwas built up on the basis of just such an extended regnal list: the piecesof bread were to hand and then the filling was inserted. However, thatdoes not mean that the filling was, in itself, any later than the bread.We can see as much from a comparison with a similar regnal chronicle,Do Fhlaithesaib Hérend iar Cretem in the Book of Leinster. There, theframe was a regnal list of Tara (also found in other places), but thefilling was derived from a set of annals belonging to the Clonmacnoisversion of the Chronicle of Ireland. Although that version incorporatedsome later interpolations, the great bulk of the material comprised annalentries recorded close to the date of the event. Moreover, the regnal listof Tara – the frame – was derived from a secondary version incorporatinga significant error.23 Woolf is thus wrong to claim (p. 91) that ‘As soon aswe recognise that the basic chronological structure was a regnal list thenwe should immediately become aware of the fact that all the materialother than the kings’ names, patronymics (where supplied) and reignlengths are secondary and are not the result of contemporary annalisticrecording.’ The frame is just as much derived from something else (anormal regnal list) as is the filling.24

On the other hand, Woolf rightly notes that a feature of the ScottishChronicle is that it uses for the Vikings a Latinised form Danari, itselfderived from the Irish Danair; yet that name is never used in thecontemporary Irish annals until the late tenth century.25 The intendedreadership of the Scottish Chronicle appears to be pan-Gaelic andscholarly: this is strongly suggested by the way it sometimes anchorsits chronology by means of well-known Irish events: the deaths ofMáel Sechnaill mac Máele Ruanaid, Áed Findliath, and Cormac macCuilennáin. It is thus significant that the term used for the Vikings differsfrom contemporary practice in Ireland. Yet it is also significant that thedeaths of Áed Findliath, Niall Glúndub, and Flann Sinna are recorded in

the chronological frame comes first and the events within the frame second, for example(p. 95), ‘Mael Coba [reigned] for three years until he fell in the battle of Sliab Toad at thehands of Subne Mend. The battle of Odba in which Conall Lóeg Breg fell . . . ’23 T. M. Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland (Cambridge, 2000), 485.24 The opposite line, that the filling came first, only later being inserted into the frame,was taken by Hudson in his edition, ‘The Scottish Chronicle’, Scottish Historical Review[SHR] 77 (1998), 129–61, at 133–7, who started with annals, which he attributed toDunkeld up to the mid-tenth century and subsequently further east, probably St Andrews.Dauvit Broun’s statement (‘Alba: Pictish homeland or Irish offshoot?’, 237 n. 10, ‘Albaas “Britain”’, 89 n. 4; similarly ‘Alba: Pictish homeland or Irish offshoot?’, 263 n. 96,‘Alba as “Britain”’, 96 n. 89) that Hudson failed to distinguish between the existing textand its sources, is unfair.25 The Annals of Ulster (to AD 1131), ed. Seán Mac Airt and Gearóid Mac Niocaill(Dublin, 1983) [hereafter AU] 986. 2, 3; 987. 1, 3; 990. 1. On these Danari, see Woolf,From Pictland to Alba, 94, 217–18.


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the way contemporary Irish annals recorded them, not in the way MiddleIrish historians usually did so. In Ireland, compilers of regnal lists of Tarawere faced with a superfluity of kings bearing the same names. CenélnÉogain posed particular problems, since its kings tended to be calledeither Áed mac Néill or Niall mac Áeda. Hence epithets were widelyused: Niall Frossach was distinguished from Niall Caille and from NiallGlúndub; Áed Allán was distinguished from Áed Oirdnide and fromÁed Findliath. These were retrospective names: Niall Caille acquired hisepithet from the River Calann in which he was drowned. The Irish annalsin their original state, however, called both Niall Caille and Niall Glúndubsimply Niall mac Áeda, and similarly both Áed Oirdnide and ÁedFindliath were called Áed mac Néill. The Scottish Chronicle agrees withthe annals against the Middle Irish regnal lists: in the reigns of Constantínmac Cináeda and Eochaid son of Rhun Áed Findliath is Aed filius Niel; inthat of Constantín mac Áeda Niall Glúndub is Niall filius Ede and likewiseFlann Sinna is Flann filius Mael Sechnaill (MS: Sethnaill).

It may even be possible to defend the use of Danari. Woolf notes theuse of Dene by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle but argues that, if Englishnaming practices were influencing the Scottish Chronicle, one wouldexpect Dani rather than Danari. Yet, if the Scottish Chronicle were alsoinfluenced by being composed by clerics who were Gaelic in speech, asseems very likely, Danari would be the natural Latin form to choose.

