The Archaeology and Prehistoric Annals of Scotland

Front matter

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Introduction

* Lanye are the treasures of oblivion. Much more is buried in silence than recorded ; and the largest volumes are but epitomes of what hath been. The account of ‘Time began with night, and darkness still attendeth it."—Srn Tuomas BROWNE.

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History which is derived from written materials must necessarily begin only where civilisation has advanced to so ripe a state, that: the songs of the bard, and the traditions of the priest, have ceased to satisfy the cravings of the human ming for mastery over the past nd the future. It has been too generally assumed that history is art inconceivable thing independent of written materials, Historians have accordingly, with a transient and incredulous glance at the fabulous infancy of nations, been too frequently content to leave their annals imperfect and maimed of those chapters that should record the deeply interesting story of their origin and rise. This mode of dealing with history is happily no longer sanctioned by the example of the ablest of its modern investigators. They are at length learning to analyze the myths which their predecessors rejected ; and the results have already rewarded their toil, though. much still remains obscure, or utterly unknown.

Gifted with an inspired pen, Moses has recorded in n briefest words the story of the world’s infancy: that, therefore, is rendered independent of myth or fable. But quitting that single illuminated spot, how shall the investigator recover the annals of our race during the dubious interval between the era of the dispersion of the human

A part must be content to be as though they had not been: to be found in. the register of God, not in the records of men. Twenty-seven “names make up the first story before the Flood, and the recorded “names ever since contain not one living century. The number of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live. The night of time far surpasseth the day ; and who knows when was the Equinox ?”?

Similar necessities and difficulties meet us when we would investigate the beginnings of younger nations. The oldest intelligible inscription known in Scotland is that graven in Anglo-Saxon Runes on the Ruthwell Cross, Dumfriesshire, and dating not earlier than the ninth century. The oldest written historic documents are probably the charters of Duncan, engrossed about the year 1035, and still preserved among the muniments of Durham Cathedral. Prior to these the Romans furnish some few scanty notes concerning the barbarian Picti. The Irish annalists contribute brief but valuable additions. The northern sagas, it is now certain, contain a still'richer store of early historic notes, which the antiquaries of Copenhagen are busily digesting for us into available materials’ Yet, after all these are ransacked, what shall we make of the long era which intervenes between the dispersion of the human family and the peopling of the British Isles? When did the first rude prow touch our shores ?—who. were’ its daring crew? Whence did language, manners, nationality, civilisation, and letters spring? All these-are questions of the deepest interest ; but on nearly all of them history is as silent as’on the annals of Chaos. With reverential piety, or with restless inquisitiveness, we seek to know somewhat of the rude forefathers of our island race, Nor need we despair of unveiling somewhat of the mystery of their remote era, though no undeciphered hieroglyphics, nor written materials, preserve one solitary record of the Menzs of the British Isles.

Human intelligence and research have already accomplished so much, that ignorance alone’can presume to resign any past event to utter oblivion. Between “ the Beginning,” spoken of in the first verse of the Book called Genesis; and the creation of man, the most humble and devout of Biblical students now acknowledge the intervention of ages, compared to which the whole era of our race is but as the progression of the shadow one degree on the dial of time. Our whole written materials concerning all these ages are comprehended in the few introductory words of the Mosaic narrative, and for well-nigh

