"Picts" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the invasion of barbarous tribes, and Valentinian now made his son Gratian his heir, in order to remove all doubt as to the succession. The Saxon pirates, meantime, harassed all the coasts of Gaul, while Britain was invaded by the Picts and Scots. Theodosius, however, defeated them, and was soon after sent to quell an insurrection in Africa. This he succeeded in doing, when Valentinian ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... Moyle and the bonnie blue hills of Scotland, divided from Ulster at this point by only twenty miles of sea path. The Irish or Gaels or Scots of 'Uladh' often crossed in their curraghs to this lovely coast of Alba, then inhabited by the Picts. Here, 'when the tide drains out wid itself beyant the rocks,' we sit for many an hour, perhaps on the very spot from which they pushed off their boats. The Mull of Cantire runs out sharply toward ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Rome itself from invading hordes of savages, the unhappy Britons had forgotten how to govern and how to defend themselves, and fell an easy prey to the many enemies waiting to pounce on their defenceless country. Picts from Scotland invaded the north, and Scots from Ireland plundered the west; worst of all, the heathen Angles and Saxons, pouring across the seas from their homes in the Elbe country, wasted the land with ...
— Stories from Le Morte D'Arthur and the Mabinogion • Beatrice Clay
... traditions are of the fighting Picts and Scots, and when history began to notice the existence of the Orkneys it was to chronicle the struggle between Harold, King of Norway, and his rebellious subjects who had fled to the Orkneys to escape his tyrannical control. And of the danger zones of every kind which followed—of storm and battle ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... fertile and beautiful valley, between Axminster and Colyton, was waged the great battle of Brunanburgh between the men of Wessex led by Athelstan and the Ethelings, and Anlaf the Dane, an alien Irish King, who captained the Picts and Scots. Five Kings (of sorts), seven Earls, and the Bishop of Sherborne were killed, but the victory was with the defenders. Athelstan founded a college to commemorate the battle and its result, and caused ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... his original paper for the Society of Antiquaries on the Sculpturing of Cups and Rings, he wished to ascertain all the localities and conditions of their occurrence. After describing the sculptured circles and cups which had been found on the stones of weems and "Picts' Houses," he referred to the caves on the coast of Fife, which he suggested might be considered as natural weems or habitations. These he had visited in the hope of discovering cup-markings; and in one near the village of Easter ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... that directed against the shedding of the blood of one's own kin. There are indications, too, that some at any rate of the tribes inhabiting these countries reckoned kinship through the mother, as in fact continued to be the case among the Picts of Scotland into historic times. It does not follow, as we know from other countries, that the pre-Aryan tribes of Gaul and Britain, or indeed the Aryan tribes themselves in their earliest stage, regarded their original ancestors as human. Certain names of deities such as Tarvos (the bull), ...
— Celtic Religion - in Pre-Christian Times • Edward Anwyl
... the close of this early historic period in connection with Horncastle there is little more to be said. The Roman forces withdrew from Britain about A.D. 408. The Britons harried by their northern neighbours, the Picts and Scots, applied for assistance to the Saxons, who, coming at first as friends, but led to stay by the attractions of the country, gradually over-ran the land and themselves in turn over-mastered the Britons, driving them into ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter
... suppose, that he desired the same inversion of every part of life, as of the use of tea. The proposal of drinking tea sour showed, indeed, such a disposition to practical paradoxes, that there was reason to fear, lest some succeeding letter should recommend the dress of the Picts, or the cookery of the Eskimaux. However, I met with no other innovations, and, therefore, was willing to hope, that he found ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... Ireland, the flower of Celtic lands, in which a system of great age and undoubted civilization was then fast falling to pieces, afforded a tempting battlefield in the everlasting feuds between chief and chief; Scotland, where the power of the Picts was waning, while that of the Scots had not taken firm hold on the country, and most of all the islands in the Scottish Main, Orkney, Shetland, and the outlying Faroe Isles;—all these were his chosen abode. In those islands he took deep root, ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... repulsed. While the Persian advance was checked by the obstinate patriotism of Armenia, Valens reduced the Goths to submission, and his Western colleague drove the Germans out of Gaul and recovered Britain from the Picts. The Empire had fully held its own through twelve years of incessant warfare; and if there were serious indications of exhaustion in the dwindling of the legions and the increase of the barbarian ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... Orkneys, finding the wood all gone there; and is remembered to this day. Einar, being come to these islands by King Harald's permission, to see what he could do in them,—islands inhabited by what miscellany of Picts, Scots, Norse squatters we do not know,—found the indispensable fuel all wasted. Turf-Einar too may be regarded as a benefactor to his kind. He was, it appears, a bastard; and got no coddling from his father, who disliked him, partly perhaps, because "he was ugly and blind of an ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... confused and uncertain, as would perhaps be natural fully 60 years before the advent of St. Augustine, and when Britain was helplessly harassed with its continual struggle in the fierce hands of West Saxons and East Saxons, of Picts and conquering Angles. Men have little time to record celestial happenings clearly, much less to indulge in scientific comment and theorising upon natural phenomena, when the history of a nation sways to and fro with the tide of battle, and what is gained ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... as commander-in-chief into Britain with an army to check the incursions of the Picts and Scots.—II. Ursicinus, commander of the infantry, is attacked by calumnies, and dismissed.—III. An eclipse of the sun—A discussion on the two suns, and on the causes of solar and lunar eclipses, and the various changes and shapes of the moon.—IV. ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... the mouth of the riuer of Loire, which diuideth Aquitaine from Gall Celtike, where they tooke land within the dominion of a king called Goffarius, surnamed Pictus, by reason he was descended of the people Agathyrsi, otherwise [Sidenote: Goffarius surnamed Pictus Les annales d'Aquitaine.] named Picts, bicause they used to paint their faces and bodies, insomuch that the richer a man was amongst them, the more cost he bestowed in [Sidenote: Agathyrsi, otherwise called Picts, of painting their bodies. Marcellus Plinie. Herodotus ...