Woolf’s preferred period when the kingship became definitelyGaelic in political stance is, as we have noted, the reign of Giric macDúngaile. The main basis for this suggestion is supplied by two sources.The first is a sentence in the Scottish Chronicle’s account of the reign ofDomnall mac Alpín, 858 × 862:26

In his time the Goedeli together with their king established therights and laws of Áed son of Eochaid at Forteviot.

The second is the entry on Giric mac Dúngaile (878?–889?) in a familyof regnal lists:27

Áed mac Cináeda was killed in battle in Strathalun by Girig sonof Dúngal and he was buried on the island of Iona. Girig macDúngaile reigned for twelve years and died at Dún Duirn and wasburied on the island of Iona. He subjugated to himself the whole ofIreland and almost the whole of Anglia; and he was the first whogranted liberty to the Scottish Church, which was under servitudeup to that time in accordance with the custom and habits of thePicts.

26 Hudson, ‘The Scottish Chronicle’, 148 (text), 153 (translation); Anderson, Kings andKingship, 250.27 Anderson, Kings and Kingship, 267 and cf. 49–50.



Woolf sees the first item as evidence for a separate Gaelic people withtheir own king within the kingdom of the Picts: Domnall mac Alpínmight have been of Gaelic descent, but his kingship was Pictish; he wasnot ‘king of the Gaels’. Áed mac Echdach, however, is likely to be theking of Dál Riata who died in 778, Áed Finn mac Echdach. One theoryabout what may have happened is that an edict (rechtge, cáin) enacted byÁed was re-enacted about a century later, no longer in Dál Riata but inForteviot in Strathearn, a royal palace in the heart of Pictavia.28 Woolf’ssuggestion is that while Cináed mac Alpín ‘may well have been king ofDál Riata as well as king of the Picts there is no reason to assume thatDomnall would have succeeded to both kingships’ (p. 105). Furthermore,he also suggests that ‘the rights and laws of Áed mac Echdach’ werethe conditions on which Dál Riata accepted submission to the king ofthe Picts. If this were so, the subjection would be being renewed by theGaels and their king, but with this difference, that the submission wasmade in Southern Pictland, at Forteviot, that is, at Domnall’s own palace.It would refer to some such text as those that survive for the Airgiallaand the Munster kingdoms in Ireland. The real meaning of the sentencewould be then very different from how, given the context, it must havebeen understood by the readers of the Scottish Chronicle once that hadattained something like its present form. For them, a Gaelic politicaland military dominance was already securely in place in Pictavia, sothat it would be inconceivable that they would take it as representing thesubjection of the Gaels to the Picts. Yet, since the Scottish Chronicle mayembody a Gaelicising edition of material that was, in origin, less partisan,it is permissible to suggest meanings for particular passages incompatiblewith their present contexts.

With this idea of a Gaelic subjection to a king of the Picts in mind,however, we can consider Girig mac Dúngaile: he is said by the regnallists to have killed his predecessor, another Áed, Áed mac Cináeda; andthere is no evidence that Girig belonged to Clann Chináeda, so thathis reign appears to have been an intermission in their long period ofpower. In the Scottish Chronicle he is not deemed king but only foster-son to Eochaid son of Rhun (of the royal kindred of Dumbarton andStrathclyde) and his king-maker.29 One attraction of thinking that thekingdom might have been transformed into Alba by Girig could be hisrelationship to Eochaid son of Rhun: as Professor Broun has shown,Alba was of fluctuating territorial extent even after its fundamental

28 T. M. Charles-Edwards, The Early Medieval Gaelic Lawyer, Quiggin Pamphlets on theSources of Mediaeval Gaelic History 4 (Cambridge, 1999), 59.29 Ordinator (Hudson, ‘The Scottish Chronicle’, 149; Anderson, Kings and Kingship,251) for which cf. oirdnithir in Críth Gablach, ed. D. A. Binchy (Dublin, 1941), line 494,and the role ascribed to Maine mac Néill, Bethu Phátraic, ed. Mulchrone, lines 961–2.


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meaning had shifted from ‘Britain’, perhaps via ‘North Britain’, to‘Scotia’.30

