Scoti or Scotti is a Latin name for the Gaels, [1] first attested in the late 3rd century. It originally referred to all Gaels, first those in Ireland and then those who had settled in Great Britain as well, but it later came to refer only to Gaels in northern Britain. [1] The kingdom to which their culture spread became known as Scotia or Scotland, and eventually all its inhabitants came to be known as Scots.
An early use of the word can be found in the Nomina Provinciarum Omnium (Names of All the Provinces), which dates to about AD 312. This is a short list of the names and provinces of the Roman Empire. At the end of this list is a brief list of tribes deemed to be a growing threat to the Empire, which included the Scoti, as a new term for the Irish. [2] There is also a reference to the word in St Prosper's chronicle of AD 431 where he describes Pope Celestine sending St Palladius to Ireland to preach "ad Scotti in Christum" ("to the Scots who believed in Christ"). [3]
Thereafter, periodic raids by Scoti are reported by several later 4th and early 5th century Latin writers, namely Pacatus, [4] Ammianus Marcellinus, [5] Claudian [6] and the Chronica Gallica of 452. [7] Two references to Scoti have been identified in Greek literature (as Σκόττοι), in the works of Epiphanius, Bishop of Salamis, writing in the 370s. [8] The fragmentary evidence suggests an intensification of Scoti raiding from the early 360s, culminating in the so-called "barbarian conspiracy" of 367–368, and continuing up to and beyond the end of Roman rule c. 410. The location and frequency of attacks by Scoti remain unclear, as do the origin and identity of the Gaelic population-groups who participated in these raids. [9]
By the 5th century, the Gaelic or Scottish kingdom of Dál Riata had emerged in the area of modern Scotland that is now Argyll. Although this kingdom was destroyed and subjugated by the Pictish kingdom of the 8th century under Angus I, the convergence of Pictish and Gaelic languages over several centuries resulted in the English labelling Pictland under Constantine II as Scottish in the early 10th century, first attested in AD 920, viewing the Picts as speaking a Gaelic tongue. The growing influence of the English and Scots languages from the 12th century with the introduction of Anglo-French knights and southerly expansion of Scotland's borders by David I saw the terms Scot, Scottish and Scotland also begin to be used commonly by natives of that country. [10] [11]
The etymology of Late Latin Scoti is unclear. It is not a Latin derivation, nor does it correspond to any known Goidelic (Gaelic) term the Gaels used to name themselves as a whole or a constituent population group. Several derivations have been conjectured, but none has gained general acceptance in mainstream scholarship.
In the 19th century, Aonghas MacCoinnich proposed that Scoti came from Gaelic sgaothaich, meaning "crowd" or "horde". [12]
Charles Oman (1910) derived it from Gaelic scuit, meaning someone cut off. He believed it referred to bands of outcast Gaelic raiders, suggesting that the Scots were to the Gaels what the Vikings were to the Norse. [13]
More recently, Philip Freeman (2001) has speculated on the likelihood of a group of raiders adopting a name from an Indo-European root, *skot, citing the parallel in the Ancient Greek skotos (σκότος), meaning "darkness, gloom". [14]
Linguist Kim McCone (2013) derives it from the Old Irish noun scoth meaning "pick", as in "the pick" of the population, the nobility, from an Archaic Irish reconstruction *skotī. [15]
An origin has also been suggested in a word related to the English scot ("tax") and Old Norse skot; this referred to an activity in ceremonies whereby ownership of land was transferred by placing a parcel of earth in the lap of a new owner, [16] whence 11th-century King Olaf, one of Sweden's first known rulers, may have been known as a scot king. [17]
Causantín mac Áeda was an early King of Scotland, known then by the Gaelic name Alba. The Kingdom of Alba, a name which first appears in Constantine's lifetime, was situated in modern-day Northern Scotland.
The Goidelic or Gaelic languages form one of the two groups of Insular Celtic languages, the other being the Brittonic languages.
The Picts were a group of peoples in northern Britain, north of the Firth of Forth, in the Early Middle Ages. Where they lived and details of their culture can be gleaned from early medieval texts and Pictish stones. The name Picti appears in written records as an exonym from the late third century AD. They are assumed to have been descendants of the Caledonii and other northern Iron Age tribes. Their territory is referred to as "Pictland" by modern historians. Initially made up of several chiefdoms, it came to be dominated by the Pictish kingdom of Fortriu from the seventh century. During this Verturian hegemony, Picti was adopted as an endonym. This lasted around 160 years until the Pictish kingdom merged with that of Dál Riata to form the Kingdom of Alba, ruled by the House of Alpin. The concept of "Pictish kingship" continued for a few decades until it was abandoned during the reign of Caustantín mac Áeda.
