The Picts
Scotland was the land of the Picts before it became the land of the Scots.
The tribes whom the Romans fought during the first four centuries AD joined
together and became known as the Picts, the Painted Ones. The picture painted
of the Caledonians (Roman name for Picts) by the Romans, was that they
were barbarian savages, but the more we learn of them the more historians
have come to understand that they had an advanced, cultured society. There
was no slavery amongst them and women for instance had a higher standing
than in Roman society. Pictish women had the right to choose husbands or
to refuse offers of marriage, because the Picts had a system of matrilineal
line of succession. As later, they inter married with the other peoples
of Scotland this recognised descent through the female line instead of
the male, would eventually lead to their virtual disappearance as a separate
people in historical records.
At the time of the Roman invasion there was no unified nation in Scotland, only a collection of related horse-war tribes who were skilled in the working of bronze and iron into weapons and implements. The Picts were made up from a total of eleven highland tribes, while the lowland Caledonian tribes numbered about nine.By the sixth century AD they had formed a kingdom, with kings whose names appear in early historical records. After the Romans, they fought the Britons and the Angles on their southern borders and the Scots in the west, but by AD 843 the Pictish kingdom had been taken over by the Scots and Pictland became Scotland. The far north and west had already fallen to the Norsemen since the first Viking raids began around AD 800.
In and Around Aberfeldy
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