Is it? That’s the question. I’ve been bothered by this question for a long time, as you know if you’ve been reading a while. We talk of the Picts as a people but much suggests that they were many peoples. That’s hardly surprising, given the way that kingdoms in England and Ireland were forming at the same time, but I’m never sure that it gets into the historiography enough, or that we make the material culture a big enough part of the differentiation. And since I got into this job I’ve been meaning to use it to make me write something—I have in fact written a first draft, if a piece of writing you do to direct the research rather than one that you in the light of it counts as a draft rather than a policy document—trying to make those concerns into a coherent argument.
Distribution map of brochs, forts and souterrains in Scotland, from Martin Carver's Surviving in Symbols: a visit to the Pictish nation (1995), p. 12
This keeps getting harder. Firstly, as I delay, people like Nick Evans, James Fraser and Alex Woolf close down the angles, so that my point gets smaller and smaller (and more like the few bits of my first Picts paper I still stand by, which means there’s little point in saying them again). Secondly, people like Alex Woolf—in fact, exactly like Alex Woolf, with whom I had the good fortune to discuss this at Leeds and then again here just a few days ago when he presented here, both of which I will record eventually—keep coming up with things that just make me think I’m wrong, or at least that I have to think some more. It may turn out that I actually don’t have anything useful to say. And then thirdly, there’s the actual evidence, brought freshly before me by teaching as well as research. A lot of the distribution maps that were crucial in the original ‘Pictland should be plural’ post of 2008 just don’t make the case I originally thought they should. Partly this is because a lot of the symptoms of cultural production are clustered where there’s agriculturally-useful lowland, which shouldn’t really surprise anyone. But also it’s because more stuff keeps turning up, and that was originally the point of this post when I began it as a stub in July. The thing is that as with most of my links posts, by the time I finally write it up there’s about twice as much as I’d originally expected, but with Pictish archaeology you’d not expect that so much. Even so:
In July, first of all, a new Class II symbol stone was found, in Sanday, Orkney, where previously only a few Class I ones have been known (the difference being relief carving and Christian symbols, i. e. usually a full-length cross , on Class IIs), which makes it harder to assume that Orkney missed out on whatever cultural shift provoked Class II and thus helps to undermine the idea that II replaced I, something that Orkney previously supported. Alex Woolf (that man again) passed this on to me as soon as he got news of it, and I’ve rewarded this ill by doing nothing except muse on it. This, however, fitted fine with my argument and I was quite happy with it as information.
And then another one came up in Easter Ross, in the Black Isle, in September, this one a Class I with a really clear Pictish beast.1 This is considerably less surprising: there’s so much Pictish material in the Black Isle that there’s a museum at Rosemarkie for it (small but lovely), but it all adds to the pile.
Almost at the same time, excavations at Fortingall in Perthshire revealed that what had looked from aerial photography like a monastic rampart probably actually was, as there’s a substantial wall underneath it and a road through a gateway in it, and this in an area which has already produced grave-stones with Pictish symbols on and a monastic hand-bell. We’re waiting on radio-carbon dates but all this is making the excavator, none other than Oliver J. T. O’Grady who has featured here before, talk in terms of a Columban monastery such as Portmahomack has been called by Martin Carver, and here there might almost be more evidence, in the form of the bell. Even more interesting is a sixth-century Anglo-Saxon bead found in the road metalling, and the fact that till now what Fortingall was mainly famous for was its 5,000-year-old yew tree, which probably has a lot to do with the location of any cult sites that may or not have been here. In my terms, I am fine with this too; there’s really no problem with arguing for a Columban presence in Perthshire, indeed James Fraser’s new book does so extensively, and if O’Grady’s right this would bear him out.2- Slightly before this, however, another Perthshire excavation had revealed a broch, of the first or second centuries AD, at Dunning, and this does actually cause me rethinking problems. Of course it is older than I care about, technically, even though it seems to have been demolished and a Pictish fortification built on top of it, which is described as palisaded but from which I am guessing there was no wood—no-one seems to be interested in its date, anyway, but I suppose it needn’t be very much later—but as a symptom of an older culture it’s still important, albeit maybe not as important as those that remained visible. ‘Lowland’ brochs are not unknown, but the huge round towers are much more common in the north (see the map above); the more of them that turn up in the south the less good the case for a regional identity based on them gets.3 I probably have to drop it, and it’s really the only one I had left. Ah well. I suppose that, unlike Slartibartfast, I’d rather be right than happy, at least about history.
An exposed section of wall from the ruined broch at Dunning
1. On the Beast, you can find sage musings and collected references in Craig Cessford, “Pictish Art and the Sea” in The Heroic Age Vol. 8 (2005), http://www.heroicage.org/issues/8/cessford.html, last modified 27 July 2005 as of 10 November 2011, §§9-16, though I personally hold out for it being the Loch Ness monster as any right-thinking person would, what with the impeccable contemporary literary evidence for Nessie in the period…
2. J. Fraser, From Caledonia to Pictland: Scotland to 795, The New Edinburgh History of Scotland 1 (Edinburgh 2009), pp. 94-111.