1 Sir Thomas Browne. Hydriotaphia, er Urn Burial.

INTRODUCTION. 5 * and its patriarchal age was long past, when Cosmogony and Geology had their rise. Now at length when the studies of many generations . have furnished materials for Astronomy, and the history of the earth’s crust is being patiently unravelled by numerous independent labourers, some students of the past have inquired if the annals of our own race may not also be recoverable. Men with zeal no less earnest than that which. has done so much for Astronomy and Geology, have found that this also lay around the older generations, recorded in characters no less intelligible, and containing the history of beings no less intcresting to us than the Saurians or Mammoths, to whose inheritance we have sueceeded. Bacon has remarked, in treating of the vicissitudes of things,! “The great winding-sheets that bury all things in oblivion, are two—deluges and earthquakes.” But the weft of our historic winding-sheet is of a feebler texture, and its unneted folds envelop an ampler oblivion, which also will yield secrets worth the knowing. Not a day passes that some fact is not stored in that strange treasury, some of them wittingly, but far more unwittingly, as the chronicles of man. To decipher these and to apply them as the elements of a new historic chronometry, are the legitimate ends of Archeology. Slowly and grudgingly is its true position conceded to the study of the archeologist. The world has had its laugh at him, not always without reason. The antiquary, indeed, in our own day, has taken the first of the laugh himself, feeling that it was not unmerited, so long as he was the mere gatherer of shreds from the tattered and, waste leaves of the past. Now, however, when these same shreds are being pieced together and read anew, it is found that they well repay the labours both of collector and decipherer. But Archeology is yet in its infancy. Little more has been done for it than to accumulate and classify a few isolated facts. We are indeed only learning the ‘meaning of the several characters in which its records are engrossed. The history of one of the oldest and most faithfully studied branches of the science, may afford an example, as well as encouraging assurance, for the whole. In 1636 the learned Jesuit, Father Kirchner, published his “ Qidipus Zigyptiacus,” a ponderous treatise on Egyptian hieroglyphics, completed in siz folios, containing abundance of Icarning, and no lack of confident assurance, but never a word of truth in the whole.” It is a fair specimen of the labours of hieroglyphic students down to the year 1799, when M. Bouchard, a French officer of : 1 Bacon’s Essays, LVIIL e

= reasonings tegarding them. They are the fossils of an extinct order of things newer than the tertiary ; of an extinct race, of an extinct religion, of a state of society and « class of enterprises which the world saw once, but. which it will never sec again ; and with but little assistance from ‘the direct testimony of history; one has to grope one’s way along this eomparatively moder formation, gpided chiefly, as in the more antient deposits, by the clue of circumstantial evidence. 1 * Such are the reflections of an intelligent geologist, suggested. bya 2 similar ‘combination.of geologieal and historic. seliod to that whigh offers itself to the visitor of ofr great National Museum, Butvit is even in a

* more absolutd sense than the geologist dreams of that the antiquities » , piece on to the geology, and show the researches of the archeologist to follow up the closing data of the older systems without a pause. He labours to build up that most important of _all the branches of paleontology which pertains to ethnological investigations, and which when brought to maturity will be found not less valuable as an element in the elucidation of the history of nations and of mankind, than the grammatical construction and the affiliations of languages, which the ethnologist now chiefly favours. The archeologist: applies to the accumulated facts of his own science the same process of inductive reasoning which the geologist has already employed with such success in investigating still earlier states of being. Both deal with unwritten history, and aim at the recovery of annals long deemed irretrievably erased. Nor is it merely in a parallelism of process, or | a continuity.of subject, that the affinity i is traceable between them. It will be found that they meet on common ground, and dispute the heirship of some of old Time’s bequests. The detritus records archeological as well as geological facts. The more recent alluvial strata ' are the legitimate. property of both ; while above these lie the evidences of still later changes on the earth’s surface—the debris of successive ages, the buried ruins, the entombed works of art, and “the heaps of reedy clay, into which chambered ¢ities melt in their mortality””*—the undisputed heirlooms of the archeologist. The younger science treats, it is true, of recent, periods, when compared with the eras of geological computation, and of a race newer than any of those whose organic remains are classified in the systems into which the strata of the earth’s crust have been grouped. But this race which

1 Hugh Miller’s First Impressions of 2 Ruskin’s Seven Lampsof Architecture, England and its People. p. 66.

the Scandinavian races, including the Anglo-Saxons of the south, and the Norsemen of the Scottish mainland and the Northern Isles. .

