Among the barbaric tribes who likewise entered into the struggle for the prize, the first in order were the Picts. The accounts of them given by Gildas, Nennius, and Bede, vary considerably. Gildas first mentions them as taking a part in the irruption of the barbarians into the Roman province after the departure of Maximus with the Roman army, but he calls them a transmarine nation, and says they came from the north-east.[112] He tells us that after the withdrawal of the frontier to the southern wall, which we have seen took place on the departure of Constantine in 406, they occupied the districts up to that wall as natives;[113] and that when finally repelled by an effort of the provincial Britons, they then for the first time settled down in the extreme part of the island, where they still remained at the time he wrote his history. The natural inference from his language is that he considered that the Picts were a foreign people who first obtained a settlement in the island in the beginning of the fifth century, unless he regarded the region north of the Firths of Forth and Clyde as a separate island, and considered that it lay north-north-east from the standpoint from which he wrote.[114] The gloss which Bede puts upon his language, that by transmarine he merely referred to their crossing the firths, seems a forced and narrow construction of his language. Nennius too viewed the Picts as a foreign people who settled in the island, and says that they first occupied the Orkney Islands, whence they laid waste many regions and seized those on the left hand or north side of Britain, where they still remained, keeping possession of a third part of Britain to his day;[115] but then he placed their settlement as early as the fourth century before the birth of Christ. Bede says that ‘at first this island had no other inhabitants than the Britons, but that when they, beginning at the south, had made themselves masters of the greatest part of the island, it happened that the nation of the Picts from Scythia, as is reported,[116] putting to sea in a few long ships, were driven by the winds beyond the shores of Britain, and arrived on the northern shores of Ireland, where, finding the nation of the Scots, they desired a settlement among them, and this being refused by the Scots, they sailed over to Britain and began to inhabit the northern parts of the island.’ He adds that having no wives they applied to the Scots, who gave them on condition that when the succession came into doubt they should choose their king from the female royal race rather than from the male, a custom which he says it is well known is observed among the Picts to his day.[117] Bede does not say at what time this settlement took place; but it is obvious that he is reporting a tradition, and that Nennius’s account is also traditionary; while Gildas does not seem to be aware that any tradition of their origin or their original seat was known to the Britons.