For, whilst they were spreading themselves over the rich plains of the north of England, a foreign, though nearly related, Celtic people, the Scots from Ireland, had taken possession of their south-western frontier districts. Hence they spread themselves to such a degree over the Lowlands that both these and the Highlands, though the latter were almost entirely independent of the Scottish sovereigns, were called by one name, Scotland. After many battles the older Pictish inhabitants were, about the year 900, entirely amalgamated with the Scots in the Lowlands. Meanwhile a storm had gathered which threatened no less danger to the Scots in the Lowlands, than to their kinsmen, the Picts, in the Highlands. The dominion of the Celts, which had long before ceased in other and more accessible lands, was no longer to find a sure place of refuge even in Scotland, though its coasts were protected by the stormy Northern Sea, and its interior filled with rocks and warlike men. ---------- SECTION II. The Anglo-Saxons.—The Danes and Norwegians.—Effects of their Expeditions. The same want of unity and the same internal disputes which had brought ruin on the Celts in other places, prepared the way for foreign conquerors in Scotland. An indomitable fate decreed that the newer and higher civilization of Christianity should here, as in the rest of Europe, be founded and promoted by a Teutonic people. But though the Anglo-Saxons had conquered almost all England, they were not able, by their own power, to subdue the Celts in Scotland. The Anglo-Saxon kings undertook, indeed, several expeditions against that country, in which they were at times pretty successful; but they were not able to hold steady possession even of the Lowlands. Subsequently, however, the Anglo-Saxons wandered by degrees, and in a more peaceful manner, from the northernmost parts of England over the Scottish border, and established themselves both in the towns and in the rural districts. The number of these emigrants appears to have increased very considerably after the conquests of the Danes and Norwegians in the midland and northern districts of England in the ninth and tenth centuries, when a great part of the Anglo-Saxons were driven from their old dwellings, and obliged to fly towards the north. Saxon institutions may even have been introduced into the Lowlands in the tenth and eleventh centuries, after an expedition of the Anglo-Saxon king Edgar. But the rocky highlands of the interior constantly defied all conquest; and the northern and western coasts, together with the surrounding islands, could be subdued only by considerable fleets, which the Anglo-Saxons did not possess.