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CHAPTER IX
THE IRISH KINGDOM OF SCOTLAND
I. Two-fold Invasion and Conquest. 2. Ireland of the Sixth Century.
3. Ancient Pagan and Medieval Christian Ireland. 4. The Military
Conquest of Scotland.
i. TWOFOLD INVASION AND CONQUEST
THE conquest which the invading Gael had set on
foot in Ireland in the sixth century B. C. and
which he had sealed with the establishment of the
Gaelic monarchy over the island in the third century B.
C. had already thrown its powerful tides over the western
coasts and islands of what is now called Scotland when
the curtain lifted over the northern scene and authentic
history began. The successive steps by which the Celts
from the Continent established their authority over what
later came to be called the five kingdoms, or provinces, of
Ireland are veiled by the uncertainty and conjecture
that precede our era. But the processes by which the men
of Ireland carried that authority northward over the sea
and added to the five kingdoms the Irish kingdom of
Scotland fall well within the historic period and can be
followed by us with tolerable clearness.
This later Irish conquest was not merely military and
national. Civilization has moved from the beginning by
devious paths and these first tides of conquest that re-
ceived their immediate impulse from Tara and Dalriada
carried with them an accompanying impulse from Athens,
Jerusalem and Rome. The power of Roman arms that
had enveloped first the Celts of Cisalpine Gaul, then
Gaul itself and then Britain, stopped short at the Irish
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