A Fusion of Cultures: The Picts, Scots and Norse

No largescale migrations into the Hebrides are thought to have taken place during the centuries that we can regard as the Late Iron Age, or from c.first century BC down to 500 AD. Nor was there a Roman presence in the Hebrides that enables us to draw a neat and tidy line under the Late Iron Age. For this reason, we can reasonably assume that by and large, the communities who inhabited the region at the end of the Iron Age were those that emerge as the Picts or proto-Picts in discussions of settlement dated to the third-fifth centuries AD though this insularity did not last. By the sixth century AD, Pictish communities were joined by the Scots in the south of the region and in the late ninth century by the Norse, whose eventual settlement covered virtually the whole of the region. Together, this succession of indigenous and exogenous cultures flourished down to the Norse handover of their Hebridean kingdom to the Scottish crown in 1266. As a period that extended across much of the Medieval Climatic Anomaly (c.AD 900–1300), formerly known as the Medieval Warm Period, this would have been a favourable time for farming communities. Indeed, its later phases or during the eleventh-thirteenth centuries AD, what some still see as forming the essential core of the Medieval Climatic Anomaly, saw a significant expansion of population across Europe. Such a phasing of what formed the most ‘optimum’ conditions of the Medieval Climatic Anomaly may need qualifying when it comes to the Hebrides for work on Greenland ice cores has suggested that the ‘most benign conditions’ in the north Atlantic area were those during the ninth and tenth centuries AD. Further, whilst tree ring data for the Grampians suggests that across the 800 years of the sample period, the five warmest summers were those of 1282, 1284, 1285, 1307 and 1310, nevertheless, a review of available historical data suggests that the second half of the thirteenth century, experienced a number of phases or years of cold summers and harsh winters that led to major scarcities whilst a globally significant eruption of the Gunung Rinjani volcano (Indonesia) in 1257–8 added to this run of crises. Clearly, the second half of the thirteenth century, the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of Alexander III (1249–86) was marked by variable weather conditions.