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time of the English Civil War in the seventeenth century. This left room for a thousand
years of Celtic Christianity. The key ingredients for the making of Gaelic Scotland can be
found in the syncretism which occurred between the Gaelic monastic church and Celtic
paganism and related social institutions. In the long run, Celtic culture would prove to
be relatively tenacious in maintaining its Heroic institutions in the face of outside
pressure.
Notwithstanding the unique identity of the
Picts and Gaels, a basic Heroic pattern of life was shared by all the Heroic kingdoms in
the North. This was partly the result of their common links to late Iron Age
Indo-European
culture, but more immediately this similarity was the result of mutual cultural leveling
after nearly two hundred years of local conflict between these kingdoms. The stakes of war
were high, but warfare itself was to some extent conventionalized and even ritualized,
with an emphasis on individual combat. The very fact that these four kingdoms were able to
remain in "the game" for several hundred years points to similarity in society
and military technology. Intermarriage between royal houses and alliances across
linguistic boundaries were common, and the evidence from physical anthropology reveals that
the people involved basically looked alike, even if they couldn’t understand one
another. However, other evidence suggests that the leaders were often bilingual. In any
case, British and Pictish were both dialects of P—Celtic, while Gaelic, also a Celtic
language, could not be too far removed from its P—Celtic cousins.
The Heroic period began with the departure of
the Romans, and ended with the coming of the Norse at the beginning of the ninth century.
The economy in the Heroic North was pastoral and to some extent agrarian: It was not based
upon cities and towns. There was some coinage, of late Roman influence, but the basic unit
of exchange was the cow. The king or chief had his dun, or fort, and his drinking
hall,
but these were not medieval stone castles by any means. Society was "heroic" in
that martial valor was regarded as the principal aristocratic virtue. Society was
economically, materially and spiritually directed towards the use and maintenance of the
warband. Warfare was the major activity.
The typical tribal kingdom in the North
consisted of kindreds, stratified hierarchically, but a limited mobility between castes
was aided by fosterage and blood-brother relationships between kindreds. The royal kindred
was at the top of the social hierarchy, followed respectively by priests, warriors,
freeman-farmers and slaves. In the pagan period, society acted within the limited confines
of certain sacred gessa or taboos (restrictions), and these applied especially to the
sacral king and to the priests (for instance, in Northumbria, priests could not ride
horses). Bloodfeud was common in the earlier period between kindreds within the tribe, but
especially between kingdoms. Bloodfeud was reduced in the Christian period, especially
within the tribe, by the establishment of a "wergild" or "man-price"
for each level of the social hierarchy, so that payment would replace a cycle of
vengeance. |
