Royal succession and kingship among the Picts

When we consider the history of the Picts we are faced with the perennial challenge for the early medievalist of deciding whether the fragments of evidence which survive are representative of the reality of Pictish society, or whether they provide us with distortions, based on patterns of survival. This issue is as relevant to the subject of royal succession as it is to other aspects of Pictish history. The debate over whether the Picts practised a matrilineal system, with the son of the previous king's sister becoming the next king, or whether it was a patrilineal system, with the kingship generally passing through the male line, has dominated the discussion of Pictish succession. Until the 1980s, the matriliny thesis was virtually unquestioned, and accepted by scholars including F. T. Wainwright, Marjorie Anderson, and Isabel Henderson.¹ The bases for this view were the accounts of the Pictish settlement of northern Britain in Bede's 'Ecclesiastical History of the English People' and Irish texts written throughout the medieval period, but mainly surviving in versions from the twelfth century or later.² In these sources it was claimed that the Picts went to Ireland before arriving in northern Britain, and that they obtained wives from the Irish, with some versions stating that this was done on condition that the succession went through the female line. Other sources which did not openly discuss the nature of Pictish succession, particularly the Irish chronicles and the Pictish king-lists, were then interpreted by scholars in relation to these accounts and were thought to support them.

The alternative view of Pictish succession, that the Picts did not practise matrilineal succession, was proposed in 1984 by Alfred Smyth in his book, Warlords and Holy Men, disputed by David Sellar soon after, and has been restated with different arguments by Alex Woolf and Alasdair Ross.³ The latter two scholars independently came to the conclusion that succession through the female line was exceptional, referring to the sons of Derelei, who ruled in the late seventh and early eighth centuries, rather than all Pictish kings. This theory minimised the importance of Bede's account, and rejected the Irish tales, proposing alternative views of Pictish succession: Woolf argued that there was a patrilineal dynasty in the seventh century, and that the succession was generally not dissimilar to that of other kingships in northern Europe. Ross, on the other hand, followed Smyth in proposing a kingship rotating between different groups, and for the intrusion of outsiders into the kingship by foreign rulers, such as the kings of Northumbria from the 650s to 685. However, it is probably fair to state that both the proponents and opponents of the matrilinear theory have concentrated on the issue of whether succession was through the male or female line, a focus found in the medieval texts which addressed the subject.

The intention of this article is not to decide whether the Picts practised matriliny or patriliny. Instead I will focus on other aspects of the succession, since, even though matriliny has been rejected by some scholars, the concentration on this issue may have led to the relative neglect of other facets. While many important points have been made before about the sources, by re-examining the evidence, in particular Bede's 'Ecclesiastical History', the Pictish king-lists and Irish chronicles, in another framework, a different depiction of succession, as well as of Pictish kingship and political structure, can be produced.

The account in Bede's 'Ecclesiastical History of the English People'

As has already been mentioned, Bede's 'Ecclesiastical History', finished in A.D. 731, includes an account of the Pictish settlement in Book i.1, the introduction to Britain and its peoples. In this Bede states:

Cumque uxores Picti non habentes peterent a Scottis, ea solum condicione dare consenserunt, ut ubi res ueniret in dubium, magis de feminea regum prosapia quam de masculina regem sibi eligerent; quod usque hodie apud Pictos constat esse seruatum.⁴

'As the Picts had no wives, they asked the Irish for some; the latter consented...