Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

itish isles: anglo-saxon, irish & pictish, 410,597 133
being throughout most of Britain. The origins of these were in several
cases, through genealogical fabrication or historiographical invention,
pushed back into earlier periods, and distinct ethnic identities were
accorded them. However, the reality of conditions in the later fifth and
sixth centuries was rather different. The picture that should emerge is one
not of Germanic Saxons or Angles fighting against Celtic Britons and gradually
squeezing them back into what would become Wales, Cumbria and
Cornwall, so much as an entrepreneurial mêlée in which individual rulers
and dynasties emerged in many different localities, depending on warfare
against their neighbours to build up military followings. The population for
such fluctuating kingdoms was ethnically mixed, consisting of Germanic
and Celtic elements. Inevitably, because of the initial establishment of the
Germanic federates in the east of the island, the cultural and ultimately linguistic
mix took the form of a spectrum, with Germanic elements predominant
in the east and Celtic ones in the west, and complex intermixtures of
the two in the centre, notably the areas of the later kingdoms of Wessex,
Mercia and Northumbria.
Evidential problems also abound with respect to the history of the
Celtic kingdoms to the north of Hadrian’s Wall, of the Pictish ones beyond
them and of Ireland. In the case of the British ones in the north, some continuities
can be traced between them and some of the Celtic tribes that
existed in these regions in the early Roman period, though some of the
tribes had clearly disappeared entirely. By the end of the sixth century the
most powerful of these was probably the kingdom of Gododdin (the
former Votadini), centred on Edinburgh, whose king’s disastrous military
expedition against the Anglian kingdom of Northumbria is recorded in the
elusive verses ascribed to the poet Aneirin and known as Y Gododdin. 34
Another British kingdom, that of Strathclyde, existed around the Firth of
Clyde, with its capital at Dumbarton, and to the south of it lay the kingdom
of Rheged in Cumbria. Culturally distinct from these were the kingdom(s)
of the Picts. Only references concerning the fifth-century missionary ventures
of Nynia, based in Whithorn in Galloway, and of the Irish monk
Columba (d. 597), founder of the monastery of Iona, have led to the
deduction that two separate Pictish kingdoms or tribal confederacies, a
northern and a southern one, existed at this time.
Similarly in Ireland, which was a pre-literate society until the beginning
of Christian missionary activity there in the fifth century, it is only the
letters of Patrick that give any reliable clue as to political organization. Later
materials, notably the various Lives of Patrick and the annals which probably
did not start being kept until the mid eighth century, cannot be relied
upon to provide objective records of the earlier period. 35 In particular, the
34 Jarman (ed.) (1988). 35 Hughes (1972) 97–159, 219–32, but cf. Smyth (1972).
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