Again, one might appeal to work by Professor Herbert, according towhich territorial terms such as Ériu and Albu (later Alba) gained favourin the ninth century because, in the Viking era, it was necessary for majorkings to appeal to the loyalty of more than one ethnic group.31 Alba thushad the potential to include the Britons of the new Strathclyde createdafter the siege of Dumbarton in 870 as well as the Picts and Gaels of theformer Pictavia; and, if that were the case, Eochaid son of Rhun mighteven have been the overlord for a time of this new Alba, even thoughhis base remained Strathclyde. So the ruler of what would become Scotiawould have been Girig, even though he, as ordinator, elevated Eochaid tohis new status as overlord of Alba. The apparently fanciful statement inthe regnal list, ‘He (Girig) subjugated to himself the whole of Ireland andalmost the whole of Anglia; and he was the first who granted liberty to theScottish Church, which was under servitude up to that time in accordancewith the custom and habits of the Picts’, might be based on this conceptof an Alba that could include Gaels, Picts, English (from the northernparts of Northumbria), and Britons of Strathclyde. The idea of such agrouping together of northern peoples might have been a response, over-ambitious no doubt, to two critical events, the battle in 867 in which theVikings defeated the Northumbrian kings at York and the siege in whichthe Viking kings, Amlaíb and Ímar, took Dumbarton in 870, and returnedto Dublin in 871 with a vast train of captives, ‘English and Britons andPicts’.32 The territorial extent of Girig’s power, according to the regnallist, would then reflect what, in reality, was not a series of conquests, buta series of alliances against the Vikings. While the two persons, Eochaidand Girig, who, perhaps, created this aspirational political constructionperished together, their ambition lived on in the very name Alba, a termfor North Britain that harked back to the days when Unust son of Wurgustshared an overlordship over all Britain with his southern ally, Æthelbald,king of Mercia.

Woolf, it must be emphasised, does not go this far; and, indeed,there are weaknesses in this speculation that render it dubious. First, itis far from clear that ‘the Gaels with their king’ is to be understood as

30 Dauvit Broun, ‘The origin of Scottish identity’, in Nations, Nationalism and Patriotismin the European Past, ed. Claus Bjørn, Alexander Grant and Keith J. Stringer(Copenhagen, 1994), 35–55, esp. 46–7. Similarly, T. F. O’Rahilly, Early Irish Historyand Mythology (Dublin, 1946), 387.31 Máire Herbert, ‘Sea-divided Gaels? Constructing relationships between Irish and Scotsc. 800–1169’, in Britain and Ireland 900–1300, ed. Brendan Smith (Cambridge, 1999),87–97; eadem, ‘Rí Éirenn, Rí Alban: kingship and identity in the ninth and tenthcenturies’, in Kings, Clerics and Chronicles, ed. Taylor, 62–72.32 AU 867, 870, 871.



referring to a king other than Domnall mac Alpín. A natural response tothis sentence in its context would be to take it as another example of thosedescriptions of law-making that emphasise a consensus between king andpeople in the making of law, a law that is, very often, not the law of all theking’s subjects but of the dominant ethnic group: the Franks in Gaul or theLombards in the Lombard kingdom or the West Saxons in Ine’s kingdom.Some descriptions highlight the role of the king, some give more weightto that of the people, as in the prologue to the law of Wihtred, king ofKent. Yet others put them together, as in the edicts of Childebert II, kingof the Franks, where the one edict is both a royal decree and an agreementbetween the king and his leudes.33 As we have seen above, some suchunderstanding of the sentence must be what it meant in its present context:there, the Gaels were already understood to be the dominant group in thekingdom of the Picts, just as the Franks had been dominant in a kingdomthat comprised both Francia and Romania.

Secondly, an uncomfortable feature of the theory is that, on theone hand, it envisages an attempt to form an alliance among the oldpeoples of North Britain, northern Alba, against the Vikings but also asuppression of the power of one such old people, the Picts, within whathad been Pictavia. Again, an appeal to a common Christianity against ‘theheathens’ might well involve a liberation of the Church from oppressivedues, but that should not have been portrayed as being directed againstjust one people’s sins, a Pictish oppression of their own Church.34

Thirdly, the notion that Cináed was ruler both of the Picts and of theGaels but was succeeded by two rulers, his brother Domnall for the Pictsand an unnamed person for the Gaels, needs to be interrogated further. Itwould be easier to accept if the territories were distinct, as Edgar becameking of Mercia while his brother, Eadwig, remained as king of Wessex.Yet, as we shall see, there is reason to think that Gaels were settled inPictland by this date. It would also be easier if, as in the English example,the two rulers were kinsmen; yet there is nothing to suggest that a memberof Domnall’s kindred ruled the Gaels. Finally, the Scottish Chronicle usesthe term Pictauia in the next reign, that of Domnall mac Custantín. As hasbeen noted, the change of name seems to have occurred during rather thanbefore Domnall’s reign.35

33 Pactus Legis Salicae, ed. Karl August Eckhardt, MGH, Legum Sectio I, iv. 1 (Hanover,1962), 267, ‘Postea uero in sequenti conuenit una cum leudis nostris: Decreuimus, ut . . . ’34 Compare Alcuin’s use of Gildas, Dorothy Whitelock, English Historical Documents,c. 500–1042, 2nd edn (London, 1979), no. 193 = Stephen Allott, Alcuin of York, c. AD

732 to 804 – His Life and Letters (York, 1974), no. 12 = Epistolae Karolini Aevi, ii, ed. E.Dümmler, MGH Epistolae, iv (Berlin, 1895), no. 16.35 Dumville, The Churches of North Britain, 36 n. 106; Dauvit Broun, ‘Dunkeld and theorigin of Scottish identity’, in Spes Scotorum, ed. Broun and Clancy, 95–111, at 103 n. 35.