— Chronicles (1 of 6): The Historie of England (2 of 8) - The Second Booke Of The Historie Of England • Raphael Holinshed
... suitably maintain so great a host, they again sever. Halfdene, who would seem to have joined them recently, takes a large part of the army away with him northward. Settling his head-quarters by the river Tyne, he subdues all the land, and "ofttimes spoils the Picts and the Strathclyde Britons." Among other holy places in those parts, Halfdene visits the Isle of Lindisfarne, hoping perhaps in his pagan soul not only to commit ordinary sacrilege in the holy places there, which is every-day work for the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... would be absurd, as that wretched place must share the fate of Montreal. Our fleet sailed this morning. The French troops, apparently about two thousand, lined their different works, and were in general clothed as regulars, except a very few Canadians and about fifty naked Picts or savages, their bodies being painted of a reddish color and their faces of different colors, which I plainly discerned with my glass. Their light cavalry, who paraded along shore, seemed to be well appointed, clothed in blue, faced with scarlet; ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... the central government of the Empire was so weak that it was unable to reestablish a firm administration. During the same period barbarian invaders were making frequent inroads into Britain. The Picts and Scots from modern Scotland, Saxon pirates, and, later, ever increasing swarms of Angles, Jutes, and Frisians from across the North Sea ravaged and ultimately occupied parts of the borders and the coasts. ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... been placed to warn the seamen from the most dangerous rocks. If you had asked the captain of the Columbine about his route, he would have told you that he must steer past Cape Noness, then close to the Isle of Mousa, with its ancient castle built in the time of the Picts; Bressay Island would next come in sight, and then the tall lighthouse which guards Lerwick Harbour. He might have told you, too, that upon that January morning he was starting with only one passenger on board—an elderly woman who was leaving her home in the south of ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... Selden in his notes observes, this assertion must be understood with many grains of allowance; and ought only to signify, as the truth seems to be, that there never was any formal exchange of one system of laws for another: though doubtless by the intermixture of adventitious nations, the Romans, the Picts, the Saxons, the Danes, and the Normans, they must have insensibly introduced and incorporated many of their own customs with those that were before established: thereby in all probability improving the texture and wisdom of the whole, by the accumulated wisdom of divers particular countries. ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... we hear of the Picts, about whom there is infinite learning but little knowledge. They must have spoken Gaelic by Severus's time (208), whatever their original language; and were long recognised in Galloway, where the hill ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... their refinement, and protecting them from the inroads of the Picts and Scots, the Romans were regarded in a friendly light by the ancient inhabitants, and their departure was much regretted. It became necessary, however, that the Britons should elect a chief from their own nation. Their military ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... Kells is now in Trinity College, Dublin. It is also known as the Gospel of St. Columba. St. Columba came, as the Chronicle of Ethelwerd states, in the year 565: "five years afterwards Christ's servant Columba came from Scotia (Ireland) to Britain, to preach the word of God to the Picts." ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... since, and which even finds its place in the matchless story of Ivanhoe, or in that striking novelette by Charles Mackay, "The Camp of Refuge," that they called themselves or were called "Saxons," is now utterly exploded among historians. It is true the Welsh, the Picts, and Scots called them by that designation, and do still; {iii} but they had but one name for themselves, as the pages of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle make manifest—"Englishmen." Nor did their Norman conquerors affect to call them by any other title, although in ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... a common practice of the belles of this time. 'The Spectator', No. 41, contains a bitter attack on the painted ladies whom it calls the "Picts." ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... the seventh and eighth centuries, the high scholarship of the Irish monks and their enthusiastic love of learning for its own sake drew to their schools students of the noblest rank from both England and France.[891] It was from Irish teachers that the Picts of Scotland and the Angles of northern England received their first lessons in Christianity. These fixed their mission stations again on islands, on Iona off southwestern Scotland and on Lindisfarne or Holy ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... it in their might and their valour, and their irresistible fury, and they have taken away Deirdre in their swift chariots, and have gone eastwards to the Muirnicht with intent to cross the sea northwards, and abide henceforth with their prize in the land of the Picts and of the Albanah, beyond the stormy currents ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... whatever period it became distinct from its now larger Irish relative, it was recognised as a native dog in Scotland in very early times, and it was distinguished as being superior in strength and beauty to the hounds of the Picts. ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton |
