I'm Bruce Fummey. Now, if you follow this channel
then you know that I've been making a series of short videos on the peoples who made Scotland:
the Scots, the Britons,
the Angles, the Vikings
and today I face the most daunting episode
the Picts. The reason that this is the most daunting episode
is that the Picts covered not only the largest landmass in this nascent
Scotland that we've been describing, but also the longest time period.
Depending on how you define them we probably need to cover pre-Roman through to early medieval,
but here's the thing, tying them down is such a problem.
Now it doesn't help that the records that we have often have been written down by,
at best, self-interested outside parties and, at worst, their sworn enemies.
Add to that the fact that they're the group in which most of the
viewers seem to have the greatest emotional investment, and putting your finger on them is like trying to
squeeze the ghost of a tooth fairy, back into the tube when she's greased head to toe in lube.
Actually that sounded more sexual than mysterious didn't it?
but when you wake up in the morning there'll be an apology on your pillow.
The point is that you may be watching this hoping that a stand-up comic come tour guide
is going to give you some deep revelation of certainty about an ancient people
when academics can't entirely agree on the territory they occupied,
the time that they existed, the language that they spoke,
or whether it was mum or dad that passed on their inheritance.
All I can do is what I'll always try and do, and that's give you something to think
about and take you someplace interesting. So if you're interested in the people, places
and events in Scottish history, then click the subscribe button at the bottom right of the screen.
In the meantime, let me tell you their story. Defining what the Picts were isn't easy,
so let s start with what they weren't. Some folk think that the Picts were some
sort of homogeneous group that were around for a short period, and
then ceased to exist and did nothing but paint themselves blue and fight everyone around them,
and of course that s ridiculous. It confuses Picts with Glasgow Rangers fans.
Don't worry there'll be a Celtic joke coming along soon.
I'll maybe put up a picture of their trophy cabinet.
That's the St Johnstone trophy cabinet.
Now the origin myth of the Picts was that they sailed from Scythia in the east,
reached the Gaels in Ireland and asked for some land on which to settle.
The Irish told them that there was no space on their island,
but they knew of an island close by, and if they look just to the east,
they'd find it, but the Picts had no women,
so they asked if the Irish would give them some women,
because let's be honest, it's women who build a nation, whether they get the kudos or not.
The Irish agreed, but only on condition
that if, in the future, there was any doubt about kingship,
that the king should be chosen from the female line.
A further story is that the over king of the
Picts was a guy called Cruithne, who had seven sons.
They spread out over the North of what is now Scotland and gave us the different
geographical regions and names, some of which remain to this day. In Gaelic the Picts are still called na Cruithnich.
Needless to say, both these stories came from writings in the Gaelic language much later, and
at a time when it was politically convenient to describe Pictland as a top-down, unified kingdom,
that had always been such, broken into regions,
the king of which just happened to have a Pictish mother and a foreign father.
So, no creative licence there. Now I'm not saying that the Picts
didn't come from the East. I'm not saying that they didn't sail
to Ireland only for the Irish to say: Well now, there's another island
twice the size of this one, and you sailed past it to get here.
To be fair, you probably didn't notice it because of the fog.
Anyway that's got plenty of space, if you can get there before BREXIT.
Here you better take some of our women, before Phil Lynott gets them.
That's more Pakistani than Irish right? I'm no saying that it didn't happen,
it's just that the Romans wrote their account first and well, you know,
tattooed, blue faced, fighty types sell more papers.
Now here's a short aside. These Picts continue to be a key political
force right up until the 9th Century, six hundred years.
So the idea that Picts can be defined as a single thing
is like saying that a Scot, who fought Edward
Longshanks under Norman Feudalism, is the same as the Scots who campaign
for independence on Twitter today, or that those Scots are the same as
those folk throughout the world who watch these videos, and claim Scottishness.
They have different accents, eating habits and political beliefs
Now, they all cling to some unifying history,
they claim to share the same name, but they're far from a homogeneous group.
In his book, 'A New History of the Picts', Stuart McHardy suggests that maybe we've
got the Roman origin of the name wrong, that from the Borders to Shetland,
right up until recent times, the name in the oral culture, can be
found as an indigenous word Pechts, meaning something like ancestors.
Maybe these were the hunter gatherer, then farmer migrations of pre-history,
who formed the indigenous people who, over time,
went from hunting woolly mammoths with spears, to showing pictures of steak pie on Facebook.
Now the pre-Roman ancient Greek explorer Pytheas, called the island and people Prettanike,
(the island of the painted ones). Romans just arrived and changed the P for a B.
Of course, three hundred years later, much of the island was Romanised,
they wore togas instead of tattoos, but up in the north,
where the lands were conquered, but never subdued,
where those primitive, painted people perennially persisted with their pointless alliteration.
