“At the present time there are in Britain … five languages and four nations— English, British, Irish, and Picts. Each of these have their own language; but all are united in their study of God's truth by the fifth— Latin.”

Writing in ca. 731, from a small but important monastery in Northumbria, Bede's geopolitical perspective has largely informed our understanding of the Picts. His Ecclesiastical History of the English People is the primary source for any study of the British Isles in this period. To each of his linguistic nations Bede parcels out a territory, origin myth, and identity. Along with the other contemporary discursive source on the Picts, Abbot Adomnán of Iona's Life of St Columba, it has promoted a vision of an isolated people adrift from time: more denizens of a Celtic Twilight than participants in the dynamic cultural shifts that Bede and Adomnán ascribe to their own people. Countering this vision has proven difficult without Pictish texts, but is currently being overcome. New archaeological finds and research approaches are radically altering our perspective. The Picts are now being re- imagined as cultural agents, ably negotiating their place among the four contesting nations to often dominate the northern British political landscape.

When and Where?

The Picts appear in documentary records between the third to tenth centuries, after which they transitioned into the kingdom of Alba in alliance with their Dál Riata (Scots) neighbours. Terms used to define this period vary across the disciplines and, while the chronological span includes the late Iron Age to the medieval period, for simplicity it will here be referred to as Early Medieval. The territory of the Picts corresponded to modern eastern and northern Scotland and included Orkney, Shetland, and the Outer Hebrides. It is a landscape delineated by lochs, rivers, seaways, glens, pastures, forests, and mountainous ranges through which people travelled and ideas and goods were disseminated. The Firth of Forth provided a southern border with the Gododdin Britons (Brythonic Celtic-speaking) who by ca. 600 CE were displaced or engulfed by Anglo-Saxon expansion from Bernicia. In the south-west, the Strathclyde Britons (also Brythonic speakers) mostly held on to the stronghold of Alt Clut (Dumbarton) over this period and controlled the region around the River Clyde and Loch Lomond.