The Phœnician origin of Britons, Scots & Anglo-Saxons : discovered by Phœnician & Sumerian inscriptions in Britain, by preroman Briton coins & a mass of new history : with over one hundred illustrations and maps

SUDDEN DISAPPEARANCE OF “PICTIS” 173

In South Britain no historical references are found to “ Picts’ as forming an element of the early population, though the subterranean dwellings called ‘“‘ Picts’ Houses ”’ are widely distributed, and are associated in Devon and Cornwall with the “ Pixies; ’’ and some place-names contain the element “Pict” (see later). And Czsar’s statement about the general prevalence in Britain of polyandry of a promiscuous kind! amongst the natives in the interior, and of the “interiores”’ as being clad in skins? probably referred to the Picts, as Cesar describes the Britons whom he met as being richly garbed.

In Ireland also, Picts are not mentioned under that Latin nickname, but they are generally identified with the “ Cruithne,’’ though this title, as we have seen, is used ambiguously, and does not properly belong to the Picts at all. That the Picts were of the same kindred as the aboriginal Irish Feins, is evident from the numerous records that the Picts in Scotland were in the habit of obtaining wives from Ireland* and that their matrilinear succession and use of the Irish “Celtic " were derived from the same.

Then, in the middle of the ninth century A.p., with the final conquest of the “ Northern Picts” in 850 by the Scot king Kenneth, son of Alpin, from Galloway, and his establishment as ‘‘ King of the Scots’ and his introduction of the name ‘ Scot-land® for North Briton,’ the “‘ Picts ”’ completely disappeared from history as suddenly as they first appeared. No historical trace of that race is to be found thereafter, notwithstanding that there is no evidence whatever of any exodus or any wholesale massacre of these people.*®

As a result presumably of this complete disappearance of established himself there as ‘King of the Picts” (ib. clxxxvii); and St. Mungo or Kentigern of Glasgow (601 a.D.), the bishop of Strath-Clyde cleansed from idolatry “* the home of the Picts which is now called Galwietha

li.e. Galloway] and its adjacent parts” (Kentigern’s Life by Jocelyn of Furness.)

1 D.B.G. v, I4, 4-5. 2 16 Vv. I4, 2. *S.C.P., 123, 160, 298 ete. * Ih. xeviiijv. 98. 5 Th, 200, 299. ® In one chronicle (Scala chronica) it is stated that in 850, at a conference

at Scone, the Irish-Scots by stratagem “ slew the king and the chief nobles ”” of the Picts (5.C.P. exci), but there is no reference or suggestion anywhere to any massacre of the people themselves.