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One of Woolf’s major contributions to the early history of Scotlandhas been a convincing argument that the name Fortriu was used ofPictland north of the Mounth.36 The Mounth seems to be what the Englishcalled the Wertermoras, the ‘Moors of Fortriu’, a name taken from thepeople living to the north.37 This becomes important for the presentbook when he is discussing the division between two branches of ClannChináeda, descended respectively from his two sons, Constantín and Áed.The kingship alternated between these two branches in a manner wellknown from some Irish kingdoms, such as Leinster.38 Woolf argues (pp.223–5) that the branch of Clann Chináeda descended from Áed was basedin Fortriu, whereas that descended from Constantín was based to the southof the Mounth. The problem with this theory is that it would produce twomisfits: first, between the dynasty and the scope of the regnal chronicle,which, as we have seen, is a chronicle of Clann Chináeda as a whole andyet concentrates on the area south of the Mounth; and secondly betweenthe dynasty and the royal circuit as represented by Woolf’s Map 5.1 (p.200). The royal circuit, like the Chronicle, presents a dynasty whose base,irrespective of which branch was currently in power, was south of theMounth.

If one were to take the view that both branches were based in whathad been southern Pictland, the change ‘from Pictland to Alba’ wouldassume a different aspect. When Constantín son of Fergus died in 820,after a long reign, he was entitled by the Annals of Ulster ‘king ofFortriu’; and the same title was given to his brother Óengus in his obitin 834. Even more importantly, the devastating defeat inflicted by theVikings in 839 was specifically at the expense of the men of Fortriu;and their leaders killed in the battle included someone with a Gaelicname, Áed mac Boantai – who was included among the kings of Albain the ‘Synchronisms of Irish Kings’.39 Constantín’s power, althoughbased in Fortriu, had extended over southern Pictland, as demonstratedby the inscription on the Dupplin Cross naming the king; the cross was

36 Alex Woolf, ‘Dún Nechtain, Fortriu and the geography of the Picts’, SHR 85 (2006),182–201.37 Crucial is Anglo-Saxon Chronicle E 565 þone wærteres be norðum morum togetherwith Simeon of Durham’s Wertermorum.38 It is not true to claim that the alternation between Cenél nÉogain and Cland Cholmáinwas ‘the only well-established case of a regular alternation of lines in the kingship’ asclaimed by Woolf, ‘The “Moray Question” and the kingship of Alba in the tenth andeleventh centuries’, SHR 79 (2000), 145–64, at 152. A classic case, as shown by MacNeill, is that of the branches of Síl mBrain, Uí Muiredaig, Uí Fháeláin, and Uí Dúnchada,in Leinster between the eighth and the eleventh centuries.39 Since the name Boantae was derived from Boand, the name of the River Boyne, it isGaelic rather than merely Gaelicised, as were the majority of Pictish names in the Irishannals; Thurneysen, ‘Synchronismen’, 91.



apparently placed to mark the boundary of land attached to the royalpalace of Forteviot in Strathearn. His power thus exemplified, in the lateeighth and early ninth centuries what Woolf has called ‘the Verturianhegemony’. As Woolf notes, the inscription on the Dupplin Cross usesa form of Gaelic orthography, but fails to give the king’s father the properGaelic genitive: it was not composed by a Gaelic speaker even though itbetrays strong Gaelic influence.40 From the time of Cináed mac Alpín,however, Forteviot was a major centre of his dynasty’s power, part ofthe royal circuit in southern Pictland, later southern Alba. There is anargument, therefore, for seeing the change ‘from Pictland to Alba’ asbeing from a ‘Verturian hegemony’ to one based to the south of theMounth. It was also a shift from a Pictish dynasty strongly influenced byGaelic culture to one that claimed a Gaelic origin in Kintyre, the formerhomeland of Cenél nGabráin.

If the rígrad, ‘the royals’, claimed an origin in Kintyre, others didlikewise. Woolf (pp. 226–8) uses a genealogical text that, followingBroun, he ascribes to the reign of Máel Coluim mac Cináeda, 1005–34,supplemented by other evidence, to set out the origins then claimed by themen of Alba: ‘the men of Fife’ were said to derive from Conall Cerr, ason of Eochaid Buide (king of Dál Riata, died c. 629), and the Gabránaig,probably referring to the men of Gowrie, from another son, Fergus Goll.41

Similarly, the men of Strathearn claimed descent from another of ‘the fourkindreds of Dál Riata’, Cenél Comgaill;42 and the name of the province ofAngus, Óengus, may well stem from a third ‘kindred of Dál Riata’, CenélnÓengusa. What is critical here is not the genetic truth of these claims buttheir significance in the tenth and eleventh centuries. What they assert isthat the elite in several provinces of Alba south of the Mounth descended

40 Katherine Forsyth, ‘The inscription on the Dupplin Cross’, in From the Isles of theNorth. Early Medieval Art in Ireland and Britain, ed. Cormac Bourke (Belfast, 1995),237–44.41 The Book of Lecan, ed. Kathleen Mulchrone (Dublin, 1937), 109 vb 34–110 rb 13,The Book of Ballymote, ed. Robert Atkinson (Dublin, 1887), 148 c 41–149 b 3. Broun’sargument, ‘Alba: Pictish homeland or Irish offshoot?’, 266, that the use of Gabránaigimplies that Clann Chináeda was held not to belong to Cenél nGabráin neglects suchIrish parallels as the emergence of the Uí Chonchobair as the rígrad of the province ofConnaught from within Síl Muiredaig, and the latter from within Uí Bríuin, leaving thepossibility of kings of Síl Muiredaig and of Uí Bríuin alongside Ua Conchobair kingsof the Connachta (e.g. Chronicum Scotorum, ed. W. M. Hennessy (London, 1866), s.aa.992, 1114; The Annals of Tigernach, ed. Whitley Stokes (repr. Felinfach, 1993), 1034,1092, 1100; Diarmuid Ó Murchadha, The Annals of Tigernach: Index of Names, IrishTexts Society, Subsidiary Series 6 (London, 1997), 180, 190).42 Cf. Cuillennros hi Sraith Erenn i nComgellaibh eter Sliabh nOc[h]el ocus MurnGiudan, ‘Culross in Strathearn among the Comgaill between the Ochils and the Firthof Forth’: Corpus Genealogiarum Sanctorum Hiberniae, ed. Padraig Ó Riain (Dublin,1985), §722. 106.


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from cadet branches of the ruling dynasty of Dál Riata that had beenexcluded from the kingship: Clann Chináeda was the rígrad, but they, byvirtue of their kinship with the kings, were the noble kindreds of Alba.

One reason why Woolf prefers to situate the branch of ClannChináeda descended from Áed mac Cináeda (Clann Áeda) in Moray wasthat, by doing so, he makes the problem of Moray easier.43 In the twelfth-century genealogies in Rawlinson B 502 and the Book of Leinster, therulers of Moray in the eleventh century are traced back to Cenél Loairn,yet another of ‘the four kindreds of Dál Riata’. As Woolf has shown,the pedigree these Irish collections supply leaps with utter disregard ofchronology from the eleventh century to two distinct lines of descentending in the first half of the eighth century.44 Woolf’s explanation isthat the fall of the kindred of Áed mac Cináeda, rulers of Moray in thetenth century, allowed a new local dynasty to emerge; and that this localdynasty, perhaps through a female link, inherited Clann Áeda’s claimsto the kingship of Alba. At the beginning of the eleventh century, as wehave seen, major provincial families in Alba south of the Mounth wereclaiming descent from branches of Dál Riata. The new rulers of Moraydid likewise, choosing the kindred that had held the kingship of Dál Riatafor much of the early eighth century, before, in 741, Óengus mac Forgussosubmerged Dál Riata in his northern imperium.

Woolf offers evidence that relations between the kindred ofConstantine mac Cináeda and Moray were often hostile, whereas thereis no such evidence for the kindred of Áed. Yet, negative evidence countsfor little: Clann Chustantín may have been hostile to the men of Moray,but that does not show that Clann Áeda was based there. There is alsoevidence for Clann Áeda’s interest in the lands south of the Mounth:not only does Custantín mac Áeda appear to have become a monk at StAndrews, but his son, Ildulb, and his grandson, Culén, may have beenburied there.45 Among those killed when Dub defeated Culén were anabbot of Dunkeld and a ‘satrap’ of Atholl;46 if the usual convention in theIrish annals were being used here, the two named among the dead wouldhave been on the side of the defeated. That would then be evidence forClann Áeda’s presence south of the Mounth.