3. Mind you, if that there wall is part of a curved structure it must have been HUGE. There’s no more curvature visible in that picture to me than I might expect as a lens artefact. I can see why it’s the broch that’s getting all the attention.
11 November 2011 at 16:47
Loch Ness Monster my foot. The Beast is obviously a coati.
11 November 2011 at 18:03
Weird feet if so! And legs surely too long. And no tail worth speaking of! Do we mean the same beast?
12 November 2011 at 14:11
That’s the one. Not a bad depiction if the artist had never actually seen one.
12 November 2011 at 22:34
This is a comment of no substance for the purpose of noting that I read, and found it interesting.
13 November 2011 at 21:26
Much appreciated!
14 November 2011 at 9:23
At your service, good sir.
16 November 2011 at 1:57
Jonathan, I found your blog post very intriguing. Can you recommend any good, commonly available sources on the Picts? I’m specifically interested in the people of the Gododdin in the late 5th and early 6th centuries. They will figure heavily in my next novel and I’m having a hard time finding sources that say more than “well, we don’t really know much about the Picts.”
16 November 2011 at 13:59
Well, the Gododdin are even worse to follow up than the Picts! But there the best current guide (indeed the only) would be Tim Clarkson’s The Men of the North (his publisher’s site‘s down, so that link goes to a review by fellow-blogger Michelle of Heavenfield). Tim’s also done a book called The Picts (Stroud: Tempus 2008, 2nd edn. 2010), which disgracefully I own but haven’t yet read. There is a bit more competition here, anyway, and I would recommend from what I have read Lloyd Laing & Jenny Laing, The Picts and the Scots (Dover: Sutton 1993) and Leslie Alcock’s Kings & Warriors, Craftsmen & Priests in Northern Britain AD 500-800 (Edinburgh: Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 2003). The latter two are more material-culture oriented, both by archaeologists, and Alcock refuses to attempt a narrative at all; if a narrative rather than a ‘feel’ is what you need, then Tim may be more help though as I say I can’t speak with experience about that book yet. There is also James Fraser’s From Caledonia to Pictland: Scotland to 795 (Edinburgh: EUP 2009), which does do more of a narrative but is hard going for the novice to the field… Both he and Alcock, however, include Britons, Picts and Angles altogether as one history of many peoples, which may be useful to you looking at the Gododdin. Anyway, that’s probably enough. If you actually mean sources, however, rather than writing about the sources, chime in again and I’ll come up with some recommendations there too.
17 November 2011 at 1:48
Thank you so much! I’ll be sure to include you in my acknowledgements for this book as someone who has helped me. I’m going to go look those books up now. I read the Laing & Laing book years ago from the library, but I think I need a refresher and my own copy now that I have a specific plotline in mind. Right now I’m just interested in writing about the sources, but if you feel like commenting on the sources themselves, I’m always open to suggestions. Again, thank you!
17 November 2011 at 12:30
Well, sources: much of the Irish written material can be found in its critical editions on the website of the Corpus of ELectronic Texts at the University of Cork; that will get you the Irish Annals and so forth in their various incarnations, as well as a text of the Life of St Columba, and Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews has a whole bunch of Dark Age British full-text resources on his site that include the Annales Cambriae, the Historia Brittonum and the Pictish king-lists and Harleian genealogies. So you can get at a vast bulk of the material in good editions without leaving the computer, although I would recommend the Penguin Classics version of the Life of St Columba anyway because Richard Sharpe’s commentary is really really useful. For the archaeology, though, you’d best be guided by Alcock, I would suggest.
18 November 2011 at 1:57
Thanks again!
22 November 2011 at 20:51
Flippin’ ‘eck it just keeps coming…
24 November 2011 at 14:54
[...] this topic before, in a post called Pictland should be plural. His latest instalment has the title Picts in many places, if ‘Pict’ is the word. You can probably see where his thoughts on the topic are heading. ‘We talk of the Picts as a [...]
30 November 2011 at 10:39
It constantly amazes me that after umpty years of digging stuff up, we keep finding great examples. Excellent Pictish beast :)
11 December 2011 at 19:07
[...] found all this pretty powerful, as you might expect from things I’ve said in the past, and asked in questions whom he thought the agents of this new cultural formation might be; he [...]
10 January 2012 at 14:41
Hello Johnathan,if I was to engage you in a conversation about “red indians of America” you would,no doubt,being a student seeking the truth of things,correct me by using the term native Americans.
So I am amazed to find even so called experts refering to” picts”.The word was meant by the Romans as a descriptive word for the forces they were confronted by.
I have no regard also for Roman written accounts concerning the north british tribes so I hope in your enquiries you can break with the “experts” and seek out all new evidence.
The creature in the stone carving is a stylised sea creature part porpoise part seal.regards.
