The Scots also suffered at the hands of the Vikings, who seized Kintyre and the Inner Hebrides, but, somehow, they were able to take advantage of the Piets’ misfortunes. After a devastating Viking raid on Fortriu in 839 left two Pictish kings dead, the Scottish king Kenneth mac Alpin (Cinaed mac Alpin) conquered all of Pictland. The traditional date for this is 842/3, but the conquest was probably only completed in 848 when Kenneth transferred relics of St Columba from Iona to the chief centre of the Pictish church at Dunkeld. It was a gesture of thanks by the king to the saint for the support of his church. Kenneth, or one of his immediate successors, commemorated his conquest by commissioning a Pictish sculptor to carve the 23-foot (7-metre) high monolith, known as Sueno’s Stone, which stands on the outskirts of Forres in Moray. One face of the stone is covered from top to bottom with scenes of battle and mass executions of Pictish kings and nobles. The message it conveyed to the conquered Piets was a bleak one indeed. It would seem that by conquering Fortriu the Scots took control of the Pictish high kingship and then secured their conquest by defeating the Pictish sub-kings. Many a Pictish high king had had to do this too, but Kenneth went a step further, and by killing the defeated sub-kings and their aristocracy deprived any attempted Pictish rebellion of leadership. Sueno’s Stone was one of the last Pictish works of art. Pictish symbols fell out of use, as did the Pictish language, which was replaced by Gaelic. The last contemporary reference to the Piets dates to 904. Thus the Piets became the only one of the Celtic peoples known to have inhabited Britain in historical times to have become completely extinct. The Scots had no great interest in preserving the memory of the Piets, and in later medieval writings they had become folkloric figures, a race of pygmies who lived underground. This odd belief may be derived from the many souterrains that the ancestors of the Piets built as cool underground storerooms for perishable foodstuffs.
The Scots adopted many of the trappings of Pictish kingship, along with its places of power, such as Scone, near Perth. Their old royal centre at Dunadd was abandoned: it was too vulnerable to the Vikings and the Pictish lands were far richer than Argyll. Kenneth and his immediate successors used the title ‘king of the Piets’, but this was abandoned by Donald II (r. 889-900), who adopted the title ‘king of Alba’. Though Alba is the Gaelic word for Scotland, ‘Scotland’ in 900 did not mean what it does now but referred only to the area between the Forth and the Spey. In the course of the tenth century, however, Scotland began a period of steady territorial expansion, which continued for over 200 years. Weakened by a devastating Viking attack on its capital at Dumbarton in 870, the British kingdom of Strathclyde became a satellite kingdom of Scotland before it was finally annexed around 1018. The English king Edgar ceded English-speaking Lothian to Kenneth II around 973 in return for his submission and Malcolm IPs victory over the English at Carham in 1018 established the Tweed as Scotland’s southern border. The eleventh century was marked by a struggle with a rival Scots dynasty that had established itself in Moray. Macbeth, Moray’s most famous ruler, became king of Scotland in 1040 but was driven out after his defeat by Malcolm III Canmore (‘big head’) at Dunsinnan in 1054. After Macbeth was defeated and killed by Malcolm at Lumphanan three years later, Moray declined and was completely incorporated into Scotland by 1130. The Norse colonies in Caithness and Sutherland followed soon after. When Norway ceded the Hebrides to Scotland in 1266, the country had reached almost its modern borders: Scotland’s last territorial acquisitions were Orkney and Shetland, ceded by Denmark in 1468-9 in lieu of a princess’s dowry, which the bankrupt country could not afford to pay. The islanders still have a strong sense of their Scandinavian heritage and in recent years there have been somewhat tongue-in-cheek calls for the restoration of Danish sovereignty.
World History
