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Picts   Listen
noun
Picts  n. pl.  (singular Pict) (Ethnol.) A race of people of uncertain origin, who inhabited Scotland in early times.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Picts" Quotes from Famous Books



... St. Germanus proceeded to Britain, and there encouraged his converts to meet the heathen Picts at Maes Garmon, in Flintshire, where the exulting shout of the white-robed catechumens turned to flight the wild superstitious savages of the north,—and the Hallelujah victory was gained without a drop of ...
— The Junior Classics • Various

... prescription was fairly shrewd. Many men would merely have laughed at the men's fears, and would neither have shaken their beliefs nor given them something new to think of. That was the way the great Columba scored off the Druids and Picts. "I don't know about your astronomy or your fine music, or tales of ancestors and heroes, but I'm telling you, old Baal himself, with all his thunder and lightning, will not be so much as touching the least hair on your head if you were just to hold ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch

... condition after the Romans had left the island (S33). They had lost their old spirit (SS2, 18).[2] They were no longer brave in war or faithful in peace. The Picts and Scots[3] attacked them on the northwest, and the Saxon pirates (S29) assailed them on the southeast. These terrible foes cut down the Britons, says an old writer, as "reapers cut down grain ready for ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery

... footing; when the seas around England and Ireland swarmed with pirates, and new expeditions started almost every spring from the numerous harbors of the Baltic—the Irish colony of Dal Riada in Scotland, which was literally surrounded by the invaders, succeeded in wresting North Britain from the Picts, drove them into the Lowlands, and so completely rooted them out, that history never more speaks of them, so that to this day the historical problem stands unsolved— What became of the Picts?— various as are the explanations given of their disappearance. And, what is more remarkable still, ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud

... Brigants, and Nouants, so farre northward, that he maketh them inhabitants of those countries which the Scots haue now in possession, and were euen then inhabited (as he affirmeth) partlie by the Scots, and partlie by the Picts (as in the Scotish historie ye may see more at large) so that what notable feat soeuer was atchiued by the old Britains against the Romans, the same by him is ascribed to the Scots and Picts throughout his whole historie, whereas (in verie truth) ...
— Chronicles (1 of 6): The Historie of England (4 of 8) - The Fovrth Booke Of The Historie Of England • Raphael Holinshed

... eye: Retire the more, the more we press 175 To draw us into ambushes. As pirates all false colours wear T' intrap th' unwary mariner, So women, to surprise us, spread The borrow'd flags of white and red; 180 Display 'em thicker on their cheeks Than their old grandmothers, the Picts; And raise more devils with their looks, Than conjurer's less subtle books; Lay trains of amorous intrigues, 185 In tow'rs, and curls, and perriwigs, With greater art and cunning rear'd, Than PHILIP NYE's thanksgiving beard, Prepost'rously ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler

... The Picts, we were informed, were a race of people who settled in the north of Scotland in pre-Roman times, and who constructed their dwellings either of earth or stone, but always in a circular form. This old castle was built of stone, and the walls ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor

... tooke land within the dominion of a king called Goffarius, surnamed Pictus, by reason he was descended of the people Agathyrsi, otherwise [Sidenote: Goffarius surnamed Pictus Les annales d'Aquitaine.] named Picts, bicause they used to paint their faces and bodies, insomuch that the richer a man was amongst them, the more cost he bestowed in [Sidenote: Agathyrsi, otherwise called Picts, of painting their bodies. Marcellus Plinie. Herodotus li.4.] painting himselfe; ...
— Chronicles (1 of 6): The Historie of England (2 of 8) - The Second Booke Of The Historie Of England • Raphael Holinshed

... of Seville, and Solinus, give a similar description of the manner of painting the body in use among the Picts. "The operator delineates the figures with little points made by the prick of a needle, and into those he insinuates the juice of some native plants, that their nobility, thus written, as it were, upon ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton

... the sound of shouting. All the lads were aware of the necessity for Archie's avoiding the notice of the Kerrs, and Andrew Macpherson, one of the eldest of the lads, at once stepped forward: "We are playing," he said, "at fighting Picts ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty

... century troubles began to fall thick upon the country. The Picts and the Scots overran the northern parts and penetrated to the very walls of London. The general Theodosius, whose son became the emperor of that name, drove them back. About this time the wall of London was built; not the wall of the Roman fort, but that of the ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant

... and beautiful valley, between Axminster and Colyton, was waged the great battle of Brunanburgh between the men of Wessex led by Athelstan and the Ethelings, and Anlaf the Dane, an alien Irish King, who captained the Picts and Scots. Five Kings (of sorts), seven Earls, and the Bishop of Sherborne were killed, but the victory was with the defenders. Athelstan founded a college to commemorate the battle and its result, and caused masses to be said in Axminster ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes

... yet their rule completely enervated the aboriginal inhabitants—they were left without leaders, without cohesion. Their land was held by permission of the conquerors. The wall erected at so much labor in the north of England proved a less effectual barrier against the incursions of the Picts and Scots than the living barrier of armed men which, at a later period, successfully repelled their invasions. The Roman rule affords another example that material prosperity cannot secure the liberties of a people, that they must be armed and prepared ...
— Landholding In England • Joseph Fisher

... and the bonnie blue hills of Scotland, divided from Ulster at this point by only twenty miles of sea path. The Irish or Gaels or Scots of 'Uladh' often crossed in their curraghs to this lovely coast of Alba, then inhabited by the Picts. Here, 'when the tide drains out wid itself beyant the rocks,' we sit for many an hour, perhaps on the very spot from which they pushed off their boats. The Mull of Cantire runs out sharply toward you; south ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... the valley, and close to the sea, lies the important village known as the CLACHAN of INVERSTARVE. It is supposed by various eminent antiquaries to have been the capital of the Picts, and, amongst the busy inroads of commercial prosperity, it still retains some interesting traces of its former grandeur. There is a large fishing station here, to which vessels from every nation resort, and the demand for foreign produce is ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various

... been Aryan, but adopted. People who think that the Aryans did not pass through a stage of totemism, female kin, and so forth, can always fall back (to account for apparent survivals of such things among Aryans) on 'Pre-Aryan conquered peoples,' such as the Picts. Aryans may be enticed by these bad races and become ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang

... Agricola had built in 78 A.D. a massive wall across the North of England, extending from sea to sea, to protect the Roman territory from the Picts and Scots, those wild dwellers in the Northern Highlands. It seems to us a frail barrier to a people accustomed to leaping the rocky wall set by nature between the North and the South; and unless it were maintained by a line ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele

... believed to be finer by the people themselves and those they had to deal with. The difference is all in the imagination, and the imagination is all-powerful with nations as with individuals. The Britons thought their blood the finest in the world till they were conquered by the Romans, the Picts, the Scots, and the Saxons. The Saxons thought theirs the finest in the world till they were conquered by the Danes and the Normans. This is the history of the human race. The quality of the blood of a whole people has depended ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman

... where people abode, and where the bloody Stennis stones rebuked the smiling sky, and where ghosts walked and wailed and waved their white arms in the shadows of those haunted ruins where once upon a time the Picts had dwelt. And Harold's heart was full of joy, the more in especial when, as he bore nigh unto the haven, he heard sweet music and beheld a goodly company of people that danced in the moonlight upon the fair green holm. Then, when presently his boat touched the ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field

... The language of the Picts, the building of the earliest Edinburgh Castle, with other subjects, on none of which they agreed, made the two wiseacres grow hotter and hotter, till at last the wrath of the man of pedigree was roused by a chance statement of the Antiquary's that the Baronet's famous ancestor, ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett

... their depredations. About the middle of the fifth century, the unwarlike Vortigern, then king of Britain, embraced the fatal resolution of requesting these hardy warriors to deliver him from the harassing inroads of the Picts and Scots; and the expedition of Hengist and Horsa was the consequence. Our mention of this memorable epoch is not for its political importance, great as that is, but for its effects on piracy; for the success attending such enterprises seems to have turned the whole of the northern nations ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms

... walls become the principal object in the British history. The Caledonians, or (as they are called) the Picts, made very frequent and sometimes successful attempts upon this barrier, taking advantage more particularly of every change in government, whilst the soldiery throughout the Empire were more intent upon the choice of a master than the motions of an enemy. In this ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... that each of these bands spoke a language of its own. They had horses in abundance, descended from Spanish stock. Among them appear to have been the Ouacos, or Huecos, and the Wichitas,—two tribes better known as the Pawnee Picts. See ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman

... frontier had held back the Barbaric world beyond it—the Parthian of the Euphrates, the Numidian of the African desert, the German of the Danube or the Rhine. In Britain a wall drawn from Newcastle to Carlisle bridled the British tribes, the Picts as they were called, who had been sheltered from Roman conquest by the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various

... of the Picts, from whom the district of Kyle is said to take its name, lies buried, as tradition says, near the family seat of the Montgomeries of Coilsfield, where his burial-place is ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... myths and traditions are of the fighting Picts and Scots, and when history began to notice the existence of the Orkneys it was to chronicle the struggle between Harold, King of Norway, and his rebellious subjects who had fled to the Orkneys to escape his tyrannical control. And of the danger zones of every kind which followed—of storm and ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... of Caithness may, to some extent, be traced in the character of its remains and its local nomenclature. Picts' houses, still fairly numerous, Norwegian names and Danish mounds attest that these peoples displaced each other in turn, and the number and strength of the fortified keeps show that its annals include the usual feuds, assaults and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... to the Multitude the enjoyments and advantages of the Few, had we shrunk from the good, because the good is a parent of the change and its partial ills, what now would be society? Is there no difference in collective happiness and virtue between the painted Picts and the Druid worship, and the glorious harmony, light, and order of ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VI • Edward Bulwer Lytton



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