Early Scotland: The Picts, the Scots and the Welsh of Southern Scotland

by Hector Munro Chadwick

Hector Munro Chadwick (1870 - 1947) was a literary critic and historian, who made notable contributions to the development of philology. Originally published in 1949, this book was edited and completed after Chadwick's death by his wife, Nora Kershaw Chadwick (1891 - 1972), another prominent literary scholar. The text presents a detailed study of life in early Scotland, encompassing the Picts, the Scots, and the Welsh of southern Scotland. Numerous illustrative figures and detailed notes are also included. This is a fascinating book that will be of value to anyone with an interest in Scottish and Celtic history.

171 pages, Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1949

About the author

Hector Munro Chadwick, Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge, married to Nora Chadwick, worked during his career to integrate history and archaeology into the study of the philology of Old English.

Reviews

[Flint Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

In his time, Hector Munro Chadwick was the preeminent scholar on British culture. This book was actually published by his wife two years after he died, in 1949. It is therefore his most developed work. As a graduate student, I worked through this book and appreciated its readability. Professor Chadwick was also not afraid to be wrong, and was therefore able to make some theories that were far from apparent to his contemporaries. Particularly in this work, his ideas about the nature of Vortigern were not taken from mainstream thinking. They were so independent that I found myself pondering if he might be right. My work on the relative chronology of Britain stems from him. For that I am grateful.

[Apocryphal Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a seminal book on dark ages Scotland was written by one of the pioneers in the field, a scholar of Anglo-Saxon and founder of the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic at the University of Cambridge. It was published posthumously by his wife and partner in studies, Nora K. Chadwick, who was no slouch either and noted for her work with Beowulf and in celtic studies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hector_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nora_K....

This book deals with the early history of Scotland from roughly the end of the Roman occupation of Britain to the demise of the Picts c. AD840. It focuses mainly on the Picts, but does devote some space to the Scots of Dunadd, the Irish (and especially the Cruithne, or Irish Picts) and to the Brythonic kingdoms of southern Scotland.

The back cover blurb claims that the book "presents a detailed study of life in early Scotland" but it does no such thing. You won't learn a stitch about what life was like during this time - no, instead the book devotes almost all of its words to figuring out who exactly were the Picts, Scots, Gall-gaidel, and Men of the North who inhabited the country that would become Scotland, who their kings were, and in what order they reigned. If you're looking for what life was like during the dark ages, you'll be disappointed here.

Luckily, I don't mind such studies, and find the analysis of early medieval chronologies (to which much of the book is devoted) to be at least somewhat interesting. I do have to admit, though, that the contents through the early middle of the book were somewhat dry, even for me, as it seems to cover the same ground more than once.

My interest peaked at the end, however, when it got into the chapters devoted to Dalriada and especially the British Kingdoms, because this is a particular fascination of mine. I never tire of hearing about Coel Hen, Rydderch Hael, Cunedda, and those Gododdin boys. We know so little of the period and place that any history takes on a mythical quality. I also have to give Chadwick bonus points for his citation of one of the quirkiest 'history' books I know: Galloway Gossip. I invite you to take a look at this marvel here: http://archive.org/stream/gallowaygos...

Although I enjoyed this book and have a lot of respect for the author, I find it hard to recommend. If you have a casual interest in the place and period, then I'd suggest you hunt down something more recent, and can recommend Tim Clarkson as a more up-to-date and accessible author. If you're looking for something more in depth, then you should look elsewhere as well, I'm afraid - check out the Edinburgh history series instead. If you interested in learning more about how historians have come to know what they do about this period, then by all means get yourself a copy if this book and enjoy.

Finally, I'd like to give another nod to Nora Chadwick, who wrote a loving and poetic introduction. I'll share a bit of that with you here:

"The country is thickly studded with structures which provide a continuous record in stone and earth... The country is a museum of three millennia, with all its exhibits in situ. The monuments of past history are representative of all periods and all ways of life - hill-top cities; great camps, well constructed on Roman and Gaulish models, tall broch towers, marvels of purely native architectural development; innumerable little castles and promontory forts; underground passages and chambers, connected in some mysterious way with the living sites above; and earliest of all, great circles and avenues of stone, and barrows where, as the Scottish peasants have told me, 'Great generals were buried lang syne, lang syne'.