. Enduring traces of these hardy colonists still remain to furnish evidence of the source of much of our national character and hereditary customs, The religion of the Angles, the Saxons, the Scottish Norsemen, the Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish Scandinavians, was similar, Christianity, which supplanted so much else, could not root out the memorials of their wild creed, which preserve in the names of the days of the week those of Tyr, Woden, Thur, and Frea, ' favourite deities of the Scandinavian mythology. In Iceland a large portion of the literature of this northern race still survives, in the form of mythic songs, sagas, laws, and other historic treasures. To . this the attention of Danish and Norwegian antiquaries is now devoted with untiring enthusiasm, and already we are possessed of some of its fruits. These are of immense valve to all the nations allied to the common stock, and among them Scotland ranks more directly than any other portion of the British Isles, The promised contribution by the antiquaries of Copenhagen to the written materials of history, of the “ Antiquitates Britannice et Hibernice,,” cannot fail to add a historic era to early Scottish annals, richer in suggestive interest even than the romantic chronicles of the Jong lost “Vinland,” by which, in their “ Antiquitates Americans,” a have added three centuries to the history of the new world, 3 A mingled race now occupies Britain, diverse in name, and still distinct in blood. The names of England and Scotland, however, contradict thecharacter of the maces. While the natives of tlie South retain the name of Angul, the father of the Scandinavian colonists, long since nearly superseded by Germano-Teutonic races, the Celtic Highlanders, and the Lowlanders of the North, alike take that of the Irish Scoti, the conquerors of the older Celtz ; though there is not wanting evidence to show, that the peculiar characteristics of the hardy Lowland race, including those of the whole north-eastern main- Jand, and the Northern Isles, are chiefly derived from the mingled Norse and Saxon blood of a Teutonic ancestry. But older races than the Scandinavian Vikings were cBlonists of the British Isles. Chris-_ tianity has failed to obliterate the traces of the creed of Woden. Still less influential have been the modifications of Teutonic and Scandinavian dialects in supplanting the older Celtic names which cling to every hill, valley, and stream, though the Celtie race has, for nearly

INTRODUCTION. ‘ il has disappeared before the immigration of more powerful nations. Similar ideas are now generally gaining ground among ethnologists. “ Within their own pale,” Dr. Latham remarks, “the Celts were the encroaching family of the oldest, the Romans of the next oldest, and the Anglo-Saxons and Slavonians of the recent periods of history.”} On like grounds to those by which Professor Nillson arrives at the conclusion that the Celta were preceded in the north by other races, Danish and Swedish ethnologists concur in rejecting the idea of the Fins having been the aboriginal race of Scandinavia. The earliest people, whose remains are found accompanied with the primitive class of implements, prior to the introduction of metals, appear to have belonged to a family of different physical character from those of any of the Arian races, and have been supposed to present features of greater affinity to the nations of Northern Asia. Professor Nillson, who has carefully examined the skeletons of the aboriginal Swedish colonists, and especially noted the conformation of their crania, states that they are readily distinguished from all the subsequent inhabitants of Scandinavia. They present the same peculiar form of cranium which has been recognised as existing among several ancient peoples, such as the Iberians or Basques of the Pyrenees, the Lapps and Samoyedes, and the Pelasgi, some traces of whom are still found in Greece.2 The last noted coincidence is of considerable interest, both from the ancient prevalence there of cyclopean architesture, and other traces of primitive arts of unknown antiquity, and alse from its vieinity to the Asiatic centre of aboriginal emigration. Dr. Latham remarks, in reply to the question, “Is there reason to believe that any definite stock or division of our species has become either wholly extinct, or so Incorporated as to be virtually beyond the recognition and analysis of the investigator? With the vast majority of the so-called extinct stocks, this is not the case ;.¢.9., it is not the case with the old Gauls of Gallia, who, though no longer extant, have extant congeners—the Welsh and Gaels. To an extinction of this kind among the better known historic nations of Europe and Asia, the nearest approach is to be found in the history of the Pelasgi”’? It will be of no slight interest if We can trace the congeners of this ancient people among the extinct aborigines of the north of Europe.

1 Natural History of the Varieties of Man, 3 Natural History of Varieties of Man, by by Robert Gordon Latham, M.D., p. 528. - BR. @. Latham, M.D., p. 568.

