The natural inference from an examination of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History is that apparently he knew of no Picts south of the Firth of Forth. He certainly mentions none, and expressly says (B. iv. c. xxvi.), in describing the result of the defeat and death of Ecgfrid, king of Northumbria, by the Picts in 686, that Trumwine, with his Angles, fled from the monastery of Abercorn, ‘posito quidem in regione Anglorum, sed in vicinia freti quod Anglorum terras Pictorumque disterminat;’ but he is here talking of the territories belonging to each kingdom, and not of the distribution of the population; and as the territory of Galloway undoubtedly belonged to the Anglic kingdom, its population must have been either a subject British or Pictish population, as Bede elsewhere implies that twenty years later it was but partially occupied by Angles. In another work, however, Bede clearly implies that the population of Galloway was Pictish at that time. In his Life of St. Cuthbert (cap. xi.) he says, ‘Quodam etenim tempore pergens de suo monasterio pro necessitatis causa accidentis ad terram Pictorum, qui Niduari vocantur navigando pervenit.’ His monastery was Melrose. Mr. E. W. Robertson was inclined to think that St. Cuthbert had sailed from the mouth of the Tweed, and been driven northwards by contrary winds into the Firth of Tay, landing near Abernethy, on the coast of Fife, the inhabitants of the banks of the Nethy probably being the ‘Picti qui Niduari vocantur;’ and he refers in a note to a suggestion of the author’s that Cuthbert may have crossed the Firth of Forth and landed at Newburn, the old name of which was Nithbren (_Scotland under her Early Kings_, vol. ii. p. 383), but a more careful consideration has satisfied him that neither view is tenable. Bede says (B. i. c. xv.), ‘De Jutarum origine sunt Cantuari et Victuari, hoc est, ea gens quæ Vectam tenet insulam et ea quæ usque hodie in provincia Occidentalium Saxonum Jutarum natio nominatur, posita contra ipsam insulam Vectam.’ Now, the term Niduari is a word evidently formed in precisely the same way from the root Nid, as Cantuari and Vectuari are from the roots Cantia and Vecta, and certainly signifies the ‘gens’ on the Nid, which can only mean the river Nith, now forming the eastern boundary of Galloway, and which separated it in the lower part of its course from the Strathclyde kingdom. Ptolemy terms the river Nith ‘Novius;’ and from this in the same way was formed the name ‘Novantæ,’ a tribe which occupied the territory from the ‘Novius,’ which here separated them from the Selgovæ, to the Irish Sea. As the name Nith is the equivalent of Ptolemy’s ‘Novius,’ so Bede’s ‘Niduari’ is the exact equivalent of Ptolemy’s ‘Novantæ;’ and the author does not now doubt that they were the same people to whom the name of ‘Picti’ was likewise applied. In either view St. Cuthbert had to go some distance by land from Melrose