Scottish times from near the end of the first century to the beginning
of the tenth, so far as they bear on the agencies at work there in
Norse times.

The first four of the nine centuries above referred to had seen
the Romans under Agricola[4] in 80 to 84 A.D. attempt, and fail, to
conquer the Caledonians or men of the woods,[5] whose home, as
their name implies, was the great woodland region of the Mounth or
Grampians. Those centuries had also seen the building of the wall of
Hadrian between the Tyne and Solway in the year 120, the campaigns
of Lollius Urbicus in 140 A.D. and the erection between the Firths
of Forth and Clyde of the earthen rampart of Antonine on stone
foundations, which was held by Rome for about fifty years. Seventy
years later, in the year 210, fifty thousand Roman legionaries had
perished in the Caledonian campaigns of the Roman Emperor Severus, and
over a century and a half later, in 368, there had followed the
second conquest of the Roman province of Valentia which comprised the
Lothians and Galloway in the south, by Theodosius. Lastly, the final
retirement of the Romans from Scotland, and indeed from Britain, took
place, on the destruction of the Roman Empire in spite of Stilicho's
noble defence, by Alaric and the Visigoths, in 410.

From the Roman wars and occupation two main results followed. The
various Caledonian tribes inhabiting the land had then probably for
the first time joined forces to fight a common foe, and in fighting
him had become for that purpose temporarily united. Again, possibly
as part of the high Roman policy of Stilicho, St. Ninian had in the
beginning of the fifth century introduced into Galloway and also
into the regions north of the Wall of Antonine the first teachers of
Christianity, a religion which, however, was for some time longer to