Another response would be to allow that there may be someconnection between Cenél Loairn and the eleventh-century rulers of

43 A fuller discussion is in Woolf, ‘The “Moray Question” and the kingship of Alba’,145–64.44 Ibid., 148–9. The problem was already seen by Chadwick, Early Scotland, 36.45 The Prophecy of Berchán, ed. and trans. Benjamin T. Hudson (Westport, CT, 1996),87 (stanza 156), 88 (stanzas 163, 168). Cf. Broun, ‘Dunkeld and the origin of Scottishidentity’, 109.46 Hudson, ‘Scottish Chronicle’, 151; Anderson, Kings and Kingship, 252.



Moray, even though the pedigree only succeeds in revealing that theprecise genealogical link was unknown. The portion of Dál Riata mostimmediately open to attack and domination from Fortriu through theGreat Glen was the north, namely Lorne, the home territory of CenélLoairn.47 Moreover, Thomas Clancy has noted that Walahfrid Strabo’spoem on the martyrdom of Blathmac regards Iona as being part ofPictland, though at an earlier date the neighbouring island of Mull veryprobably belonged to Cenél Loairn.48 If, then, Iona was reckoned to liewithin Pictland in the early ninth century, the modern Lorne was veryprobably subsumed into Fortriu, then the dominant Pictish kingdom.Some annal entries help to confirm the accuracy of Walahfrid Strabo’splacing of Iona in Pictland; indeed, they suggest that the Dál Riatanterritories incorporated into Pictland may even have stretched as far asKintyre, the homeland of Cenél nGabráin. According to the Annals ofUlster, the battle between Conall mac Taidg and Constantín in 789 wasinter Pictos, between two groups of Picts. Conall would be killed inKintyre in 807, while Constantín would die as king of Fortriu in 820; yetConall is probably one of ‘the two Conalls’ recorded in the Synchronismsof Irish Kings.49 If, then, Conall belonged to the old ruling kindredof Kintyre, it would seem as if the great men of Dál Riata could beconsidered to be Picts, presumably as an effect of the Pictish dominationof their kingdom. Yet Conall may have been a Pict who first took refuge,and later gained power, in Kintyre. Indeed, he may be the Canaul filiusTang of one version of the Pictish regnal list, so that he would firsthave ruled in Pictland and later in Dál Riata.50 The incorporation of DálRiata within Fortriu had been inaugurated by ‘the hammering of the DálRiatai by Óengus son of Forggus’ recorded in the Chronicle of Irelandfor 741 and had endured for much of the subsequent century. When,in 839, the Vikings slew the leading men of Fortriu in battle, the threenamed in the Annals of Ulster were Éuganán son of Óengus, Bran sonof Óengus, and Áed son of Boantae. The first corresponds to Uuen filiusUnuist of the Pictish Regnal Lists, while Áed son of Boantae, as we haveseen, is included among the kings of Alba in the Synchronisms of Irish

47 Hudson, Kings of Celtic Scotland, 128.48 Thomas Owen Clancy, ‘Iona in the kingdom of the Picts: a note’, IR 55 (2004), 73–6;Bannerman, Studies on the History of Dalriada, 112–16. For a suggestion as to who mighthave been Walahfrid Strabo’s informant, see Clancy, ‘Diarmait sapientissimus: the careerof Diarmait, dalta Daigre, abbot of Iona’, Peritia 17–18 (2003–4), 228–9; Wattenbach-Levison, Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen im Mittelalter: Vorzeit und Karolinger, rev. byHeinz Löwe, vi (Weimar, 1990), 782–3.49 Thurneysen, ‘Synchronismen’, 90–1.50 Anderson, Kings and Kingship, 263. 8; cf. Lebor Bretnach, ed. A. G. Van Hamel, 86,§52. The Poppleton version, ibid., 249. 6, has Tar’la for Tang; for Marjorie Anderson’scomments, see Kings and Kingship, 191, 192.


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Kings.51 It appears as if Áed mac Boantai may have been both a king inDál Riata and a great man among ‘the Men of Fortriu’. Fortriu, by thatperiod, was, through its own expansion, a mixed kingdom, both Pictishand Gaelic. With this background in the second half of the eighth centuryand the first half of the ninth, it is then hardly surprising that Cináed andhis sons should have been at once a Gaelic dynasty from Kintyre andkings of the Picts.

