| We advance to a darker feature of our
country in its first beginnings. The inhabitant was as untamed as his rugged land. Those
who occupied the southern half of our island, were, as the fruits of the earlier Roman
invasion, a considerable cultivation of the soil was already to be seen, were known by the
name of Britons. Those who inhabited the northern division, the men who roamed over the
bleak moors and dark hills we have described, were called Caledonians or Picts.1
The Scots—the contingent thrown in to attemper the general population, and give to it
its predominant quality, if not its numerical strength—had not yet arrived in a
country which was to bear their name in after ages. The Greek historian Herodian, who has
given to our early ancestors a place in his sketches of the campaigns of Severus, may have
unduly deepened the shades of his picture. He never was in Britain, and could relate only
what others told him of the country and the people. But his descriptions may safely be
taken as the portraiture of the Caledonian current at Rome in the age of the Emperor
Severus. Herodian paints the men of Caledonia as going naked, only encircling their necks
and bellies with iron rings, as others array themselves in ornaments of gold. Their country, he tells us, abounded in swamps, and
the vapours exhaled from these miry places by the heat filled the air with a continual
murkiness. The natives traversed their bogs, wading up to the neck in mud, wholly
regardless of the discomfort and defilement of person to which they subjected themselves.
They had no raiment to soil, and a plunge into the first stream would cleanse their
persons. Battle was to them a delight, and the greater the carnage the higher their
satisfaction. Helmet and habergeon were unknown to them; protection for their persons they
sought none, save a narrow shield of wicker-work covered with cow-hide. They carried no
weapon into the fight but a javelin or lance, and a sword girded on their naked loins.2
Their bravery, their contempt of danger, and their recklessness of life, made them no
despicable antagonists, even to the legions of Rome. Their flight was sometimes more fatal
to the enemy than their attack. The barbarian, burdened only with his few simple
accoutrements, skimmed the surface of the quaking bog with agility and safety, and was
soon out of reach of his pursuers, while the Roman soldier, weighed down by his heavy
armour, sank in the morass and was held fast, till his comrades came to extricate him, or
the foe he was chasing returned to slaughter him. Herodian can hardly conceal his chagrin
that these untrained and unclothes warriors should have adopted a mode of fighting so
alien to all the established usages of war, and which placed their opponents in so many
points at a disadvantage. It was hardly to be expected that the Caledonians would consult
the convenience of their haughty invaders or give themselves the least concern whether
their mode of defence agreed with or crossed the usages of Rome.3
Their appearance, as Herodian has depicted
it, must have been uncouth in the extreme. Hardly have we courage to look calmly at the
apparition which his pen has conjured up. We are fain to persuade ourselves that the
historian has given the rein to his imagination, and produced a picture such as would
grace his pages rather than one that would find its likeness on the moors of Caledonia.
And yet there must have been some foundation for the statement, otherwise, it would not
have been so publicly made by writers of name, and in an age when it was so easy to test
its truth. The Caledonians were in the habit, so Herodian assures us, of tattooing their
bodies, after the fashion of the New Zealanders and the American Indians of our own day.4
What we would have accounted a disfigurement they reckoned an embellishment. It cost them
no little pains, and some suffering to boot, to effect this ingenious metamorphosis of
their persons. By means of a hot iron the Caledonian imprinted upon his limbs the figures
of such animals as he was most familiar with, or as he chose to make the symbols or
interpreters of his predominating dispositions, much as the knight of our own day blazons
on his shield the figures which are most suggestive of the virtues or qualities he is
emulous of being thought to possess. The parts of the body touched by the hot iron were
rubbed over with the juice of the plant called woad, and this brought out in blue the
figures which the iron had imprinted upon the person. We can imagine the barbarian, after
completing this strange adornment, surveying himself with no little pride, and thinking
how formidable he should look in the eyes of his enemy, blazing all over with the shapes
of monstrous and terrible animals. Before going into battle he was careful, we are told,
to deepen the colour of these wild figures in order to heighten the terrors of his
appearance.5
Besides this curious emblazoning, worn on the
person, and not after the more convenient fashion of modern times, on the shield, one
other circumstance helped to make their aspect savage and terrible. This was their manner
of disposing of their hair. Their locks, dark and matted, hung down, shading their faces
and clustering on their shoulders. This arrangement served in some sort as a vizor. It may
have stood them in some stead on occasion, but it would tend to hide the fire of their
eye, and so diminish the terror of their countenance, unless, indeed, when the wind blew
aside their locks, or the action of battle momentarily parted them, and then their faces,
burning in fury, would gleam out upon the foe.5
Strange looking personages, indeed, must
these forefathers of ours have been, if their first historians have not done them
injustice. Blue men, figured all over from head to heel with the representations of
horses, bullocks, wolves, and foxes; traversing their wilds with foot almost as swift as
that of the roe and deer which they chased; stalking by the shore of their lakes and their
seas in the pride of barbarian independence, disdaining to plow or weave, to dig or plant,
their loins begirt with skin of wolf, their long hair streaming in the wind, and their
dark features brightening with keen delight when the chase was to begin, or kindling with
the fire of a yet fiercer joy when battle was to be joined. Were these uncouth progenitors
to look up from their resting places on lonely moor or underneath gray cairn, it is hard
to say which would be the more astonished—we or they? We to see the men who went
before us, they to behold the men who have come after them: we to behold the Scotland of
the first century, they to see—striking contrast—the Scotland of the nineteenth!
FOOTNOTES
1. That the Caledonians and Picts were one
and the same people is now universally allowed."—Pinkerton, i., 105.
2. "The primitive Celtic dress,"
says Pinkerton, "was only a skin thrown over the shoulder, and a piece of cloth tied
round the middle. Gildas mentions the last as the dress of the Scots or Irish in his
time."—Vol. ii. p. 144.
Herodian says, "Tantum scuto angusto
lanceaque contenti, proeterea gladio nudis corporibus dependente." Lib. iii. 268.
3. Herodiani Historia Cum Angeli Politiani
interpretatione latina, Vindocini, 1665, lib. iii. p. 266-268. Neque enim vestis usum
cognoverunt, sed ventrem atque crevicem ferro incingunt: ornamentum id esse, ac divitiarum
argumentum existimantes, perinde ut aurum caeteri barbari.
4. The statement of Herodian that the
Caledonians painted their bodies, acquires confirmation from the well known passage in
Claudian:—
"Ille leves Mauros, nec
falso nomine Pictos,
Edomuit."
"He the fleet Moor
subdued; and painted Pict
Not falsely named."
And again—
"Ferroque notatas,
Perlegit exanimes Picto
moriente figuras."
"They on the bodies of
the dying Picts
Saw the rude figures,
iron-graved."
5. Herodiani Historia, lib. iii. 267.
Quin ipsa notanbt corpora pictura varia et omnifariam formis animalium quocirca ne
induuntur quidem, videlicet picturam corporis ne adoperiant. Sunt auten belliciosissima
gens atque audissima caedis.
6. It does not appear that the name Pict
was an ancient one, or long continued. It probably came from the Romans. Finding the
Caledonian warriors figured over with these strange devices, they would naturally speak of
them as picti, or painted men. |
