%vie, the first Christian king of the Picts. died in 580. Catalogues are preserved, of more or less authority, of the sovereigns who succeeded him. It is impossible to reconcile the discrepancies of these lists, which probably contain the names of princes who reigned at the same time in the northern and southern divisions of the kingdom. The limits of the Pictish territories continued much the Some till the middle of the 7th c., when a portion of the southern province was subdued by Oswy, king of Northumbria.. In the beginning of the reign of Oswy's son and successor, Egfrid, the Picts made an attempt to recover the territory which had been wrested from them. It was unsuceess ful; and the power of the English was so firmly established, that the conquered province was erected into a diocese separate from Lindisfarne, the seat of the bishop being fixed at Abercorn. Encouraged by the success which had attended his enterprises, Egfrid seems to have contemplated the subjugation of the whole Pictish kingdom. He advanced northwards with his army; Brude, son of Bili, king of the Picts, retreating before hint. Thu English sovereign passed the Tay, and the Picts made a stand at Neehlansmere, supposed to be Dunnichen, in Arm's. A conflict ensued; the English were utterly defeated. and their king was slain. 'The consequences of this battle, which was fought on the 20th of May, were very important. The Picts recovered the whole territory which they had lost, and even subdued for a time a portion of the kingdom.
The next Pictish prince whose name calls for special notice is Nectan, son of Dereli. who succeeded about the year 710. He cultivated learning to some extent, and aspired to the position of an ecclesiastical reformer. The Pictish church held precisely the same doctrines as the English; but it differed in various points of ritual, the most impor tant of which related to the proper time of keeping easier. The king applied for advice to Ceoltrid, abbot of Jarrow, and the answer, which is addressed "To the most excel lent lord, and most glorious king, preserved among the works of venerable Bede. Encouraged by this *sae, he summoned a counsel of his clergy and nobles, and enjoined theM to observe the English usages. The royal command met with a ready obedience. He had also applied to the abbot of Jarrow for architects to build a church of stone in the Roman fashion, which he proposed to dedicate to St. Peter. We arc told by Bede that the architects were sent, but have no further information on this inter esting subject. The plans of the.king were probably interrupted by dissensions among his people; and the entire assimilation of the ecclesiastical institutions of northern Brit ain to those of England was postponed for four centuries.
The most active of all the Pictish sovereigns was Hungus, son of Urgust, who suc ceeded in 730, and reigned for 30 years. He was engaged in constant wars with the Scots, the Britons, and the English, in which lie was generally victorious. After his death, the kingdom began to decline. The history of its latest period is involved in impenetrable obscurity; all that we know for certain is the final result. Various princes claimed the crown, and held possession of portions of the kingdom. But the most pow erful competitor was Kenneth, son of Alpin, king of the Scots, who was descended, in the female line, from the ancient sovereigns of thePicts, and was probably the true inheritor, according to the peculiar law of succession which is said to have existed among hat nation. Kenneth was acknowledged as king in 843, and fixed his residence at Fort eviot, in Strathernc, the capital of the Pictish kingdom.
A famous passage from Henry of Huntingdon has often been quoted, in illustration of the supposed utter destruction of the Picts, of their princes, their race, and their lan guage. It is referred to in that sense at the close of the following sentences of a work
written some time before, but only published in the year 1864: "The Pictish vessel is seen in the distant horizon; she approaches rapidly, till you clearly distinguish the crew upon the deck; but before you are near enough to hear their voices, she sinks, the waters lose over her, and the wreck never can be raised. The total extinction of the Pictish language renders any further inquiry impossible. The acumen and criticism of the 19th c. cannot beyond the homely wisdom of the 12th century."—Sir Francis Pal grave's History of Normandy and England, vol. iv. p. 294.
The impression conveyed by such words is an erroneous one. The Pictish princes st ill continued to reign in the persons of Kenneth and his descendants. They were kings. or the Picts in reality and by race, as much as James I. and his successors were kings of England. The princes did not cease in the one case more than in the other to be sov ereigns of the larger kingdom, because they had previously ruled in the lesser one. Neither did the nation of the Picts cease to exist. They dwelt as before in their own land; their old capital was the capital of the new kingdom; and Pictavia is spoken of by the chronicles long after the accession of Kenneth, and long before Scotia became identified with northern Britain, or ceased to be the ordinary name for Ireland. Undoubtedly, through the influence of the kings, and perhaps of the clergy, whom the later Pictish princes had held under an oppressive bondage, the Scots became the pre dominant race. and finally gave their name to the united kingdom and nation. Neither did the language of the Picts cease to be spoken. It continued, as before, to be the dia het of the north-eastern provinces, till, first in the extreme n., it yielded to the Scandi navian invader, and afterward—mo•e than two centuries subsequently to the accession of Kenneth—it began to recede slowly before the Teutonic tongue of English and ish colonists. The same process which destroyed the Celtic language of the Pictish peo pl:_‘, e2stroyed also the Celtic language of the British kingdom of Cumbria. The subject of the Pictish language has been of late thoroughly discussed by Mr. Skene in his Four Ancient Books of Walls. In addition to Peanfahel, the sole Pictish word formerly known, Mr. Skene has discovered four other distinct words, besides a number of sylla hies entering into props: names; and front all these he deduces the opinion that Pictish " is not Welsh. neither is it Gaelic; but it is a Gaelic dialect largely of Welsh f'orms." More specifically, he holds that Pictish, as compared with partaking was a low dialect—that is, different from Gaelic in much the same way that low Gelman differs from high.
The chief ancient authorities for the history of the Picts are Adamnan's Life of St. Columba, edited by Dr. Reeves; the Ecclesiastical History of venerable Bede; the Life of by Allred of Rievanx, in Pinkerton's Ancient Lires of Scottish Saints; the Pictish chronicle, in the appendix to Innes's Critical Essay on the Ancient Inhabitants of Scotland, and in the appendix to Pinkerton's Inquiry into the History of Scotland; and the Irish Annals, edited by O'Conor. The best modern works on the subject are Innes's Critical Essay, and his Ciril and Ecclesiastical History of Scotland; Pinkerton's Inquiry; Chalmer's Caledonia, vol. I.; Ritson's Annals of the Caledonians, Picts, and Scots; Mr. Grub's Ecclesiastical History of Scotland, vol. i.; a dissertation in Garnett's Philological Etsays; and Mr. W. F. Skew: in his Four Ancient Books of Wales; and in Celtic Scotland (2 vols. 1875-77).