Even earlier there had been, as Chadwick and others have noted,Gaelic settlement in Pictland.52 The text known as ‘Conall Corc and theCorco Loígde’ was composed, very probably, c. 700 at the monasteryof Cloyne (East Co. Cork).53 It was opposed to the claims of theÉoganacht Locha Léin, whom it calls the Uí Choirpri Lóchra. It alsoknows, however, of a branch of the Uí Choirpri in Pictland. This evidenceis especially significant because it is early, can be ascribed to a particularmonastery, and has no interest in advancing the claims of the dynastyin question – indeed, quite the reverse. The associations between Gaelicsettlement in Pictland and West Munster thus go back before Óengus macForggusso, who was later said to have belonged to the Éoganacht MaigeGerginn, a branch of the Munster Éoganachta related to Éoganacht LochaLéin (alias Uí Choirpri Lóchra) but settled in eastern Pictland long beforethe days of Cináed mac Alpín.54

In the history of medieval Scotland before the Wars of Independence,the relationship between kingdom, ethnicity and culture seems to havevaried widely. The bewildering relationship between Cumbria andGalloway in the eleventh and twelfth centuries is an extreme case. On theone hand there is the division of dioceses: a large twelfth-century dioceseof Glasgow that encompassed a land of several nations and languagesalongside a smaller diocese of Whithorn. On the other hand, David I(who had been prince of Cumbria) made a grant, addressed to ‘both

51 Anderson, Kings and Kingship, 193, 249; Thurneysen, ‘Synchronismen’, 91.52 Chadwick, Early Scotland, 96.53 ‘Conall Corc and the Corco Luigde’, ed. Kuno Meyer, in O. J. Bergin et al., Anecdotafrom Irish Manuscripts 3 (Halle, 1910), 57–63, at 59. 12; trans. Vernam Hull, Proceedingsof the Modern Language Association of America 62 (1947), 887–909, at 897. For theprobability that Bruide (d. 706) and Nechtan (defeated 729), sons of Der Ilei, wereof Cenél Comgaill on their father’s side, but with a Pictish mother, namely Der Ilei,see Thomas Owen Clancy, ‘Philosopher-king: Nechtan mac Der-Ilei’, SHR 82 (2004),125–49, at 130–3.54 Corpus Genealogiarum Hiberniae, ed. M. A. O’Brien (Dublin, 1962), 196; discussedby Broun, ‘Alba: Pictish homeland or Irish offshoot’, 271–3, developing ideas inKatherine Forsyth, ‘The Ogham Inscriptions of Scotland: An Edited Corpus’ (HarvardUniversity, unpublished PhD thesis, 1996), 48–50, but without reference to the earliertext, ‘Conall Corc and the Corco Loígde’. For the significance of denying the titleÉoganacht, see Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland, 536–7.



Gawenses and Englishmen and Scots’, giving ‘to God and to the churchof St Kentigern of Glasgow all the tithe of my cáin, in cattle and pigs,from Strathgriff and Cunningham, and from Kyle and from Carrick, eachyear except when I myself shall come there making my circuit and eatingmy cáin there’.55 The grant is witnessed by, among others, Fergus ofGalloway. Significant here is the address to the Gawenses, presumablyfor Galwenses ‘Galwegians’: it is probably put first because the landsin question were considered to be within Galloway; yet almost all thisterritory belonged to the diocese of Glasgow.56 Some kingdoms in NorthBritain were relatively uniform in language; and that must suggest, as aminimum, that the elites of those kingdoms had come to consider useof a particular language as a prerequisite of high status. Others weremultilingual and allowed people of different ethnic affiliation to gain entryinto the ruling elite. Pictland in the eighth and ninth centuries appears tohave been like Galloway and Cumbria in the twelfth, but Alba from thetenth century was more like, say, Northumbria in the eighth. Without suchan assumption – that Gaelic became a prerequisite for entry into the eliteof Alba – it is not easy to explain why Pictish should have died.

Woolf has an admittedly speculative account of linguisticrelationships in North Britain (pp. 322–40). It was noticed by HeinrichWagner among others that some features of modern Scots Gaelicresemble Welsh rather than Irish: an example would be the use of thesynthetic present tense as a future.57 On the basis of such observationsWoolf concludes that ‘the Gaelic and British dialects of Albania probablyinfluenced each other enormously during the course of the tenth centuryand probably began to converge into a single Albanian language’ (p. 340).This Albanian language is held to have coexisted with ‘purer forms ofGaelic’. ‘Albanian’ was spoken by the mass of the population in EasternScotland but the purer Gaelic was the language of cultural prestige andwas also reinforced from the west and from Ireland. A fundamentaldifficulty here is to know whether what is envisaged is a language hithertounknown to history, ‘Albanian’ in the sense of the language most widelyspoken in Alba in the tenth century and surviving into the twelfth, a fusionof two earlier languages, or simply an ‘impure’ form of Gaelic, most ofwhose impurities are to be ascribed to Pictish influence. With the secondone need not, in general, quarrel; indeed, as is well known, Old Irish was astandard language behind which may lie concealed local dialects. Acrossits full geographical range, Irish is likely to have had, at various dates,

55 The Charters of David I, ed. G. W. S. Barrow (Woodbridge, 1999), no. 57.56 For the distinction between the smaller and larger Galloway, see G. W. S. Barrow,Regesta Regum Scottorum i The Acts of Malcolm IV (Edinburgh, 1960), 38–9.57 Heinrich Wagner, Das Verbum in den Sprachen der britischen Inseln: ein Beiträge zurgeographischen Typologie des Verbums (Tübingen, 1959), 83–8.