Dál Riata or Dál Riada was a Gaelic kingdom that encompassed the western seaboard of Scotland and north-eastern Ireland, on each side of the North Channel. At its height in the 6th and 7th centuries, it covered what is now Argyll in Scotland and part of County Antrim in Northern Ireland. After a period of expansion, Dál Riata eventually became associated with the Gaelic Kingdom of Alba.
Scotia is a Latin placename derived from Scoti, a Latin name for the Gaels, first attested in the late 3rd century. The Romans referred to Ireland as "Scotia" around 500 A.D. From the 9th century on, its meaning gradually shifted, so that it came to mean only the part of Britain lying north of the Firth of Forth: the Kingdom of Scotland. By the later Middle Ages it had become the fixed Latin term for what in English is called Scotland.
Pictish is an extinct Brittonic Celtic language spoken by the Picts, the people of eastern and northern Scotland from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages. Virtually no direct attestations of Pictish remain, short of a limited number of geographical and personal names found on monuments and early medieval records in the area controlled by the kingdoms of the Picts. Such evidence, however, shows the language to be an Insular Celtic language related to the Brittonic language then spoken in most of the rest of Britain.
The history of the Scots language refers to how Anglic varieties spoken in parts of Scotland developed into modern Scots.
Attacotti, Atticoti, Attacoti, Atecotti, Atticotti, and Atecutti were Latin names for a people first recorded as raiding Roman Britain between 364 and 368, alongside the Scoti, Picts, Saxons, Roman military deserters and the indigenous Britons themselves. The marauders were defeated by Theodosius in 368.
The Britons, also known as Celtic Britons or Ancient Britons, were an indigenous Celtic people who inhabited Great Britain from at least the British Iron Age until the High Middle Ages, at which point they diverged into the Welsh, Cornish, and Bretons. They spoke Common Brittonic, the ancestor of the modern Brittonic languages.
In medieval Irish and Scottish legend, Scota or Scotia is the daughter of an Egyptian pharaoh and ancestor of the Gaels. She is said to be the origin of their Latin name Scoti, but historians say she was purely mythological and was created to explain the name and to fit the Gaels into a historical narrative.
Scotus or SCOTUS may refer to:
Fortriu was a Pictish kingdom recorded between the 4th and 10th centuries. It was traditionally believed to be located in and around Strathearn in central Scotland, but is more likely to have been based in the north, in the Moray and Easter Ross area. Fortriu is a term used by historians as it is not known what name its people used to refer to their polity. Historians also sometimes use the name synonymously with Pictland in general.
The origins of the Kingdom of Alba pertain to the origins of the Kingdom of Alba, or the Gaelic Kingdom of Scotland, either as a mythological event or a historical process, during the Early Middle Ages.
Scotland is a country that occupies the northern third of the island of Great Britain and forms part of the United Kingdom. The name of Scotland is derived from the Latin Scoti, the term applied to Gaels. The origin of the word Scotia dates back to the 4th century and was first used by Roman writers to describe the northern Gaelic group of raiders that left present-day Ireland and landed in west coast Scotland.
Scotland was divided into a series of kingdoms in the early Middle Ages, i.e. between the end of Roman authority in southern and central Britain from around 400 AD and the rise of the kingdom of Alba in 900 AD. Of these, the four most important to emerge were the Picts, the Gaels of Dál Riata, the Britons of Alt Clut, and the Anglian kingdom of Bernicia. After the arrival of the Vikings in the late 8th century, Scandinavian rulers and colonies were established on the islands and along parts of the coasts. In the 9th century, the House of Alpin combined the lands of the Scots and Picts to form a single kingdom which constituted the basis of the Kingdom of Scotland.
The Gaels are an ethnolinguistic group native to Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man. They are associated with the Gaelic languages: a branch of the Celtic languages comprising Irish, Manx and Scottish Gaelic.
The Vacomagi were a people of ancient Britain, known only from a single mention of them by the geographer Claudius Ptolemy. Their principal places are known from Ptolemy's map c.150 of Albion island of Britannia – from the First Map of Europe.
The Scottish people or Scots are an ethnic group and nation native to Scotland. Historically, they emerged in the early Middle Ages from an amalgamation of two Celtic peoples, the Picts and Gaels, who founded the Kingdom of Scotland in the 9th century. In the following two centuries, Celtic-speaking Cumbrians of Strathclyde and Germanic-speaking Angles of Northumbria became part of Scotland. In the High Middle Ages, during the 12th-century Davidian Revolution, small numbers of Norman nobles migrated to the Lowlands. In the 13th century, the Norse-Gaels of the Western Isles became part of Scotland, followed by the Norse of the Northern Isles in the 15th century.
The Christianisation of Scotland was the process by which Christianity spread in what is now Scotland, which took place principally between the fifth and tenth centuries.
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