Caledonians

• 1. Introduction

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  The Caledonians were a tribal confederacy in what is now Scotland, and almost nothing we know about them came from their own mouths. They are believed to have spoken a Brittonic language, which makes them Celtic, and they lived through the Iron Age and into the Roman era. Nearly all the surviving information comes from Roman sources, and those sources may be biased. The Romans made several attempts to occupy Caledonia and never fully succeeded. So who were these people, and what did they call themselves? Did they follow a single leader, or many? How much of the Roman picture is description, and how much is stereotype? And what did the ground itself leave behind when the writers fell silent?

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• 2. A Name in Dispute

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  The Greek writers recorded the tribe as Kalēdōnes, and that form gave rise to the name Caledonia for their territory. Where the word itself came from is still argued.

  Some 19th-century antiquarians suggested a Gaelic origin, Coille-daoine, meaning forest-people. Modern scholarship rejects this as speculative, because it builds the name from comparative Celtic methods rather than Gaelic guesses.

  In 1824 the Scottish antiquarian George Chalmers proposed that the Caledonians took their name from their homeland. He sought to establish a Brittonic identity for them. He linked the word to Cal-ydon, a Greek province famous for its forests, and argued that Tacitus and other classical writers later applied it to the wooded Scottish Highlands. Modern linguists no longer accept this derivation.

  The linguist Stefan Zimmer reverses the direction. For him the land of Caledonia comes from the tribal name Caledones, which he reads as a Latinized Brittonic plural. He suggests it may mean possessing hard feet, an allusion to standfastness or endurance, built from the Proto-Celtic roots for hard and foot. A singular form, Caledo, appears on a Romano-British inscription from Colchester.

  Not everyone is persuaded. Some authors doubt the link between the tribal name and the root for hard, especially given the theory that the Caledonians and Picts might not have been Celtic speakers at all.

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• 3. Allies and Neighbours

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  The Greek geographer Ptolemy recorded the Vacomagi, Taexali and Venicones in northern central Scotland. The Caledonian confederacy is named after a single tribe, the Caledonian tribe itself, and these neighbours may by the later period have joined it in conflict with Rome.

  The Romans handled other northern peoples differently. They reached an accommodation with Brythonic tribes such as the Votadini, who served as effective buffer states.

  The historian Peter Salway offers a picture of who the Caledonians were. He assumes they were Pictish tribes speaking a language closely related to Common Brittonic. He also allows that it may have been a branch of that language, augmented by fugitive Brythonic resistance fighters who fled Roman-occupied Britannia.

  Geography added another layer. By the latter half of the 2nd century AD, the Maeatae would likely have lived between the actual Caledones and the Antonine Wall. That placement matters, because the Maeatae reappear again and again as partners in revolt.

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• 4. Walls Against the North

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  In AD 83 or 84, a war-leader named Calgacus led the Caledonians into battle at Mons Graupius against the Roman general Gnaeus Julius Agricola. The Caledonians lost, and the account comes from Tacitus.

  Tacitus avoids calling Calgacus a king. Historians therefore cannot say whether the Caledonians had single leaders or were more disparate, with Calgacus simply an elected war-leader.

  Construction of Hadrian's Wall began in 122 AD. It created a physical boundary between Roman-controlled territory and the land the Romans deemed Caledonia.

  The Romans likely attempted an invasion during or shortly after 139 AD. In 142 AD they began the Antonine Wall, roughly 100 km north of Hadrian's Wall. It was meant to aid the push into Caledonian territory and consolidate the conquest of the south. Around 158 they abandoned it and returned to Hadrian's Wall.

  Malcolm Todd judged the tribes of northern Britain, probably including the Caledones, "too warlike to be easily contained". That is why the Romans left extensive garrisons. Fraser and Mason argue the Caledones likely did not directly attack or harass the Romans at this time, though they may have had minor conflicts with other tribes. The picture changes sharply in AD 180.

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• 5. Treaties and Payments

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  In AD 180 the Caledonians took part in an invasion of Britannia, breached Hadrian's Wall, and were not brought under control for several years. They eventually signed peace treaties with the governor Ulpius Marcellus. That suggests they could make formal agreements in unison, despite supposedly having many different chieftains.

  There is a catch. Roman historians used the word Caledonius for the Caledones and also for any other tribe north of Hadrian's Wall, whether Pictish or Brythonic. It is even possible that the raiders were the peoples of Brigantia rather than the Caledones.

  According to John Casey, the Romans made a series of regular payments to the Caledonians during the reign of Commodus. These continued into the first few years of the reign of Severus.

  In 197 AD, Dio Cassius records, the Caledonians helped in a further attack on the Roman frontier, led by the Maeatae and the Brigantes. The attack was probably inspired by Clodius Albinus removing garrisons from Hadrian's Wall. Dio says the Caledonians broke the treaties they had made with Marcellus. After Albinus was defeated, the governor Virius Lupus was obliged to buy peace from the Maeatae rather than fight them.

  By the end of the 2nd century, according to James Fraser and Roger Mason, most northern tribes had merged in the Roman mind into either the Caledones or the Maeatae. Malcolm Todd adds that all residents of the region were called Caledonians, whatever their tribal affiliation. The next mention involves an emperor in person.