2 British Association for the Advancement : of Science, Report for 1837, p. 31.

sible task of the historian.- This period past—so momentous in the influence it exercises on all the years that follow—the historian finds himself among materials more manageable in some respects, though not always more trustworthy. He reaches the era of chronicles, records, and, still better, of diplomas, charters, deeds of gift, and the like honest documents, which being written with no thought of posterity by their compilers, aré the only really trustworthy chronicles that posterity has inherited. This historic epoch of Scotland is involved in even more obscurity than that which clouds the dim and " fabulous morning of most nations. We have indeed the few but invaluable allusions of Roman authors supplying important ‘and generally trustworthy data. But it is only a momentary glimpse of sunshine, For the era succeeding we have little better than the perplexing admisture of traditions, facts, and pious legends of monkish chroniclers, furnished with a copiousness sufficiently characteristic of the contrast between the literary legionary of imperial Rome, and ‘the cloistered soldier of her papal successor, Amid these dusty acres of parchment must we glean for older: dynasties and monarchical pedigrees—not seldom tempted to abandon the weedy furrows in disgust or despair. It is with no lack of zeal or courage, however, that _ these soldiers of the Church have encountered the oblivious past into which we still peer with no less resolute inquisitiveness. Bede, Fordun, Wyntoun, Boece, and the other penmen of the cloisters who, more or less accurately, chronicled contemporary history, all vontributed their quota to the thick mists of fable which obscure the earlier annals of the country. Wyntoun, the*best of our Scottish chroniclers, following the example of other monkish historians, begins his work as near the beginning as may be, with a treatise on angels, before proceeding to “manny’s fyrst creatoune!” In the sixth chapter he gets the length of “ Ye Arke of Noe, and of the Spate,” and after treating of Ynde, Egype, Afryk, and many other lands with an enviable and leisurely composure, he at length reaches the threshold of his legitimate subject, and glances, in the thirteenth chapter of his Scottish Chronicles, at “how Bretanne and Irlande lyis.” This, however, is a mere passing notice ; nor is it till after the dedication of,many more successive chapters of his first five books to the general history of the world, that the author of the “ Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland” quits his ample theme, and devotes himself exclusively to the professed object of his investigation, with only

14 SCOTTISH ARCHAEOLOGY.

- such occasional deviations as might be expected from an ecclesiastical historian. ;

With such laborious chroniclers peering into the past, which lay fully five centuries nearer them than it does to us, there might seem little Jeft for the men of this older generation to do. But unhappily the very best of monkish chroniclers must be consulted with caution even-as contemporary historians, and scarcely at all as the reeorders of what passed any length of time prior to their own day ; their information being nearly as trustworthy in regard to Noah and his spate, as to the traditions of generations immediately preceding their own. Lord Hailes begins his annals with the accession of Malcolm Canmore, “ because the history of Scotland previous to that period is involved in obscurity and fable.” ‘Tytler, with even less courage than Lord Hailes, commences orily at the accession of Alexander the Third, “ because it is at this period that our national annals become particularly interesting to the general reader.”

Till recently, the never-failing apology for all obscurities and deficiencies in Scottish history, has been the rape of our muniments _ by Edward and Cromwell. The former spoliation supplied for some centuries an excuse for all degrees of ignorance, inconsistencies, or palpable blunders; and the latter came most conveniently to hand for more recent dalliers in the same pleasant field of historic rambling.« Edward and Cromwell both contributed a helping hand to the obscurity of Scottish history, in so far.as they carried off and destroyed, national records which could ill be spared. The apology, however, has been worth far more to maundering manufacturers of history than the lost muniments were ever likcly to have proved. Not a few of these irrecoverable national records, so long deplored, it begins to be shrewdly suspected, never had any existence. Many more of them, it is found, were not sought for, or they might have been discovered to.have never left their old repositories. Diligent Scottish antiquaries, finding this hereditary wail over lost muniments a very profitless task, have of late years betaken themselves to the study of what remained, and have been rewarded by the recovery of chestloads of dusty charters and deeds of all sorts, of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, containing mines of historie information. “The Scottish chartularies, now printed by various Clubs of literary antiquaries, disclose to us information seareely open to a doubt, concerning old laws, feudal customs, servitude, tenure of property, ecclesiastical corporate rights, the collision of lay and clerical interests, and the final transference of monastic lands to lay proprietors, The old apology, therefore, of muniments lost or destroyed, will no longer-serve the Scottish historian. Imperfectly as these treasures have yet been turned to account, medieval history is no longer obscure. Many fallacies are already exploded, and many more must speedily follow. The legends of the old chroniclers must be tried by the tests of documents written sometimes by the same authors, but with no thought that history would ever question them for the truth.

