WARLORDS, HOLY MEN AND MATRILINEAL SUCCESSION

Abstract

The author of Scandinavian Kings in the British Isles and of Celtic Leinstet1 has acquired a formidable reputation for scholarship and controversy and his incursion into Scottish history has been eagerly awaited. Expectations have not been disappointed. In Warlords and Holy Men Dr. Smyth has produced a splendid and spirited book. He has used his knowledge of Irish and also of Anglo-Saxon history to point apt and often novel comparisons and, as in Celtic Leinster, he makes the reader conscious of the influence of landscape and geography on the shaping of history. The book is written throughout with great verve and freshness of style, always readable and frequently compelling, a remarkable achievement given the difficult and intractable nature of the raw material. There are, however, no half measures with Dr Smyth: his point of view is always pressed strongly and often provocatively. In his first chapter 'Britons in the Shadow of the Roman Wall' he emphasises that neither the Antonine Wall nor Hadrian's Wall is to be seen as a limit, as a clearly defined physical frontier marking the boundary of the Roman Empire. Rather they are to be seen as a means of monitoring and patrolling a frontier area which extended from the Peak District to the Forth. 'Part of the reason why chaos reigns in Romano-British studies as to the correct chronology and sequence of occupations of the Antonine and Hadrianic Walls in the period AD 150-207,' he writes, 'is the insistence of historians in assuming that either one wall or the other must have marked the absolute limits of empire at any given time.' (pp 9-12) Another theme of the chapter is the fifth-century British revival in the North, which is compared to the fourteenth-century Gaelic revival in Ireland. Smyth portrays the Gwyr y Gogledd, the Britons of the North, as they re-emerge on the historical record in the fifth century, as little affected by the centuries of Roman occupation, their archaic culture continuing almost unchanged into the seventh century until shattered by the kings of Northumbria, and particularly by Ecgfrith. It is a mistake to view the north British rulers of this period as sub-Roman successors of client kings, says Smyth; rather they were 'a full-blooded barbarian Celtic aristocracy accoutred in Iron Age tores', apparently 'untouched by even the thinnest veneer of Romanization' (p. 18). This emphasis on continuity does provide valuable insights, not least on relations between Britons and Picts, but the argument here is surely overdone. Like many before him Dr Smyth urges caution about the use of the name 'Pict': the name is essentially a historical one, a loose description of people living north of the Antonine Wall. It is a mistake to associate the term 'Pict' too closely with one set of material remains or place-name elements to the exclusion of others. On the other