Murder at the Feast, The Treachery of Scone

Many Murders, Many Feasts?

Like the last post, which featured the holy island of Iona, I will return to the subject of this piece, Scone, as it is a place with nearly as many legendary and historical accretions. Primary among these is the story that the Scottish king Cináed mac Ailpín, or Kenneth mac Alpin, murdered a number of Pictish nobles at a feast in this place and thus affected the political union of the Picts and Scots. The first thing to say about this legend - and it is a legend - is, apart from the fact that the story is old, there are plenty of parallel tales from other places.



   It would be as well to look at Ireland first, as there may be obvious common Gaelic ancestry to the motifs of death at the feast or extinction of ancient races. When tribal names ceased to be used, for whatever reason, later writers sometimes explained this by saying that the entire identified people had been wiped out. In Ireland it was stated that the tribes named the Domnainn and Gáliain were exterminated. The Gáliain suffered a nasty supernatural end when most of them were killed by druids chanting malevolent spells against them. The tale about a massacre of Picts appears as the title to a tale, Braflang Scóine, 'Treachery of Scone', which appears in the 12th century Book of Leinster as one of the famous tales which poets should be able to recite. The fame of the legend was widespread soon after this, for a version of it was known by Giraldus Cambrensis in Wales. His work Liber de Printipis Instructione, 'Instructions for Princes,' was started in the late twelfth century. According to him:

The Scots betook themselves to their customary and, as it were, innate treacheries, in which they excel all other nations. They brought together as to a banquet all the nobles of the Picts, and taking advantage of their excessive drunkenness and gluttony, they noted their opportunity and drew out the bolts which held up the boards; and the Picts fell into the hollows of the benches on which they were sitting, caught up in a strange trap up to the knees, so that they could not get up; and the Scots immediately slaughtered them all.

   Gerald may well have heard this story while he was in Leinster in the winter of 1186. Earlier in the 12th century the English Henry of Huntingdon may have been drawing on different, Scottish sources when he wrote that Kenneth attacked the Picts and secured the monarchy, battling against them seven times in a single day (an oblique reference to overcoming all seven legendary Pictish regions in one go?).


    Beyond Britain of course there are plenty of corollaries of the murder at the feast legend. The Scottish historian M. O. Anderson found a parallel to the tale in the Russian Primary Chronicle. The ancient Greek writer Herodotus gives two prototypes for the murder at the feast tale: Cyaxares of the Medes invites the Scythians to a feast and slays them after getting them intoxicated. Queen Neitakri of Egypt drowns feasting nobles who had been responsible for the murder of her brother in an underground chamber.



 Meanwhile we could cite the supposed murder of Celtic Britons by the Saxon Hengist in similar circumstances, as contained in the tales given by Nennius and Geoffrey of Monmouth. This tale also harks back to the supposedly historical incident of 88 BC when  Mithridates V, the Great, invited sixty Celtic chiefs of Galatia to a feast and slaughtered them all.

Berchán, Fordun and Other Early Versions

   The earliest account of the treachery incident in embedded in the Prophecy of Berchán, a long poem celebrating many Irish and Scottish kings which in its present form is 14th century, but containing much early material.  This source speaks of Picts - signified as 'fierce men of the east' - being tricked and slaughtered by Kenneth 'in the middle of Scone of the high shields'.  Digging in the earth is alluded to, possibly linking the earliest tradition to the tale told by Giraldus.  According to the latter, a band of Pictish aristocrats were invited to a banquet and after they became sufficiently drunk, bolts were withdrawn from the benches they sat it, they fell into a trap or pit beneath and were slaughtered.  (An alternative translation of Braflang Scóine is 'The Pit-fall of Scone'), A note in the Pictish kings lists stated that one of their last rulers, Drust son of Ferat, died at Forteviot, and there is a possibility that the story of his death migrated to Scone and was magnified.

   The Berchán text magnifies the ferocity of Kenneth, 'a man who will feed scald-crows':

He is the first king from the men of Ireland in Scotland who will take kingship in the east; it will be after strength of spear and sword, after sudden death, after sudden slaughter. The fools in the east are deceived by him, they dig the earth, mighty the occupation; a deadly goad-pit, death by wounding, on the floor of noble shielded Scone. Seventeen years, heights of valour, in high-kingship of Scotland; after the slaughter of Picts, after the harassing of Vikings, he dies on the banks of the Earn.

    A far different version of events is offered by John of Fordun in his Chronicle of the Scottish Nation [IV. 3]. In his story, Kenneth's Gaelic chief men are too scared of the Picts to attack. So Kenneth disguises himself with luminous fish scales on his cloak and, during the night, and passes himself off as an angel with a message that God commanded them to attack the Picts. The following day the Gaels fought the Picts and overcame them. Hector Boece adopted this story in the 16th century But the tale likewise has parallels elsewhere. Herodotus tells the story of the exiled Pisistratus to restore himself to power in Athens. He found a handsome and statuesque young woman called Phye, dressed her in armour and mounted her in his own chariot to impersonate the goddess Athene, patron of the city. When they drove through Athens, the crowds were awed into accepting his rule once more. The disguise theme is a well-attested occurrence in folklore, occurring throughout Eurrope (firstly in Italy in the 14th century) and suggests a story that Fordun had picked up from oral sources. The 'disguise as a deity' theme is classified as K1828, and 'disguise as an angel' K1828.1, in Thomson's Motif-Index iv, 438.

   This tale is both a dilution of the more brutal earlier tale, transmuting it into a folk legend, but also contains the trace of the tradition that there was an ideological, religious element to the suppression of Pictish independence. A chronicle in the Poppleton manuscript refers back to a lost source describing the destruction of the Picts as a divinely ordained act in revenge for them going against God's will, 'because they not only spurned the Lord’s mass and precept, but also wished to be held equal to theirs in the law of justice [or, 'they did not wish to be held equal to others in justice.].' This may have been a reference to some stubborn Pictish adherence to customs in their own Church.   A 13th century record referring to the reign of King Giric mac Dúngail (878-889) returns to this scheme and states that 'he was the first to give liberty to the Scottish churhc, which was in servitude up to this time, after the custom and fashion of the Picts.'


   But whatever the facts, Kenneth had not singled out the Picts aggressively on their own for religious or any other reasons.  He is reported to have fought against the Saxons 6 times and burned Melrose and Dunbar in a southern campaign.

Versions in Later Historians

 By the time of the Declaration of Arbroath in the early 14th century it was believed (by some at least) that the Picts had been entirely wiped out. There was little original added to the legends in the 15th century Andrew of Wyntoun's Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland:

Quhen Alpyne this kyng was dede,
He left a sowne wes cal'd Kyned,
Dowchty man he wes and stout,
All the Peychtis he put out.
Gret bataylis than dyd he,
To pwt in freedom his cuntre!   

   In the 15th century the Scotonichron of Walter Bower added folkloric and other elements to explain the supposed reasons behind Kenneth's aggression against the Pictish nobles. First was that the Picts killed the king's father Alpin, and also an alliance between pagan English and Pictish forces. More strangely, another reason was the theft of a hunting dog taken by the Picts from the Scots. The 16th century work of John Leslie said that Kenneth defeated the Pictish king Dunster and invaded their town of Camelodonum, killing the inhabitants. Then he passed through all Pictish provinces, nearly putting their name into oblivion and out of memory. Those who escaped went to Denmark or Norway or to Northumberland. Kenneth divided countries among his husbandmen, renamed them. Also in the 16th century George Buchanan repeats Fordun fish scale disguise story. There was a mighty slaughter of the Picts in battle. Kenneth decimated the Picts and defeated them in a fight again in the following year:

The force of the Picts was wholly broken by this overthrow, and Kennethus wasted Lothian and the adjacent country together with those beyond the Forth, that they might never be able again to recover themselves. The garrisons, for fear, surrendered themselves. Those few Picts who were left alive fled into England, to an indigent and necessitous condition.

The Killer Kenneth?

 Both Kenneth and his father Alpin bore Pictish names and their origins remain mysterious. One conundrum is the fact that all his immediate descendants and successors undoubtedly bore Gaelic names.It is undoubtedly true that the external pressures of Viking raids may have weakened the two north British nations and forced a union. But cultural trends were perhaps moving towards a kingship which encompassed a wide territory. Contemporary with the supposed conqueror Kenneth, Ireland had its first high-king in the person of Máelsechnaill mac Máele Ruanaid. It has to be noted that slaughters during feasts actually occurred. Kenneth's own son-in-law Áed Findliath in 870 gave a banquet at Dublin for the purpose of slaughtering the chieftains of the Vikings.

   Yet it seems to easy to credit that a single act of treachery could have 'wiped out' the Picts. Apart from the apparently Pictish names there is the fact that several kings in the immediate generations following Kenneth described themselves as kings of the Picts. Many generations before them there had been Gaelic-Pictish cultural and settlement cross-fertilisation which makes the cataclysmic murder theory untenable. Kenneth is supposed to have reigned for 16 years over the Picts and was also responsible for bringing relics of St Columba from Iona into mainland Scotland, a move which was partially in response to Viking incursions in the the west. It is widely thought that he dignified Dunkeld with the saint's relics. Some of the relics also went to Ireland at the same time.


   Whether Kenneth took advantage of Scandinavian aggression in Pictland is another bone of contention. There was a massive victory for the Vikings there in the year 839 which must have weakened its fighting capabilities. But the notion that he deliberately took advantage of this turmoil is not specifically mentioned until Fordun in the 14th century. What actually happened in terms of the Scots' motivations and actions and the subsequent fate of the Picts is hard to fathom . One pragmatic theory is imagining that the Scots, hemmed in by political pressure from several directions and physically constricted by the geography of Dal Riada, chose to take advantage of expansion into Pictland when the inhabitants of that region were more concentrated on the threat from Norse warbands. This was the favoured solution of Isabel Henderson.

   When he died he was mourned by the bards, and a fragment of his eulogy has survived:

That Cinaed with his hosts is no more [or, Kenneth, of many stables]
Brings weeping to every home:
No king of his worth under heaven
Is there, to the bounds of Rome.

The Vanished Race:  Picts in Tradition

  One side-effect of the legend of the Pictish massacre is the supposed extinction of the Picts entirely. One popular and widespread folk tale is the story of the last picts, popularly known as 'Heather Ale' in some versions.  According to this the Pictish race dwindled into a single father and son who were captured by the Scots and forced to reveal the secret of their race's heather ale.  The father asked his son be killed and then he would reveal the recipe.  This was done, but he said his son may have given up the secret but he never would, so he flung himself off nearby cliffs.  The tale is localised in may places, particularly Galloway, where it has mingled with the legend that Picts once lived in this region.

   The Northern Isles also have there legends of the people.  In one of these, the Picts arrived here from Picardy, but quarrelled among themselves.  Some fled to Scotland, others to the furthermost part of the isles and the last of them were slain by Norsemen.  They were noted for their diminutive size.  Part of this tradition was set down in writing in the Historia Norvegiae, around 1180, portraying the Picts as magical pygmies who built fabulous walled towns morning and evening but vanished underground in their houses at noon. The folk tales therefore seem to have been developing in parallel, or at least closely following, the 'state sponsored' version of the massacre of the Picts at Scone.

Chapel on the supposed site of the Moot Hill at Scone

Sources Consulted

A. O. Anderson, Early Sources of Scottish History, 1922, rep. Paul Watkins, Stamford, 1990.

M.O. Anderson, Kings and Kingship in Early Scotland, Scottish Academic Press, Edinburgh, 1973.

John Bannerman, ‘The Scottish takeover of Pictland and the relics of Columba,’ John Bannerman, in Spes Scotorum, Hope of Scots, Saint Columba, Ireland and Scotland, ed. Dauvit Broun and Thomas Owen Clancy, T and T Clark, Edinburgh, 1999, pp. 71-94.

Peter Berresford Ellis, Celt and Saxon, The Struggle For Britain AD 410-937, Constable, London, 1992; paperback edn 1994.

Alan Bruford, ‘What happened to the Caledonians?’, in Alba, Celtic Scotland in the Medieval Era, ed. E. J. Cowan and R. Andrew McDonald, The Tuckwell Press, East Linton, 2000, pp. 43-68.

George Buchanan, Rerum Scoticarum Historia (1582).  A hypertext edition by Dana F. Sutton, University of California, Irvine.

Thomas Owen Clancy, ed., The Triumph Tree, Scotland’s Earliest Poetry AD 550-1350, Canongate, Edinburgh, 1998.
Myles Dillon and Nora K. Chadwick, The Celtic Realms, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1967.

A. A. M. Duncan, The Kingship of the Scots, 842-1292, Succession and Independence, Edinburgh University Press, 2002.

Isabel Henderson, The Picts, Thames and Hudson, London, 1967.

Benjamin T. Hudson, The Kings of Celtic Scotland, Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut, 1994.

Benjamin T. Hudson, The Prophecy of Berchán, Irish and Scottish High-Kings of the Early Middle Ages, Greenwood Press, Westport, Conneticut, 1996.

John Leslie, The Historie of Scotland, translated (1596) by Father James Dalrymple, volume I STS, William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh (1888).

Alan Macquarrie, Medieval Scotland, Kingship and Nation, Sutton Publishing Ltd, Stroud, 2004.

F. J. O' Byrne, Irish Kings and High-kings, BT Batsford, London, 1973.

T. F. O' Rahilly, Early Irish History and Mythology, T. F. O’Rahilly, Institute for Advanced Studies, Dublin, 1946; rep. 1999.

Smyth, Alfred P., Warlords and Holy Men, Scotland AD 80-1000, 1984, rep. Edinburgh University Press, 1989.

River Tay near Perth