The Highlanders of Scotland - Clan Strachan Society

402 THE HIGHLANDERS [excursus
NOTES
Page 2, second last line. Buellan is another form of Boyle.
Page 3, line 17. For Hamilcar read Himilco.
Page 4, line 10. There is no distinction between Albiones and Britanni.
Albion originally meant all Britain ; it is the Irish that restricted the name
to Scotland.
Page 9, line 9. \'ecturiones, possibly a misreading for Verturiones
later Fortren.
Page 21. Gift of lona, according to native annals, was made by King
Conall of Dalriada. Bede is here mistaken. For the extent of the power
of the Gael, see Excursus above, p. 386. Strabo's " Islands of the Picts "
is poetic license. The older Argyle stretched to Lochbroom, and in Norse
times the Minch was Sl'o/\and Fjord.
Page 23. Picts, Piccardach, Pictores, Picti, &c. Dr. Skene's attempted
distinction in these names is not supported by the facts, and it finds no place
in Celtic Scotland.
Page 25, line 5. Read " Eochaid larlaithi rex Cruithne moritur." The
Cruithnig meant were those of Ireland.
Page 26. The Pictish Succession. See Excursus. The succession
among the Scots was Patriarchal, but the king or chief was elective by the
nobles. A king's successor was appointed during his lifetime, and was
called the Tanist, which really means the Second. He was usually brother
of the king, and generally gave way before the king's son, if the latter
was of age.
Pages 30-43. The Scottish Conquest. Here Dr. Skene declines to
follow the Latin Chronicles for the Dalriad kings of the 8th century, and
puts his faith in a poem called the " Albanic Duan," a monkish exercise of
unknown date (professing to be written in ]\Ialcolm Canmore's reign, and
calling Macbeth " renowned" !), and of little value. This is unfortunate, for
Dr. Skene has misread the plain Chronicle history of Dalriada. The Duan
confuses Dungal, son of Selbach (circ. 735), with Dungal, son of Ewen
(circ. 835), and places Alpin, the successor of the latter, as successor to the
former, thus killing off Alpin in 743 instead of 843. Dungal and Alpin are
•the immediate predecessors of Kenneth the Conqueror in reality. Would it
be believed that Skene actually places them like the Albanic Duan, one
hundred years earlier, and closes the record of Dalriad kings for the next
hundred years, regarding the kings in the lists, even in the Albanic Duan, as
inserted by the monkish Chroniclers to fill the vacant gap? Yet so it is !
Pinkerton, before him, performed the same feat. The reason in both cases
is the same— to get rid of the Dalriad Scots and their Conquest. Nor was
there material wanting to make the suppression of the Dalriad kingdom
plausible. Angus MacFergus, King of P'ortrenn, waded his way to the
Pictish throne through blood—" a sanguinary tyrant," as a Saxon chronicle