If Stuart McHardy is right, calling them Pictii, or painted people,
instead of Pechts, the ancestors,
might have been no more than a bit of name calling in the playground,
or maybe the pub. Pechts did ye say?
Aye Pictii more like. Painted tosspots.
Haw, haw, haw Pictii that's brilliant man. Hilarious haw, haw, haw.
I'm telling wee Rab. Haw Rabius Minimus.
Did you hear Willius Maximus there? Haw, haw, haw. He just called the Pechts, Pictii
He's pure raj man. Bunch of painted dobbers.
I think the subtitles for this bit will just say:
Bruce hilariously caricatures a Roman legionary as a Glasgow ned,
for the folks south of the border, or across the Atlantic. You know what I mean.
Incidentally I did an extended interview with Stuart McHardy and that's available
for my Patreon members now. Now if you're watching this, there's
a fair chance that you already know that during Rome's 1st Century, Flavian dynasty,
Agricola invaded, then retrenched. In the 2nd Century, Emperor
Hadrian retrenched further, and built a wall, then Antoninus Pious invaded to build a more
northerly wall between the Forth and Clyde, but they all had to fall back again.
In the 3rd Century, there was another invasion under Rome's African Emperor Septimius Severus
Now obviously he didn't look African in Harry Potter, but that's more historical revisionism isn't it?
Anyway he died at York and the Romans started squabbling amongst themselves.
During all this period the Romans had identified two different groups in what we now call Scotland.
The Maetae, broadly south of the Forth Clyde line, and the Caledonians to the north.
Now the Romans saw them as two groups, but I'm pretty sure that the groups themselves saw many
more subdivisions into smaller tribes. From the Roman point of view,
the southern Maetae at least partially came on board with the Roman project,
but the Caledonians in the north, they were a stubborn lot,
and by the time these invasions in the 1st Century, 2nd
Century and 3rd Century were over, the Romans were calling them Picts
and the Pechts seemed to take it as a badge of pride.
By the time the Romans left, Pictland wasn't a nation state,
but whether through opposition to outside forces, or the imposition by internal strongmen,
tribes were starting to consolidate. These strong men
may have got their authority from their mums, and kingship may indeed have been matrilineal,
the debate will continue, but we're also getting into
that period, where we see the crafted stones that the Picts are famed for
and it's time that I show you, why I brought you here. This is Tap O Norh
Here on a hill near Huntly in Aberdeenshire, is a huge hillfort.
It's one of the biggest post Roman habitations in Britain.
This was occupied throughout the timescale that we've discussed.
People lived here from prehistoric, through Roman Iron Age to Pictish proper.
In fact this is the biggest settlement that we know of in the Pictish period.
800 dwelling sites have been found in and around this hill, over an area of 50 football pitches.
At the bottom of the hill, two miles from here, is a place called Rhynie
where you can find hugely significant Pictish carved stones.
It's estimated that 4000 folk may have lived here. Now these were not just painted savages.
This was a Pictish town.
Activity, infrastructure, social structure and political organisation.
Now talking about political organisation, just south of here is the Mounth,
that's the rocky extension of the Highlands that stretches from the mountains of the west
towards the coast near Stonehaven. That mountainous area down to the
sea, was a dividing line between northern Picts and southern Picts
and as Pictland consolidated, a warlord in one or other
would seek control as the overall King of Pictland.
In this series, I've been trying to give you a picture of the kingdoms of the Scots,
the Britons, the Angles and the Picts around the 6th to the 7th century.
And for the Picts, that time, and a couple of centuries after,
was a prolific time for those carved stones for which they're so famous.
You can find them at the foot of this hill at Rhynie, at Aberlemno, in the Historic Scotland Museum at Meigle,
at the church at Trinity Gask, and all over what was Pictish territory.
But something else happened in that 7th Century.
To help you understand I made a video called The Pictish Battle of Bannockburn
and you should watch that, in fact you can come back and
click the white tab up there. That battle of Dun Nechtan did a lot to
further consolidate the Picts into a kingdom, a kingdom that would go on to take
over the kingdom of Scots militarily, and then in turn be taken over BY them politically,
culturally and linguistically.
And through all of that, you can trace the distinction between the northern
and southern Picts, the people south of
the Mounth and the men of Moray to its north. You can trace it all the way from Pictish times,
through Macbeth, to David I and Robert the Bruce. You can see it in the ghastly end
that I describe in my video 'Forgotten Kings of Scotland'.
Folk have messaged me for some time to make a video about the Picts.
Now, I don't know if this what you wanted or expected. I'm sure you'll let me know in the comments section below,
but it seems to me that the Picts are not a single, homogeneous
people that can be defined in a short video, and maybe that's part of their enduring mystique.
If you want to know about some of the other peoples that made Scotland,
A video will be coming on screen now.
In the meantime, tha mi an dochas gum bith lath math leibh. Tiorridh an drasda.