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On the Ruin of Britain

St Gildas, tr. Williams, 1899

14. Picts and Scots

After this, Britain is robbed of all her armed soldiery, of her military supplies, of her rulers, cruel though they were, and of her vigorous youth who followed the footsteps of the above-mentioned tyrant and never returned. Completely ignorant of the practice of war, she is, for the first time, open to be trampled upon by two foreign tribes of extreme cruelty, the Scots from the north-west, the Picts from the north; and for many years continues stunned and groaning.¹

Notes

The Scoti came from the North West (a circione). This would fit well with the explanation that at this time they had made no fixed settlements in the land subsequently called after them Scotland. Until the tenth century, Scoti or Scotti, and Scotia or Scottia, in Latin writers, mean respectively Irishmen and Ireland: in c. 21 Gildas calls them grassatores Hiberni. After the Dalriad migration of Irish settlers in Cantyre and the island of Islay, about A.D. 502, there were Scoti “qui Britanniam inhabitant,” as Beda could write in Book I of his History; but at the time to which Gildas refers any occupation that might have taken place was merely migratory. The first mention of Picts, by the Panegyricus of A.D. 292, refers also to Hiberni. We find an irruption of Scots and Picts (Scottorum Pictorumque gentium ferarum excursus) first mentioned by Ammianus Marcellinus, Book xx, i, I, while writing of Julian’s activity in Gaul (A.D. 360). Four years later, he relates, the Picti, Saxones, Scotti, and Atacotti, were harassing the country (xxvi, 4, 5). It is not strange, therefore, when contingents from over the seas had been, thus so long, abetting the northern barbarians, that Gildas should speak of transmarinae gentes, though the Picts did not come under that designation. Beda, in copying Gildas, gives an explanation of the term: “we say transmarinae gentes, not because they were outside Britain, but because they were remote with respect to the Britons, and two bays intervened” (H. E., i, 12). Plummer pronounces this to be a very forced gloss (vol. ii, p. 23); cf. also the words of c. 17, which tell us that they were driven over seas by the Roman troops: trans maria fugaverunt. The adverb, primtim, has been understood as implying that this rush of Scots and Picts, about A.D. 383, was their first inroad into Britain. Gildas is not guilty of such an error, because primum must be taken as qualifying calcabilis. Previous to the departure of Maximus, carrying the Roman army with him to the continent, the barbarians had always found a Roman force to contend with: now, “for the first time” the country is open (calcabilis) to their attack.