Yet ample as is the field thus open to the literary antiquary, these will only partially satisfy earnest longings after a knowledge of the past, and a clue to the old ancestral chain whereof they are but the middle links. Ritson has already carried back the supposed

. limits of authentic Caledonian history fully a thousand years before the vbscurity that daunted Lord Hailes: Chalmers, Gregory, Skene, and other zealous investigators, have followed or emulated him in the same bold inquiry. But neither do they reach the BE@rnnine which we still desiderate. Much obscurity indeed vanishes. We begin to discover that the Northern and Southern Picts, so long the subject of mystery and fable, were no other than the aboriginal Celtze ; while the Scots who founded the kingdom of Dalriada, in Argyleshire, and ultimately conferred their name on the whole races occupying ancient Caledonia; were probably, if not indeed certainly, ‘nly another branch of the same Celtic race, who so readily amalgamated with the older occupants of Caledonia, that the change which is known as the “ Scottish Conquest” long puzzled the historian, from the absence of any defined traces of a progress at all commensurate with its results. This is somewhat gained on the medieval beginning which could alone be previously held tenable. But this also begins i in the wake of much progression, and glances at a period which likewise had its old history full of no less interest to us, could its annals be recovered.

In one of the few records of Sir Isaac Newton’s reflections which he has left for the help of others, the following comprehensive thought occurs :—* It is clearly apparent that the inhabitants of this world are of a short date, seeing that all arts, as letters, ships, printing, needle, &., were discovered within the memory of history.” The reflection is surely a very pregnant one. The data it suggests to us as

7 4 16 SCOTTISH ARCHEOLOGY.

the land-marks of time are well worth extending and turning to account, if so be that with their aid we can arrive at some trustworthy system of chronology, whereby to travel back towards that date which we reckon to be the beginning of things.

In this inquiry the labours of the literary antiquary, iv ever zealously pursued, will but little avail us in reaching the desired point. The antiquary, nevertheless, has been long familiar with the elements of this older history, though turning them to very much the same profitable account as, till a very recent period, he did the hieroglyphic records graven on the granite tablets along the Nile. The first of arts mentioned by Newton is letters ; justly first in point of dignity and universal value. Far homelier arts, however, sufficed the primitive races of mankind. Humble were their wants, and " limited their desires; and if we are justified by the records of creation preserved to us in the Mosaic narrative, in as$uming that - man, beginning with the woven garment of fig-leaves and the coat of skins, has slowly progressed through successive stages to the knowledge of nobler arts, and the higher wants of an intelligent being, then we have only to establish evidence of the most primitive arts, pertaining to the primeval race, in order to be assured that we have reached the true beginning at which we aim. In the general investigation, indeed, allowance must be made for the speedy loss of antediluvian metallurgic arts which would follow almost of necessity on the exodus of the primitive nomades from their Eastern birthland, though preserved perhaps by the founders of the first Asiatic kingdoms, and probably practised by the earliest colonists of the Nile valley. Such at least we shall find to have been the case with the _ primeval colonists of Britain. f

This point it is at which the modern areheologist now directs hiy inquiries, not altogether without the anticipation that these same primitive arts, the product of the beginning of things, may also prove to contain a decipherable alphabet, which may be resolved into definite phonetics, and furnish the key to many inscriptions no Jess curious and valuable than the parchments of medieval chartcr-chests, or even the tablet of Abydos and the Rosetta Stone.

