Caledonia & Dalriada
By the early 7th century there was a unified Pictish kingdom north of a line from
the Clyde to the
Forth rivers. The original inhabitants were Picts. To the south of the Picts,
Scottish invaders from Ireland had established the kingdom of Dalriada in the
5th century. They were the descendants of the
Caledonii and other tribes named by Roman historians or found on the map
of Ptolemy. The hillforts that stretched from the North
York Moors to the Scottish highlands in the north from the Middle Iron Age
by individual family groups likely inhabited these new fortified farmsteads, linked
together with their neighbours through intermarriage.
Tintagel or the South
Cadbury hill-fort, in 5th and 6th century repairs along Hadrian's
Wall at Whithorn in southwestern
Scotland (possibly the site of St. Ninian's
monastery through chance discoveries documenting the continuing urban occupation
at many Roman cities and an extensive villa-like structure at Wroxeter.
The ministries of Ninian, Patrick, Columba, and Augustine speeded up the process
of conversion to Christianity among the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon peoples. Ireland
remained independent of both Rome and the Anglo-Saxons throughout this period.
Southern Ireland accepts Roman order of Christianity.
The final union of Picts
and Scottish kingdom of Dalraida completed
by the marriage of the Scots/Irish king Kenneth
mac Alpin to a Pictish princess, only a yeare after Danish fleets attack and
conquer Norwegian settlement at Dublin.
The Romans referred to Scotland as Caledonia,
a name derived from the Pictish tribe Caledonii,
which fought Agricola at
Mons Graupius in 84 AD. Finally, when Kenneth MacAlpin usurped the dual throne
as King of Picts and Scots in 845 AD, he called the crown Rex Pictorum or "King
of Picts." However, by the beginning of the 10th century, his descendants changed
to "Rex Alban," which is then translated as "King of Scotland" or "King of Scots.
" In Middle Irish, known as such, as Mormaer.
The Romans referred to Scotland as Caledonia, a name derived from the Pictish
tribe Caledonii, which fought Agricola at Mons Graupius in 84 AD. Finally, when
Kenneth MacAlpin usurped the dual throne as King of Picts and Scots in 845 AD,
he called the crown Rex Pictorum or "King of Picts." However, by the beginning
of the 10th century, his descendants changed to "Rex Alban," which is then translated
as "King of Scotland" or "King of Scots. " In Middle Irish, known as such, as
Mormaer. In the west, Pictish presence
in Argyll must have disappeared quickly after the arrival of the Scots of Dalriada
around 500 A.D. In the north, Pictish influences reached as far north as the
islands went and stones have been found in nearly all of them. This land was defended
many times after the departure of Rome's legions. The Picts fought invasions by
the Scots in the west, the Britons and Angles in the south and the Vikings in
the north. Scots invasions further reduced Northumbria to an earldom stretching
from the Humber to the Tweed, and Northumbria was for a long time in territory
where sovereignty was disputed between the emerging kingdoms of England and Scotland.
The Dalriadic Scots
established a footing in the islands towards the beginning of the 6th century,
their success was short-lived, and the Picts regained power and kept it until
dispossessed by the Norsemen in the 9th century. Vikings having made the islands
the headquarters of their buccaneering expeditions (carried out indifferently
against their own Norway and the coasts and isles of Scotland), Harold
Harfagre ("Hairfair") subdued the rovers in 875 and annexed both
Orkney and Shetland to Norway.
In the 8th century, King Nechtan
IV of the Southern Picts
evicts monks of Iona
for refusing to accept Roman
order of Christianity; the English monk Ecgberct
goes to Iona and the Roman Easter is
celebrated there for the first time in 718. Supremacy of Irish church begins to
shift from Iona to Armagh.
Bishop Elbodug of Bangor begins introduction of Roman Easter into Wales.
In
the 7th century the Scots pushed their frontier far north, and a victorious Celtic
army came within a half-day march of the Pictish capital of Inverness
in the north before it was crushed. In the south, the Angles marched their Teutonic
armies north and held Pictish lands for thirty years before they were butchered
and sent fleeing south by a united Pictish army. Roman accounts of the Pictish
Wars as well as later accounts, it appears that the Pictish lands were essentially
north of the Forth-Clyde line, north
of the Antonine Wall. Roman pacification, and Celtic and Saxon migration from
the south would have erased any Pictish claims to people or lands south of the
wall.
During the 790s, the first Viking raids
on Northumbria by Danish vikings occured when Merfyn Vrych, descendent of
rulers of the Isle of Man, succeeds to
the kingdom of North Wales
and marries the sister of the king of Powys. Vikings made Northumbria rather wealthy
after pillaging it first, with a lucrative trade at Jórvík
that extended to the farthest reaches of Europe. Wales continues its resistance
to the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, but Wales declares submission to the West
Saxons in 828 and then to the Mercians
ca. 860. But the first Viking raid by Norwegian
vikings on Ireland in 795, at Lambey
occured before Turgeis comes
from Norway, conquers Armagh and sets up Viking
settlements in Anagassin, Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, Cork, and Limerick.
