There were almost certainly Scots, that is, Celts, Irish Gaels, who settled in Scotland before the main settlements in Dalriada on the west coast of present day Scotland, in the 5th. and 6th. centuries, apparently with the permission of the Picts. There is also evidence to show that Gaels settled in the area round Dundee at an early stage and have given their name to the city. The place we now call Scotland, Alba in Gaelic, means ‘white’, which is what the first Celts who landed on these shores would have seen in the cliffs of Dover, and the name was originally applied to the whole island from the Isle of Wight to the far north of Scotland including the Orkneys. The original Celts were Brythons or Britons, arriving in Alba, perhaps about 500 B.C. The evidence shows that their pre-Roman name was Pretanni or something similar and they could have been called Pritons, but became Pridain/Pryden, which certain newcomers, to these shores, Anglo-Saxons, took as meaning, ‘Picts’. To complicate matters we must note that these Brythons, were known as Cruithne to the Scots and Irish. These Brythons had replaced or coexisted with now unknown previous inhabitants of these islands. The Picts were Celts, a branch of the Brythons, possessing greater linguistic similarities with the Brythons than with the Scots. They arrived later than the Brythons and the Gaels, possibly at the latter end of the B.C. period, and settled in the Hebrides, Orkneys and northern mainland of Scotland. Eventually they moved southwards and took over the hegemony from the Brythons, before succumbing to the Scots and Norse in the 9th century. At this time it is reckoned that Gaelic was the language understood, if not spoken, by all the Picts and Brythons who had merged with them. Norse would also be one of the main languages of Scotland, as the place names show.

The connection between Gaels and Brythons becomes clearer when you understand that one of the major differences between these two Celtic peoples was the use of ‘P’ and ‘C’. The original sound which gave rise to these letters developed as a ‘P’ by the Brythons, (Pryden) and the ‘C’ sound pronounced as a ‘K’ (philologists refer to it as a ‘Q’ sound) by the Scots. Prenn in Brythonic, and Crann in Gaelic both meant trees, and the similarity is obvious. Similarly, pen in B., and ceann in G., both meaning ‘head’. Other words like dun G. and din, B. both meaning fortress, hill, show the closeness of the tongues, and also how in time they could degenerate into ‘toun and ton’, probably helped by the Norse ‘tún’, pronounced ‘toon’.

The Norse had been around here for some time but we only regard them as invaders from about the late 8th. century. More of them later.

Similarly, the Saxons, Sassenach in Gaelic, had joined with the Scots and the Picts in the attacks on the Brythons as reported by Roman writers in the mid 4th. century. After the Romans left ‘Britannia’, at the beginning of the 5th. century, Angles and Saxons, (the Scots always referred to them as Saxons) invaded present day England and established fiefdoms in the south, north, and east of England. The native Brythons were pushed to the west and called, Welsh, which comes from the Anglo-Saxon word Wealas, which was adapted from a Celtic source, meaning ‘a Celt, Briton’. However in England a secondary meaning developed implying, ‘foreigner, slave’, which is rather petty, totally inaccurate, and unfortunately spewed out on hundreds of websites. The Norse called the Celts Valir,(pronounced-Wallir) indeed they called the non-Frankish part of France, Val-land, and Julius Caesar mentions a Celtic tribe the Volcae. The name of William Wallace, the great hero of Scotland, also comes from this Celtic source.

The Angles formed an area they called Bernicia in the mid 6th. century, which is claimed reached to the Firth of Forth by the 7th. century. Now just because you throw your towel on a sunlounger, does not mean you own it. Similarly, Angles may indeed have seen the Firth of Forth, but left no settlements there. Din Eidyn (Edinburgh) was not besieged or captured in 638 by Angles. There was a battle of Glenmorisain, unidentified but probably in the north of Scotland, between Scots under Domnal Breac, according to the Ulster Annals, an ally of the Bernicians, against the Brythons in that year, which the Brythons won, but no mention of Angles. There also was mention of a siege at Etan or Etain, which has not been satisfactorily identified, but that is all. The Anglo Saxon Chronicle makes no mention at all of this year.

Eadwine of Northumberland had his capital Bebbanburch, modern Bamborough, (the local Brythons had named it Din Guayroi centuries before) burned in 623 by Irish/Scots, and then was killed in 633 in Northumberland, and gave his name to nowhere in Scotland. The academic/non academic howls of anguish from certain quarters are indeed that—academic, since Bernicia quite disappeared in the 7th./8th. centuries, subsumed in an area called Northumberland, severely attacked by the Norsemen in the 8th. century and which was occupied by them in the 9th. , 10th and 11th. centuries.

The Scots meanwhile had been expanding their territory at the expense of the Brythons and the Picts, although the latter had some notable victories over the Scots, and indeed in the 8th. century, under their king, Angus, took over from the Scots. It was only in the 9th. century when the Picts had been severely weakened by the incursions of the Norsemen, aided by Kenneth MacAlpin, that the Scots under Kenneth MacAlpin finally imposed some sort of Scots hegemony, in tandem with the Norse, over great parts of Scotland by 839. There were still areas such as the Brythonic Strathclyde, and the Norse Isle of Man, Dumfries and Galloway, much of the Western Isles, Orkney and Shetland, areas round Aberdeen and probably areas down to the Tweed, including Berwick, which were under Norse influence and settlement. Lack of recognition of this fact has caused lots of etymological confusion and misunderstanding of the origin of the Scots non Gaelic tongue, which most certainly had Norse, not Anglo-Saxon, as a major contributor.

In the 10th. century, as in the 9th. century, the Scots were allied to the Norsemen, and King Constantine of Scots joined with Anlaf, Norse king of Dublin and York in attacking Aethelstan the Saxon king at Brunanburh, possibly at the mouth of the Humber, or more probably, at Bromborough (Brumby), near Liverpool, in 937. Tennyson in his translation of the Saxon poem on this conflict mentions the Vikings and the Scots and says they returned to ‘Difelin and Iraland’, Dublin and Ireland. This did not stop Anlaf becoming king of York and Northumbria in 941, nor the Norseman Amlaib, who had fought against Aethelstan and had been king of York and Northumbria from 939 to 941. Indeed, Brunanburh, seems to have been a dress rehearsal for the real thing. According to the poem, it is said that the Norsemen bragged of having ‘had the better in perils of battle’.