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• 6. Severus Marches North

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  In 209 the emperor Septimius Severus personally led an expedition north of Hadrian's Wall, in search of a glorious military victory. The Caledonians are said to have surrendered. Herodian and Dio wrote only in passing of the campaign, but both describe the Caledonians ceding territory to Rome.

  Cassius Dio records that the Caledonians inflicted 50,000 Roman casualties through attrition and unconventional tactics such as guerrilla warfare. Dr. Colin Martin has suggested a darker purpose behind the campaigns. In his view the Romans sought no battle at all. They aimed to destroy the fertile farmland of eastern Scotland and wipe out the Caledonians through starvation.

  By 210 the Caledonians had re-formed their alliance with the Maeatae and joined a fresh offensive. Severus's son Caracalla led a punitive expedition with orders to slaughter everyone it met from any of the northern tribes. David Shotter mentions Caracalla's dislike of the Caledonians and his wish to see them eradicated. Severus prepared for total conquest but was already ill. He died at Eboracum, modern York, in 211.

  Caracalla tried to take command, but his troops refused to recognise him as emperor. He made peace with the Caledonians and retreated south of Hadrian's Wall to press his claim.

  Historians disagree about how quickly he left. Sheppard Frere suggests he briefly continued the campaign, citing a delay in his arrival in Rome and indirect numismatic and epigraphic evidence. He argues that Dio's hostility toward Caracalla led him to record a truce. Malcolm Todd finds no evidence for this. Peter Salway thinks the pressures on Caracalla were too high, and the frontier secure enough to allow departure.

  Nonetheless the Caledonians retook their territory and pushed the Romans back to Hadrian's Wall. Then the written record goes quiet for about a century.

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• 7. The Silent Century

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  Around AD 230, an inscription at Colchester records a dedication by a man calling himself the nephew, or grandson, of "Uepogenus, a Caledonian". It is the only trace of the Caledonians in that long gap.

  One explanation for the silence is that Severus's campaigns were so successful that the Caledonians were wiped out. This is highly unlikely.

  In 305, Constantius Chlorus re-invaded the northern lands of Britain. The sources are vague about how far north he penetrated. They claim a great victory over the "Caledones and others", in a text known as the Panegyrici Latini Vetares.

  The event is notable for another reason. It includes the first recorded use of the term Pict to describe the tribes of the area.

  The Caledonians had once been counted as a group of Britons. After the Roman conquest of the southern half of Britain, the northern inhabitants were distinguished as Picts, thought to be a related people who would also have spoken a Brittonic language. Roman writers had by then already settled on a description of how these northerners looked.

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• 8. Red Hair and Long Limbs

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  In his Agricola, chapter XI, written around 98 AD, Tacitus wrote that "The reddish (rutilae) hair and large limbs of the Caledonians proclaim a German origin". He took these features as evidence of ancestry.

  Jordanes, in his Getica, wrote something similar: "The inhabitants of Caledonia have reddish hair and large loose-jointed bodies." Eumenius, the panegyrist of Constantine Chlorus, wrote that both the Picts and the Caledonians were red haired. The scholar William Forbes Skene noted that this matches Tacitus.

  James E. Fraser reads the evidence differently. He argues that Tacitus and other Romans knew the Caledonians dyed their hair to reach the stereotypical red colour. In his view, the Romans misinterpreted a fashion as an ethnic marker.

  Fraser also points to the pressure on the northern tribes, which forced them to move. That pressure may have created identifiers specific to certain tribes, such as clothing or jewellery. Some of the earliest examples are armlets, earrings and button covers, along with decorated weaponry.

  North of the Firth of Forth, most Caledonians would likely have lived in villages without fortifications, in houses of timber or stone. Those nearer the western coast more probably built in dry stone. Malcolm Todd cautions that the substantial houses of the north may be over-represented in the record, because they survive better as recognisable structures. There is little direct evidence of a distinct Caledonian archaeological culture.

  Hillforts stretched from the North York Moors to the Scottish Highlands, and they show a distinctive northern character emerging from the Middle Iron Age onward. They were much smaller than the hillforts further south, often under 10,000 square metres, which is one hectare or about 2.47 acres. There is no evidence that the Caledonians extensively occupied or defended them. The Caledonians appear generally to have had a dispersed settlement pattern.

  By the time of the Roman invasion, people had moved toward less heavily fortified but better sheltered farmsteads surrounded by earthwork enclosures. Individual family groups likely lived in them, linked to their neighbours through intermarriage. The reason for the change from hilltop fortresses to farms is unknown.

  Barry Cunliffe suggests that showing off an impressive residence mattered less by the second century. Competition for resources may have fallen, through advances in food production or a population decline. Alternatively, finds of Roman material may mean that social display shifted to personal adornment with imported exotica.

  Anne Robertson points to the Roman objects found inside many Caledonian structures, including relative finery and currency. She reads them as evidence of a trade network between the two cultures from as early as the first century AD. She dates it to at least the fourth century AD, a span far longer than any single war.

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