Finally taken prisoner by the King of Meath
Mael Saechlainn, and Irish resistance to Norwegian
settlements. Soon Danish vikings are also attacking France and the Low
Countries in Europe at the same time, the following decades.
Between
843 and 850 Kenneth I, king of Dalriada, established himself also as king of the
Picts, although how and why is not clear. The kingdom of Alba thus formed became
the kingdom of Scotland. In 930 Iceland
is first occupied by Norwegian vikings
following from Athelstan establishing a Roman Christian diocese in
Cornwall, marking final conversion of Welsh
and Cornish church to Roman order. After the regin of King Alfred, missionaries
like St. Dunstan were moving into the
Danelaw and establishing Christianity among the Danish
Viking settlers. Norsemen begin invading Northumbria from the north, coming
from Ireland, during a wane of Merica. King
Cearbhall of Leinster takes Dublin
back from the Viking “foreigners.” The Viking Rollo
(Ganga-Hrolf of the Heimskringla
and Roland of Le Chanson de Roland) establishes himself as Duke in Normandy. Normandy
secedes from France and becomes a kingdom in its own right. The Norwegian Rognvald
captures York from the Danes. In 920 he recognizes Edward as overlord of all of
Scotland, Northumbria, and the northern Welsh/Pictish kingdom of Strathclyde.
Before
Alfred is elected to the kingship of Wessex in 871, Danish
vikings conquer York and defeat the Northumbrian effort to retake it and then
to East Anglia. Later in 876, Halfdan distributed
the lands of Northumbria among the Danish Vikings. But the Danes eventually divide
Mercia for settlement (modern Yorkshire, Nottingham, Lincoln, Derby, and Leicester)
and partition East Anglia for Danelaw
settlement (Northampton, Huntingdon, Cambridge, Bedford, Norfolk, Suffolk,
Essex and even London for a short time.) The reign of King Alfred, who temporarily
brought many of the southern Anglo-Saxon tribes of the
weald into alliance. The Norse appear to have arrived in Cumbria
in 925AD and left a huge impression upon the toponymy of Cumbria. Many mountains,
rivers and valleys have Norse names, as attested by the abundance of the elements
fell, -ay and dale (Mickledore, Scafell, Rothay, Duddon, Langsleddale, Allerdale).
Many town and villages also contain Norse elements (Whitehaven, Ravenglass, Silloth,
Ulverston, Ambleside)
Bernicia became part of Northumbria,
and by 954 was overrun by the Danish kingdom
of York. Eirik Bloodaxe, wild and
exiled son of King Harald Harfargar (Hairfair)
of Norway, comes to Northumbria and takes the kingship and is said to have
entered Kvenland but Olaf Siggtrygsson and Eadred, brother and successor to Edmund
(d. 946), fight to regain control of Northumbria. Shortly afterwards Bernicia
came under a unified England, then in 1018 Malcolm
II brought the region as far as the River Tweed under Scottish rule. The province
of Britannia was a territory of the Votadini. The
Votadini and Picts were a people of the Iron Age. To what extent the native
population was replaced during the 600s is as unknown as their influence if at
all, to druidry and the four-fifths. Sub-Roman Britain in the culture of late
antiquity is known to other terms such as the Brythonic Age. The city of Newcastle
was founded by the Normans in 1080 to control the region by holding the strategically
important crossing point of the river Tyne.
St. Magnus Cathedral, Kirkwall is
Britain's most northerly cathedral. The first Bishop was William the Old, and
the diocese was under the authority of the Archbishop of Trondheim
in Norway. It was for Bishop William that the nearby Bishop's Palace was built.
St. Magnus' is also the only cathedral in Britain to have its own dungeon.
The
place names of a region or the language from Viking
occupation of Orkney, including the settlement at the Brough of Birsay are
near to runic inscriptions
or ancient sites before readings were replaced by the Latin alphabet in central
Europe and in Scandinavia, not til the late medieval period when futhark
also became a script. Sometimes a runic calendar, although a medieval
Swedish invention was read as an almanac on the mainland. Written with seven
runes of futhark, fifty-two times,
three additonal runes place at the dates at which the new moon is calculated to
appear in the nineteen yeare long moon cycle, hundreds of years after the Gaulish-Coligny
calendar , from its eclipses, cycles, climate predictions and ogham
similarity. It is as long as some natural period related to the motion of
the moon such as a phase. If there are 255 draconian months of an eclipse cycle,
computation of the date of Easter
is used by the Hebrew calendar so that in the ancient
Babylonian, Hebrew, and Attic calendars, a typical lunisolar calendar, most
years are lunar years of 12 months. There are also continental sources such as
the Gallic Chronicles that refer
to events in Britain during this period.
1, 2,
3, 4,
5, 6,