10 January 2012 at 15:18
I even have trouble with the term `native Americans’, since it implies the same kind of indigeneity as some people in Scotland claim for the Picts, the very first humans on location. However, the fact that the Irish also picked up the word Pict as Pecht and that there are these place-names in ‘Pet-’ and ‘Pit-’ has led some historians to hypothesize that the word ‘Pict’ was not a Roman coining per se but a Latinization of a native term. I’m not sure I buy that myself but to me the deciding fact is that by the seventh and eighth centuries it was what the groups, or at least the groups’ rulers, called themselves, or seem to have done. I think that makes it OK to use whatever its origins, if the people I’m writing about used it of themselves, don’t you?
10 January 2012 at 15:30
Yes: it’s clear that (as James Fraser said at Leeds), the Picts referred to themselves as Picts by the 7th/8th century, for whatever reason. The place-names could as easily belong then as earlier, I suspect. For the Roman period (assuming, although we don’t know one way or the other, that the picti did not refer to themselves by that name) I don’t know what other term you could use. Just an italicised ‘picti’ (without capital), in the same way as I refer to trans Rhenan barbarians as ‘Germani’? Pritani perhaps? If you are looking for names, I don’t know what other evidence there might be.
10 January 2012 at 16:45
“Cruithni” :-)
10 January 2012 at 16:52
Wouldn’t Cruitni be as unacceptable as ‘Pict’ in your correspondent’s views? My understanding was that Cruithni was another outsider’s name – in this case an Irish Q-Celtic rendition of a local P-Celtic word like Pritani (Britons).
10 January 2012 at 18:26
Well, yes, hence the smiley! But at least it’s not an enemy’s name but a straight linguistic reflex of an ‘indigenous’ one.
10 January 2012 at 18:28
Sorry – did wonder if that was what the smiley meant!
10 January 2012 at 21:13
“at least the group,s rulers,called themselves,or SEEM TO HAVE DONE.”
Sorry,bit “wooly” that one,and it stems directely from Roman not Irish.Probably they reacted much like the Welsh to others use of that term.Thanks anyway I will keep searching for something more apt.
10 January 2012 at 21:51
It’s woolly because it’s accurate. The fact that all Irish and Anglo-Saxon texts that mention a people in what is now Highland Scotland call them either Picti or a vernacular version of that term (or, admittedly, Cruithni, but then that is just as Latin a term at base), and note their rulers as rex pictorum at their deaths, coupled with the fact that that was also the title used of Kenneth mac Alpin and several of his descendants, not just in the same sort of sources but lists of kings actually compiled in Scotland, is about as good as evidence can get given the absence of any written material at all from inside Pictland before that. It’s not conclusive but you almost certainly won’t find anything better; people have been looking for a long time If you were interested in reading something about this I’d recommend starting with Marjorie Anderson’s “Picts – the name of the people” in A. Small (ed.), The Picts: a new look at old problems (Edinburgh 1987), pp. 7-14. At the moment I’m at something of a loss to know how, if you pay no regard to the Latin sources for the North British peoples, you can have an opinion about what they meant by the term. Do feel free to tell us your sources too!
11 January 2012 at 19:20
In answer to your query of my disregard of Latin sources..it is because I am interested in my own ancestors from their understanding of themselves, not some rag bag fragments of propaganda for Roman consumption.
I became interested in this subject when I bought 4vols History of the Highlands James Browne 1850,some years ago,his Preliminary Dissertation I thought very interesting.
I am now attempting to read From Caledonia etc by James E. Fraser 2009.but as you know it,s a hard read..”.nuf sed”.
I use the term picts because I have to ,dont I? But I ,naively perhaps,expected historians to have found out more in the 161 years from James Browns ponderings in his ,to my mind,masterful work.
I live in Orkney and as such I am reminded every waking hour of the fantastic legacy our ancestors gave us not least because we have a small lively history group.In talking one evening about how the Scottish nation had been abused in the past (Romans,English haha) a question was raised that no one could ,with confidence answer,Who were our ancestors? before the outside world invaded us ,so foolishly I offered to “go on the net” and find out more.
I don,t seek to be insulting to historians in general but I could be of many who continue in ignoring parts of history they find difficult,and instead of silent diligent further research, perpetuate myths,unthruths and personal elevation among their peers.
I feel historians are not taking advantage of this amazing swell of interest in “where do I come from”…especially in the Scottish nation with all the concerns about independence……thanks for your time regards Marshall Lock
12 January 2012 at 12:53
Aha, fair enough. I am usually pessimistic about the chances of tracking ancestry back much further than the start of parish registers, which leaves a good few centuries to cover to get back to this period! The main reason we haven’t found out more is, of course, the very poor survival of evidence; we are all essentially trying to agree on what the jigsaw looked like with only a quarter of its pieces available.
Have you encountered the Pictish Arts Society? It’s a long time since I had much to do with them, but when I did they certainly had some people involved who had very much the kind of interest you express above in this period. They are as you can see not great at keeping a website updated but as far as I know still functioning.
As for Fraser’s book, well yes, I have some thoughts about that which may well make a future post here, though not in the next month or so at least, given how behind I am and various other things.