It is long since the evidences of a primitive state of socicty, still abounding in the midst of modern civilisation, attracted the attention of the antiquary. It was indeed almost a necessary consequence of the accumulation of large collections of antiquities. The private hoards of “ nick nackets,”—including in general a miscellaneous assortment of relics of all ages, only sufficient to produce a confused notion of useless or obsolete arts, without creating a definite idea of any single era of the past,—may be aptly compared to the disjecta membra of some beautifully-proportioned and decorated vase., Hoarded apart, the pieces are nearly without value, and to new possessors become even meaningless. But should the whole, by some fortunate chance, be re-assembled in a single collection, it becomes possible for a skilful manipulator to piece the fragments together, and replace them with an elegant and valuable work of art. Thus it has proved with more than one archeological museum. In 1780 the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland was established, and its collection of national antiquities begun. A brief but most suggestive paper, read at one of its meetings in 1782, and published in the first volume of its Transactions, shews the speedy results of such valuable reconstructions, by means of an intelligent comparison of the primitive relics of Scotland.) But the resources of private zeal proved inadequate to the effective pursuit of these researches into Scottish Archeology, and the national funds found other, though not always more valuable objects for their expenditure. The hint was lost, but the accumulation of materials for future students was happily not altogether abandoned.

“ About forty years ago,” says J. J. A. Worsaae, the eminent Danish antiquary, writing in 1846, “ the general character of, scientifie pursuits was in our country (Denmark) much the same as in most other parts of Europe. Great pains were spent in collecting all sorts of objects illustrating the changes of the globe upon which we live, and the distribution and habits of animals and plants—in short,

all the departments of Natural History ; whilst, strange to say, people for the most part neglected traces of men, the remains not only of their own ancestors, but also of all the different races who have been spread over the world. The antiquities, with the exception of those of Roman and Greek origin, were regarded as mere curiosities, without any scientific value.”? Notwithstanding all the zeal of British archeologists of late years, so much of this spirit still remains among us, that it de An Inquiry ' into the Expedients used . ** The Antiquities of Ireland and Den-

by the Scots before the Discovery of Metals,” mark; being the substance of-two eommu-

by W. C. Little, of Libberton, Esq. Archeo- nications made to the Royal Irish Academy

logia Scotica, vol. i. p. 389. at its Meetings, Nov. 80, and Dec. 7, 1846.” B

18 SCOTTISH ARCHAOLOGY.

would be easier, perhaps, even now, to secure the purchase by the Trustees of the British Museum, of a Roman statue or an Egyptian tablet, than of valuable relics of British antiquity.

One man has within the last thirty years accomplished, not for Denmark only, but for Europe, what the whole united labours of earlier archeologists failed to do. About the year 1815, the present Danish Councillor of State, C. J. Thomsen, the son of a merchant of Copenhagen, was appointed Secretary of a Royal Commission for the preservation and collection of national antiquities. It had then been in existence some seven or eight years, and the whole result of its labours was a few. miscellaneous articles, unclassified and uncared for, lying in a small room of the University Library. His enthusiasm in the study of the antiquities of his country surmounted all obstacles. He had to contend alike with the theories of the scholar and the prejudices of the unjearned. But he had succeeded to a position of the utmost value to a man of énergy and enthusiasm. From the first he had grants (though exceedingly small ones) of public asency at his disposal, He soon enlisted the more important element of public sympathy, and nationality of feeling, in his pursuits. His little room became too small for accumulating purchases and donations. A suite of apartments was yielded, at his intercession, in the Royal Palace of Christiansborg ; and ag the varied collection increased in his hands, he found himself possessed at once of the space and the elements for systematic classification. .

The Royal Museum of Northern Antiquities of Copenhagen now numbers between three and four thousand specimens of stone weapons and implements, some hundreds of bronze swords, celts, spear-heads, armille, tores, &c., and a eollection of native gold and silver relies unequalled in all the museums of Europe. To it we owe the valuable suggestion of the system of classification now universally adopted in the nomenclature of archzological science—the Stone, Bronze, and Iron periods, which, simple as it may appear, was first suggested by Mr. Thomsen, and is justly esteemed the foundation of Archeology as a science. By means of it the whole materials of antiquarian study at once arrange themselves according to an intelligible chronology of universal acceptance, and adapted in an especial degree to Northern antiquities. This, therefore, is the system on which fhe following data are arranged,. subject only to such modifications as scem naturally to arise from national or local peculiarities.