The form which the linguistic legend usually assumes is that of a colony of soldiers obtaining wives from another people whose language they adopt, and perhaps the most curious specimen is that told of the Britons of Armorica by Nennius. He tells us that when Maximus, who was declared emperor in Britain, went over to Gaul to maintain his pretensions, he withdrew from Britain its military force, and, unwilling to send his soldiers back to their wives, children, and possessions in Britain, settled them in Armorica, where they became the Armorican Britons, and some MSS. have the following addition:—These Armorican Britons, having laid waste and depopulated the country, took the wives and daughters of the previous inhabitants in marriage, but cut out their tongues that their children might not learn their mother tongue. Hence they were called _Letewiccion_ or half speech.[108] The meaning of this tale is, that identity of language is implied by the marriage of the leaders of one people with the wives and daughters of another, and a dialectic difference could only be accounted for by depriving the females of the power of speech. The story told by Bede that the Picts had no wives, and first asked them of the Britons and were refused, and then obtained them from the Scots, is likewise a legend, intended to account for that people, or at least the greater portion of them, speaking a Gaelic dialect; and in the same manner the oldest poem which narrates the settlement of the Milesian Scots in Ireland tells us that ‘Cruithne, the son of Cinge, took their women from them;’ and then after— There were no charming noble wives For their young men. Their women having been stolen, they made affinity With the Tuatha Dea.[109] Here we have the same story of the Picts, as personified in their _eponymus_ Cruithne taking their wives from the Milesians, and the latter replacing them by wives taken from the previous inhabitants of the Tuath De. The meaning is obviously linguistic, and such legends are intended simply to express a community of language between the supposed military colonies and the people from whom they obtained their wives. [Sidenote: Historical legends.] Some of these legends have, however, a historical basis, such as those which relate to supposed settlements of the race of the Scots in Britain. These contain an element of truth, in so far as temporary settlements of the Scots took place in Britain in the fourth century, when they first appear in history, and joined the Picts, Saxons, and Attacotti in assailing the Roman province in Britain; and still more when a permanent settlement of the Scots on the west coast north of the Firth of Clyde undoubtedly took place in the beginning of the sixth century, and the small Scottish kingdom of Dalriada was formed. [Sidenote: Artificial character of early Irish history.]