Well jings, crivvens, help ma boab...
Well, my first post to the board rests on a mildly fortean incident - I chose the name 'Cruithne' in honour of the (eventually false) third moon discovery, and then promptly walk into THIS thread. Fate, coincidence or my own over-fertile imagination?
Anyway, there's a lot of irony thick in the air in this conversation. As cujo points out, it is quite likely that we owe the concept of our nations as geographical (as opposed to cultural) entities to the Romans, with the conqueror's need to divide, separate and define. The lay of the land, pre-Romans, was rather similar to pre-conquest america - with tribes and confederacies of people holding a sense of collective identity in a manner not entirely undefined by boundaries and geography, but much less so than we do at present - the main cohesives being shared language, history, art and cultural mores. This seems to change with the arrival of the Romans, or indeed, any other outside threat.
Once you get over that hurdle of our modern (post Roman) sense of identity and 'nation' being the same as 'country' then I would argue, the need to get so hot under the collar about all of this hopefully lessens. The 'Welsh' (really, just brythonic tribes of varying types) cannot be seen particularly as invaders, I agree. It seems likely that, for a good while at least, brythonic tribes such as the Votadini had been in southern Scotland for a good while - maybe at some point they had been invaders, but had probably been in that region of the country long enough to stop being invaders in any case -and as much of the land was not used for farming, not claimed or proclaimed in any official treaty, 'invasions might seem a touch grandiose. Remember also, that the term 'The Welsh' is a bit much - the Welsh lanaugae is the closest to the language they would have spoken, but Wales is a post Saxon encroachment phenomenon, to my knowledge - the various tribes making up the Britons were far more complex and heterogeneous than I think some posters are giving them credit for.
But they did have their wars, these ancestors of ours - tribal conflicts, squabbles, etc. Well, that doesnt add up to an invasion either - it just meant the various competing identities didnt always get on famously - land, territory etc worked its mojo on them and started wars.
Speaking of my own back garden though, we're a fairly complex bunch too. Who were the Caledonians? Well, as pointed out, Tacitus grouped them altogether. We know there were people calling themselves the Picts after Roman power declined in the Isand confederated into a proto nation in the greater part of Scotland, who on occasion glowered resentfully at the thriving, thrusting maritime kingdom of dal Riata to the west, as it increasingly turned its attention away from the hebridean/argyll seaboard (increased Viking incursions a great incentive there) to matters inland. going further back from that, and it gets fuzzier and less clear, although one thing is fairly clear, and that is that those north of the current border, living amid the woods were generally seen as a wee bit odd by those south of it.
The Picts/Caledonians will alsways be a bit of a mystery - some people doubted they existed before the defining experience of the Antonine and Hadrian walls, others beg to differ. I've heard of the basque link - I don't actually discount it. It would not surprise me in the least if there were other 'neolithic hangovers' like the Basques in Europe - Scotland's actually a pretty good candidate for that. In addition we have the Cruithne - which are often described in the early annals as the 'early people' of Scotland and Northern Ireland, before the arrival of the Celts. Where they the Caledonians and other picts?
What is certain, that5 even by the time the Romans had come, whatever the Picts were, they had been strongly influenced culturally by those we do know to have been Celts - by the early centuries AD they had adopted P-celtic (early precursor to Welsh), and there had been numerous intercultural exchanges. these serve to place the Picts in a context, but make iot much harder to work out their true origins. But yes, they were seen as a distinct grouping, if not one people, by many.
dal Riata is interesting too - recent archaeology suggests that the old theory, that a bunch of Erse pirates came over (the sons of Erc) came and founded it fairly late in the day, doesnt seem tenable - it seems the kingdom as it stood in the early post-Roman period, was the resuly, not of a full scale invasion of Gaels but of over a thousand years of development - many of its people were natives who spoke Gaelic, who had come under the influence of the language and culture as a result of the maritime nature of the region - the Gaelic compact between western Scotland and Ulster was an aquatic Gaelic based proto-nation which had developed via settlement, spheres of influence and trade, it seems.
I'm running out of time here, and I havent even started on the Romans yet, so I'll more or less summarise from hereonin -
- the arguments I've read here, have been very entertaining, and informative, but seem to come from a very modern perspective (only seem to - forgive me if I read you wrong...)
- The history of that period is too complex and elusive to reduce to the level of who beat who or whether 'Scotland' was worth conquering - of course it was worth conquering! The success of the romans rested on the fact that they, generally saw the potential in pieces of territory and areas of land in a fashion quite different from everyone else. I do agree though, that lack of resources, willpower and problems in other parts of the em was probably the reason they did not break their backs trying to complete the job. The Picts/Gaels and other natives might well be able to take some pride in the fact that they made life sufficiently difficult enough for the Romans for them to take that decision to give up the ghost - but it was never as straightforward as just kicking them out.
-I dont think the Romans were Saints - there is a lot to criticise, but unlike the Nazis, there were admirable features, and ideals of public life and government which they aimed for - that they failed of course, sometimes spectacularly, sometimes grossly perverting them, is not so much a testament to their evil as to their painful (collective) humanity
Speaking of which, I hope to come back and do some irresponsible speculating about the 'what if' of the survival of the pagan empire -and I hope this post hasnt been TOO dull, or irrelevant...