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other substratum influences than those provided by Pictish.58 If we onlyknew everything about the history of Gaelic (Irish) that we might wish,the Gaelic of Alba might well not seem outstandingly ‘impure’. Talk ofan Albanian language distinct from Gaelic, therefore, goes far beyond theevidence.

The change from a North Britain beyond Forth and Loch Lomonddivided between a Pictish east and north and a Gaelic west to a GaelicAlba is most unlikely to have been accomplished in one go. Six stagesmay be distinguished:

(1) Before the triumph of the Pictish king, Unust or Óengus, overDál Riata in 741 there was already elite Gaelic settlement withinPictland, as indicated by the example of the sons of Der Ilei,59 byepigraphic evidence, and by the mention, c. 700, of an Uí Choirpriamong the Pictish people.

(2) The triumph of Unust led to the incorporation of Dál Riata intoPictland – one of the developments that led to Unust becoming,as ally of Æthelbald of Mercia, joint-king of Britain, Albu. Forgeographical reasons as well as the power of Fortriu, the latterwas the Pictish kingdom of which Dál Riata was normally a part.This situation probably continued, though perhaps with gaps, untilthe Viking defeat of Fortriu in 839. Crucially, the elite of Fortriuaccommodated Gaelic alongside Pictish.

(3) The reign of Cináed mac Alpín (842–58) saw a change of dynastybut not of the identity of the kingdom as Pictish. On the evidence ofthe Pictish regnal lists, the change from Bred to Cináed mac Alpínalso marked a change from Pictish to Gaelic in the recording of thenames of the kings who ruled the Picts. Moreover, Clann Chináedatraced its origins back to Kintyre, the homeland of Cenél nGabráin.It is likely that the main base of Clann Chináeda was south of theMounth, not in Fortriu. Cináed’s accession was thus much moresignificant than recent scholarship has claimed.

(4) About AD 900 the name of the kingdom changed. This was markedby internal and external sources at much the same time:

Scottish Chronicle: from Pictavia to AlbaChronicle of Ireland: from Picts to AlbaAnglo-Saxon Chronicle: from Peohtas to Scottas and

Scotland.

58 Peter Schrijver, ‘Varia V: Non-Indo-European surviving in Ireland in the firstmillennium’, Ériu 51 (2000), 195–9; idem, ‘Varia I: More on Non-Indo-Europeansurviving in Ireland in the first millennium’, Ériu 55 (2005), 137–44.59 See above n. 53.



In all three cases the movement was away from ‘Pictland’ or ‘Picts’;the evidence of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle suggests that Alba was,in its elite, predominantly ‘Scottish’, namely Gaelic.

(5) By about AD 1000 local elites in the provinces of Alba, such as ‘theMen of Fife’, were claiming an origin in seventh-century Dál Riata.To judge by (6) this suggests that Gaelic had become an entrancerequirement for inclusion in the elite.

(6) By the twelfth century Pictish had apparently died out; and theinherited language of government in Alba, when it was not Latin,was Gaelic, several fundamental concepts, such as cáin, coinnmed,sluagad, being shared with contemporary Irish kingdoms. But bythis stage the elite was again being recruited both from those whodid not speak Gaelic and from those who did. The relationship of thekingdom to ethnicity now more closely resembled that of Pictlandin the eighth and early ninth centuries, or Cumbria in the tenth andeleventh, than it did Alba from c. 900 to c. 1100.

Of these six stages, (1) and (6) lie outside the chronological rangeof Woolf’s From Pictland to Alba; as for (2) to (5) the interpretationjust given largely agrees with that proposed by Woolf, except that bothbranches of Clann Chináeda are here thought to have been based southof the Mounth, Giric mac Dúngaile is not given so prominent a role, thereign of Cináed mac Alpín has much of its traditional significance, andthe likely linguistic history is understood quite differently.

None of these differences, whether it is a contrast of emphasis orof major substance, detracts in the slightest from one’s admiration forWoolf’s achievement. The balance of his approach is matched by thequality of his prose: it has an easy pace, a clarity of structure and the toneof civilised conversation. It is hard to think of how such a survey couldbe better done, given the difficulties of the evidence and the complexityof the changes in North Britain from the eighth to the eleventh century.

T. M. CHARLES-EDWARDS IS JESUS PROFESSOR OF CELTIC AT THE

UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD.