SCOTLAND UNDER HER EARLY KINGS.

Printed by R. & R. Clark

FOR

EDMONSTON AND DOUGLAS, EDINBURGH.

• LONDON    HAMILTON, ADAMS, AND CO.
• CAMBRIDGE MACMILLAN AND CO.
• DUBLIN    W. ROBERTSON.
• GLASGOW   JAMES MACLEHOSE.

J.Bartholomew Edin. F.R.G.S.

THE EARLY KINGDOM.

EDMONSTON & DOUGLAS, EDINBURGH

SCOTLAND
UNDER HER EARLY KINGS

A HISTORY OF THE KINGDOM
TO THE CLOSE OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY

BY

E. WILLIAM ROBERTSON

VOL. I.

EDINBURGH
EDMONSTON AND DOUGLAS
1862

PREFACE.

The present work has no pretensions to anything beyond being an attempt at supplying a hiatus in the history of Scotland which has hitherto been left unfilled. By the few historians who, in days gone by, devoted their attention to the subject, the earlier portion of Scottish history, more especially the period before the reign of Malcolm Ceanmore, seems to have been tacitly abandoned as a battleground for theorists—a sort of debateable land upon which they attacked or defended their various systems, wielding their feathered weapons with quite as much hostility as ever Pict, Scot, or Attacot displayed in actual combat, though (perhaps more fortunately for themselves than for their readers) without similarly fatal consequences. In the company of these enthusiasts I first endeavoured to trace out the history of the past, until, dissatisfied with my guides, I turned to chartulary and chronicle, with the result which is now before the reader.

I feel that an apology may be needed for the length and number of the Appendices, some of which will, perhaps, appear at first sight to have but little reference to the history of Scotland. Many questions, however, had to be discussed, many points to be raised or settled, which, though possessing little interest for the general reader, could not be passed over altogether; and such discussions, accordingly, I decided upon consigning to the Appendix. It will also be found that I have, not unfrequently, wandered from the beaten track; and wherever I have differed from usually received opinions I have felt bound to record my reasons for doing so. The remaining Appendices, though they may occasionally be devoted to questions comparatively foreign to Scottish history, embody the reasons which have guided me in forming many of my conclusions. I am very far from implying that it would have been impossible to write the early history of Scotland without entering upon the subjects of which they treat; I only plead my own inability to do so.

I have nothing more to add except that, as I put forward no claim to infallibility, and as my sole object has been to ascertain the truth, wherever it is clearly shown that I have failed in arriving at the end in view, I shall unhesitatingly acknowledge myself to have been mistaken. I have already sacrificed too many theories to object to the necessary immolation of as many more as may be proved to be erroneous; for historical accuracy will scarcely be attained by too rigid an adherence to preconceived ideas. The kindly interest and encouragement with which my work has been received by those whom I have long been accustomed to regard as the first living authorities upon the subjects of which it treats, and to whose contributions to Scottish history it really owes any merits it may possess, have been, I need not say, extremely gratifying to me. I trust I may accept this as an omen of success, and as an assurance that I have not uselessly sacrificed both time and labour in endeavouring to shed a few more rays of light upon the early history of the land of my forefathers.

Nether Seale Hall, Ashby de la Zouche,

September 6, 1862.

CONTENTS OF VOLUME I.

History of Scotland

TO THE CLOSE OF THE 13TH CENTURY.

CHAPTER I.
The Early History—Before A. D. 843.

Britain, dimly recognisable in the vague accounts given by Hecatæus of a large island off the coast of Gaul inhabited by a sacred race of Hyperboreans, and sometimes even disputing with Iceland the questionable honour of having been known as Ultima Thule, owes her first introduction within the pale of authentic history to the ambitious policy of the Cæsars. The historian, however, finds little worth recording about the northern districts during the Roman occupation of the island, and that little belongs rather to the province of the antiquary. A transitory gleam of light is shed upon the subject by the pen of Tacitus; A. D. 80–4. but the campaigns of Agricola were unproductive of results, and northern Britain again sinks into obscurity until the Emperor Hadrian deemed it necessary for the protection of the Roman province to throw up a turf rampart across the narrowest portion of the island, extending from the Solway to the Tyne. A. D. 120. Twenty years later another was added between the Forth and Clyde, connecting the old line of forts erected by Agricola, and known, from the reign in which it was built, as the Wall of Antonine; but after a fruitless struggle of sixty years the whole of the district between these walls was abandoned by Severus, when he raised a third rampart, built of stone, immediately to the northward of the original bulwark. A. D. 208. From this period the Roman province was bounded by the southern wall, and though towards the close of the fourth century the energy of Theodosius reasserted the dominion of the empire over the district between Forth and Tyne, A. D. 369. which now received the name of Valentia in honour of the Emperor Valens, the newly-established province was soon relinquished, and about the opening of the following century Britain was finally abandoned by her ancient masters. Long before this period the incursions of the northern tribes upon the Roman province A. D. 407. had become incessant, and some idea may be formed of the distance to which they occasionally penetrated, from the account left by Ammianus Marcellinus, that Theodosius, after landing at Rutupe, the modern Richborough, was obliged to fight his way through Kent, swarming with their hostile bands, before he could reach the capital, Augusta, described by the historian as “an old town formerly known as London.” Their earlier title of Caledonians had by this time disappeared, and they were generally known as Picts, a name including the two great divisions of Vecturiones and Dicaledones, answering apparently to the later confederacies of northern and southern Picts.[1]

Britain after the departure of the legionaries appears to have suffered her full share of the calamities of that disastrous epoch, and the episodes of invasion and conquest enacted throughout the continental provinces of the expiring empire were repeated with similar results, within the narrower limits of her ancient island dependency. A continuous stream of Teutonic invaders poured without ceasing upon her shores, Jutes, Saxons, and Frisians peopling the south-eastern coasts, whilst further towards the north swarmed the Anglian tribes who were destined to fix an imperishable name upon the island. Towards the middle of the sixth century an additional impetus appears to have been given to the torrent of Anglian invasion by the arrival of Ida, the reputed founder of the Northumbrian kingdom, and leader of the Bernician Angles, whose descendants formed so important an element in the Teutonic population of southern Scotland. No record of his prowess is to be found in the annals of his countrymen; his name alone survives with that of his forgotten foe, “the dark lord”—Dutigern; but the precipitate flight of the British bishop from York, the sudden extinction of Christianity throughout the diocese, the name of Gwrth Bryneich—or Bernicia’s thraldom—by which the famous fortress of Bamborough was known amongst the conquered people, and the ominous title of “the Flame-Bearer,” applied to the mighty Angle in the lays of the hostile bards, sufficiently attest the ruthless energy with which he extended the dominion of his race from the marshy plains of Holderness to the distant islets of the Forth.[2] From the Humber to the Tyne the country was known amongst the Britons as Deheubarth, or “the southern part,” whilst beyond that river and the ruins of the southern wall, the district stretching to the Forth was distinguished as Bryneich, or “the country of the braes;” and it was within the boundaries of the latter province that the Anglian population of the Lothians first established themselves as conquerors in the land which their descendants still occupy.

Ida fell in battle, slain, say the British authorities, by Owen of Reged, whose father Urien, the favourite hero of the bards, and a warrior from whom many a laurel has been stolen to adorn the chaplet of the fabulous Arthur, was hailed unanimously as leader of a confederacy which was to drive the invader from the soil. The tide of conquest was now rolled back upon the Angles, Bryneich was recovered, and the sons of Ida were driven from the land, when at the very moment of his triumph the bravest champion of his race fell by the dagger of “Llovan of the accursed hand,” and his death was fatal to his countrymen. Step by step the Angles recovered their ascendency, winning their way at the point of the sword, until the whole of the eastern coast was wrested from its original possessors, confined henceforth to the westward of “the Desert,” and the Northumbrian kingdoms of Deira and Bernicia rose out of the ruins of the conquered British principalities.[3]

A solitary entry in the annals of the Irish abbot, Tighernach, affords the earliest historical testimony of the arrival of a small, but in many respects a remarkable, band of colonists, about fifty years before the settlement of an Anglian population in the Lothians, upon the rocky and indented coasts of southern Argyle. A. D. 502. Fergus Mor MacEarca, a chieftain of the Irish Gael, was their leader, and the north-eastern extremity of the modern county of Antrim, which, at that time, formed part of the territories of the Irish Picts, was the locality which they abandoned when they crossed the channel in their leathern coracles in search of another home upon the shores of Britain. Amidst the lakes and mountains to the southward of Loch Linne, Fergus and his followers fixed their new abode; and the limits of his petty kingdom, which were never enlarged, are still traceable in the names implanted by succeeding princes upon the dependent districts of Lorn, Cowal, and Kintyre. These principalities, with a few of the islands off the coast of southern Argyle, made up, collectively, the whole of the kingdom of Dalriada—for such was its real name; though in the Latin chronicles of a later age, Fergus and his descendants invariably appear under the more familiar appellation of “Kings of the Scots.” The annals of the Dalriads are totally devoid of interest before the reign of Conal, fourth in succession from Fergus Mor, who, by the shelter he afforded to the exiled Abbot of Durrow, indirectly furthered the conversion of the northern Picts to Christianity.[4]

It was in consequence of a feud between the leading clans of the royal race of Ireland, that the apostle of the northern Picts first quitted the home of his earlier years and dedicated the remainder of his life to the labours of a missionary. On the occasion of one of those great meetings of the clergy and laity of Ireland, to which such frequent allusion is made in her annals, a son of Aodh, king of Connaught, who happened to be present in full reliance upon a promise of immunity from Columba, was seized and put to death by order of Dermot MacKerval, lord of the southern Hy Nial, and at that time Ardrigh, or supreme king of Ireland. Columba, who was then abbot of Durrow, was also a member of the same great sept, and closely allied by birth to the king of one of the northern branches—the Clan Conal; and his kinsmen, bound by the usual ties of relationship to avenge the insult, uniting with the king of Connaught, inflicted so severe a defeat upon the aggressor, that his whole wrath was turned upon Columba, whom he caused to be excommunicated by the leading clergy of Meath. Dreading the further effects of his enemy’s vengeance, Columba bade adieu to his native land; and, under the curse of man, sought those shores to which, under the blessing of God, he was destined to become, indeed, a messenger of good tidings.[5]

Arriving with the usual complement of twelve followers, off the coast of Argyle, he obtained permission from Conal, king of the Dalriads, to appropriate the little island of Iona, and after employing himself for two years in establishing and regulating his brotherhood, he prepared to enter upon his allotted task, and to penetrate across the mountain barrier of Drumalban. A. D. 565. Not far from the spot where the river Ness issues from the parent lake of which it assumes the name, there still exist the vestiges of an ancient earthwork, ascribed by the tradition of the country to a Pictish king; and thither Columba and his companions bent their steps, for Bruidi MacMalcon, who at this time held supreme sway over both divisions of the Picts, held his court within the ramparts of this Rath or Dun. As the arrival of the Christian missionary appears to have been expected, he was opposed by a number of the Pictish Druids, but as their hostility seems to have been limited to the use of incantations and enchantments, little real hindrance could have been offered to his progress, and he reached, without difficulty, the residence of the king. As the gates of the royal fortress close upon the little band, all knowledge ceases of the further proceedings of Columba; the bare record of the success of his mission has descended to posterity, and the people acquiescing, as in duty bound, in their sovereign’s renunciation of idolatry, both divisions of the Pictish people were henceforth united in belief.[6]

An interesting description of the disciples and successors of Columba has been handed down in the pages of a writer, whose difference with the Gaelic clergy in certain trivial points of faith did not blind him to the virtues and real merits of the earliest apostles of Christianity to his own heathen forefathers. Shut out in their distant northern home from the knowledge of synodical decrees, and constrained to seek their doctrine and rule of conduct in the writings of the prophets, the evangelists, and the apostles, the simple denizens of the sea-girt Iona were conspicuous for the purity of their unblemished morals, for their fervent attachment to their divine Master, and for their strict adherence to the precepts and traditions of the revered founder of the brotherhood. As they preached so they practised, their own blameless manner of life affording the best commentary on their doctrine; and when they issued forth from their monastery to baptise and to instruct, to convert the infidel and to strengthen the believer, the offerings forced upon them by the gratitude of the powerful and the rich were employed in relieving the wants of the poor and in alleviating the sufferings of the sick—in restoring freedom to the captive and in purchasing liberty for the slave. Such is the picture drawn by the venerable Beda of Aidan and his fellow-labourers in the work of converting the Angles of Northumbria; worthy inheritors of the virtues and devotion of Columba, and bright examples of the pure and simple piety inspired by the zeal of Patrick amongst the early fathers of his church.[7]

For about a century and a half after the arrival of Columba, Iona continued in the position of the leading monastery of the north, extending her authority over many parts of Ireland, and bidding fair at one time to establish a similar influence throughout southern Britain, until a dispute about matters of comparatively trivial importance abruptly severed her connection with Northumbria. A difference of opinion had long existed between the clergy of the Picts, Britons, and northern Irish, on the one hand, and the followers of Augustine amongst the Anglo-Saxons, on the other, together with the ecclesiastics of southern Ireland, who had been latterly brought to conform to the practice authorised by the see of Rome. The proper time for the celebration of the Easter festival, and the orthodox form of the clerical tonsure, were the subjects in dispute; and though the former was clearly a question of astronomical calculation, and the tonsure was a badge of Paganism in the days of the primitive church, both points originated frequent and animated discussions, and were debated in the seventh century as important matters of faith. A.D. 664. Colman and his followers, at the celebrated conference of Whitby, had bade adieu to their adopted country sooner than relinquish the practice they had inherited from their predecessors; and fifty years later a similar tenacity in favour of “ancient customs” brought about the expulsion of the clergy of Iona from the territories of the Pictish sovereign. Nectan MacDeriloi, in consequence of a difference of opinion with his clergy about the points in question, dispatched envoys to Ceolfred, abbot of Wearmouth, requesting his decision upon the matters in dispute, and, at the same time, inviting the assistance of Saxon architects to build a stone church after the approved Roman model. The abbot responded to both appeals, and though every vestige of the stone church has long since disappeared, the letter of Ceolfred may still be read in the pages of the historian Beda. It strengthened and confirmed the king in his own convictions, and A.D. 717. he decided that his clergy should conform accordingly; but they were as firm in their resolution as Colman; and Nectan, summarily ordering them across Drumalban, appears to have transferred to his recent foundation (which seems to have been Abernethy) the pre-eminence amongst the monasteries of northern Britain, which had hitherto been the peculiar prerogative of Iona.[8]

Whilst the arrival of the Angles upon the coasts of Valentia is dimly traceable in the scanty records of the period, and the settlement of the Dalriads in a portion of Argyle is historically noticed by the earliest annalist of Ireland, a barren and corrupt, but singularly accurate list of uncouth names is the sole record of the Pictish people before the opening of the seventh century, when the confusion resulting upon the death of the Northumbrian Ethelfrith compelled his children to seek a refuge amongst the friendly people of the north. The bitter spirit of animosity engendered in the Angles by their incessant hostilities with the Britons is hardly traceable in their early relations with the Picts, and accordingly a ready welcome was extended to the youthful exiles, who were instructed in the knowledge of the Christian faith by the Gaelic clergy, and sheltered for fifteen years beyond the protecting barrier of the Forth. The residence of the Northumbrian Athelings amongst the Picts was productive of important consequences; Eanfred, the eldest of the brothers, became the husband of a Pictish princess—and their son Talorcan was numbered amongst the Pictish kings—whilst Oswald, after recovering his father’s throne, sought from amongst the instructors of his early youth those holy men through whose assistance he hoped to spread abroad amongst his people the blessings of the novel faith which he had learnt to prize so dearly.[9]

After the death of this amiable prince upon the fatal field of Winwed, the ties of affection and good will which had hitherto united the sons of Ethelfrith with the people who had sheltered them in adversity were severed during the reign of his harsher brother Oswy, and exchanged for the galling bonds of conquest. Province after province bowed to the Anglian yoke, until the majority of the neighbouring Pictish princes were ranged with the Dalriads, who shared the same lot, amongst the tributaries of the Northumbrian sovereign, and though they endeavoured to regain their liberty when A. D. 670. Egfrid ascended the throne, their premature attempt only served to rivet their fetters more securely. About eleven years later a yet more decisive step was taken towards the permanent annexation of the tributary Pictish provinces, and Egfrid, when he divided the overgrown diocese of Wilfrid into the Sees of York, Hexham, and Lindisfarne, appointed Trumwine to the bishopric of the Picts, choosing Abercorn, upon the southern bank of A. D. 681. the Forth, as the seat of the new Episcopate.[10]

Five years after the erection of the See of Abercorn, A. D. 685. for some unknown cause, Egfrid, repeating the ravages of his Irish expedition of the previous year, poured a mighty army across the Forth, burning the Raths of Tulach-Aman, and Dun Ollaig. His progress was unopposed, and penetrating into the neighbouring province of Angus, he crossed the Tay without resistance, and skirted the base of the Grampian range until he approached the neighbourhood of Lin Garan or Nectan’s Mere, a little lake in the modern parish of Dunnichen. Here his antagonist, who was his cousin Bruidi, awaited with his followers the hostile onset, the signal overthrow of the invading force justifying the choice of the position. The victory was as glorious as its consequences were important, Egfrid and the greater part of his army were left upon the field, whilst few escaped from the scene of slaughter to carry back to Northumbria the tidings of her monarch’s fall. All that the conquests of thirty years had wrested from the Picts was lost for ever to the race of Ida, and the Saxon bishop, abandoning in terror his See of Abercorn, never rested in his hurried flight until within the walls of Whitby he had placed the whole breadth of Bernicia between himself and his rebellious flock. The Dalriads also recovered their former liberty, and even the Britons enjoyed a momentary independence, and through the losses and embarrassments entailed upon Northumbria by the disastrous overthrow of Egfrid, the pre-eminence of the Northern Angles received a fatal shock which the utmost efforts of succeeding princes failed altogether to repair.[11]

During the forty years which elapsed after the victory of Nectan’s Mere an occasional conflict with the Angles testifies to the embittered feelings which had arisen through Northumbrian aggression; and upon the abdication of Nectan, the correspondent of Ceolfred and somewhat arbitrary reformer of the Gaelic clergy, who after a reign of eighteen years relinquished his throne for the cloister, a contest seems to have arisen between four Pictish kings, which, after five years, terminated in the undisputed ascendancy of Angus Mac Fergus. A. D. 730. Fortune proved true to her favourite, whose alliance was courted at different periods by the Mercian and Northumbrian sovereigns, and in the results of his victories over his various competitors, and of his conquests over the Dalriads and the northern Britons, may be traced apparently the germs of the future kingdom of Scotland.[12]

Confined within the narrow district to the southward of Loch Linne and to the westward of the mountain range of Drumalban, the Dalriad princes exercised but little influence upon the great confederacy of the Picts, their usual opponents being the Britons, and in early times the Angles, against whom both Britons and Dalriads occasionally appear to have united. Their fleet is sometimes mentioned in the Irish annals, a hostile expedition against the Islesmen disclosing the limited extent of their dominion in the western seas.[13] The most prosperous era in the annals of the little kingdom coincides with Columba’s residence in Iona, after Conal, the early patron of the saint, was succeeded by Aidan Mac Gauran, the enterprising and able leader of the clans of Kintyre, the names of whose numerous battles, preserved in the annals and biographies of the period, amply testify to his warlike qualities without throwing much light on the causes of their display. His latest antagonist was the Northumbrian Ethelfrith, A. D. 603. from whom he received so severe a check at Degsa’s Stone, that the Angles were allowed henceforth to prosecute their career of conquest over the Britons without interference from the Dalriads, who with the exception of an occasional contest with their neighbours on the Clyde seem to have turned their attention to the opposite coasts of Uladh.[14] For a quarter of a century and upwards they were tributaries along with the Picts of the Northumbrian kingdom, regaining their independence after the battle of Nectan’s Mere, though it may be gathered from the words of Adamnan and from certain notices in the annalists, that the predominance in the kingdom passed about this time from Kintyre to the house of Lorn, whose chieftain, Selvach, seems to have rivalled Aidan in the number of his battles, fought generally, as in the case of the latter prince, against the Britons of Strath Clyde. A. D. 723. The abdication and death of Selvach were fatal to the supremacy of his house; the authority of his son, Dungal, being quickly confined A. D. 730. within the limits of the paternal inheritance, which he was destined a few years later to lose through a wanton outrage upon a connection of the formidable Angus. Bruidi, a son of the Pictish sovereign, appears to have fled for some cause to the island of Toraic, A. D. 733. where he was followed—or found—by Dungal, who forced him from the sanctuary in which he had taken refuge. The devastation of Lorn in the following year, and the destruction of the two A. D. 734. Raths of Dunleven and Dunadd, attest the vigour with which Angus avenged the insult; Dungal and his brother Feredach were carried off in chains in the victor’s train, and two years later the defeat of Muredach, A. D. 736. the last known member of the family, upon the shores of Loch Linne, completed the ruin of the house of Lorn. The scanty records of the period throw no farther light upon the subject, Lorn and its princes disappear from history, and the success of Angus would appear to have extended not only to the conquest of the province in question, but to the temporary subjection of the entire kingdom of Dalriada.[15]

The alliance with Ethelbald the Proud seems to have involved Angus in a collision at different epochs with the West Saxons and the Northumbrians, though a connection of a more friendly nature arose at a later period with the Bernician Eadbert, one of the greatest restorers of the Northumbrian power, the alliance being probably based upon the mutual spoliation of the Britons. The conquests of Ethelfrith in the neighbourhood of Chester, and the victories of Edwin in the south-west of Yorkshire, when he drove Ceretic, or Caradoc, from the forest district of Elmete, appear to have made the first impression upon the lengthened tract of country to the westward of “the Desert,” the true home of the Cymri, extending from the Severn to the Clyde, in which a number of petty princes and kinglets long united in paying some sort of deference to the authority of one supreme king, or Unben.[16] The faint remains of a line of defence, dictated possibly by a recollection of imperial tactics, can still be traced towards the north-eastern frontier of this British territory under the name of the Catrail or Pictswork ditch, stretching from Peel Fell through the south-western portion of Roxburghshire to Galashiels in Selkirkshire; and to the westward of this barrier the Britons long remained upon a footing of comparative independence, after they had lost all hold upon the more open country in the vicinity.[17] Mercia, at the period of Edwin’s reign, was under the rule of Penda, a chieftain who, to a hatred and contempt of Christianity, joined an ardent desire of shaking off his dependence upon the kindred Angles beyond the Humber, and encouraging the designs of the British princes against the conqueror of Caradoc, he united the pagan warriors of Mercia with the Christian followers of Caswallon, re-establishing the supremacy of the Britons over the ancient city of York, by the defeat and death of Edwin, though the triumph was purchased at the price of the temporary extinction of Christianity. But the alliance between Christian and pagan was of evil omen, and the death of Caswallon in the following year destroyed the hopes of the Britons, though they again swelled the forces of the heathen Penda, when he lost his life near the Broad Arc, Cadwal of Gwynneth alone escaping from the field. Cadwallader, the last king whose authority is supposed to have been supreme, died of the pestilence in 664; and towards the close of the same century the conquests of Egfred extended the Northumbrian dominions to the western coast, and with his numerous donations of lands in the modern counties of Lancashire and Cumberland to the Northumbrian clergy, interposed a permanent barrier between the Britons of North Wales, Cumberland, and Strath Clyde.[18]

Henceforth the ancient confederacy of the Britons seems to have been broken up into the separate divisions of Wales, and English and Scottish Cumbria—or Cumberland and Strath Clyde—never again destined to be reunited under the authority of one supreme Unben. During the reign of the Northumbrian Alfred, the Angles began to extend their encroachments from the neighbourhood of Carlisle along the whole of the south-western coast, known in a later age as Galloway, their possessions in this quarter having increased, shortly before the death of Beda, to such an extent as to justify their usual policy of establishing a bishopric; and accordingly, Whithern, or Candida Casa, the traditional see of Ninian, was revived, and placed under the superintendence of a line of Anglian bishops, which was abruptly brought to a close about a century later. The successes of Eadbert reduced the fortunes of the Britons in this quarter to the lowest ebb. Kyle was rendered tributary to Northumbria, which already included Cunningham; A. D. 756. and shortly after the middle of the century, Alclyde or Dumbarton, the strongest bulwark of the Northern Britons, surrendered to the united forces of the Northumbrians and the Picts. The capture of Alclyde must have thrown the whole of the ancient British territories in the Lennox, which were subsequently included in the diocese of Glasgow, into the power of Angus, together with a great portion of the “debateable land” between Forth and Clyde, similarly included in the “Cumbrian” diocese; and the little principality of Strath Clyde was now completely hemmed in and surrounded by hostile territories, though the gradual decline of the Northumbrian power towards the close of the eighth century, enabled the petty state to struggle on for another hundred years in a precarious species of nominal independence.[19]

After the death of Angus MacFergus, king of the Picts, A. D. 761. who is stigmatized by a Saxon writer as “a bloody tyrant,” the history of the succeeding period again becomes obscure. Bruidi his brother followed him on the throne, which, after the death of Bruidi, and an interval of fifteen years, during which it was again occupied in succession by two brothers, reverted once more to the family of Angus in the persons of his son and grandson—Constantine MacFergus, A. D. 789. also probably a member of the same race, acquiring the supreme power towards the close of the century by driving out Conal MacTeige, who lost his life a few years later in Kintyre. The names of three kings of Dalriada attest the existence of the little kingdom, without throwing any further light upon its history, though from the character of a subsequent reference to Aodh “the Fair,” it may be conjectured that he was in some sense the restorer of the line of Kintyre. A. D. 792. After the death of Doncorcin, the last of these three princes, which happened shortly after the accession of Constantine, no further mention of the province will be found in any of the Irish annals which have hitherto been published.[20]

For thirty years and upwards, the supremacy of Constantine was undisputed, and he was succeeded upon his death by his brother Angus, his son Drost, and his nephew Eoganan in the same regular order which is subsequently observable amongst the early kings of Scotland. His reign was unquestionably an era of considerable importance, tradition connecting it with the termination of the Pictish monarchy, and representing Constantine as the last of the Pictish kings—a tradition which must have owed its origin to a vague recollection of some momentous change about this period. He and his brother Angus are numbered most suspiciously amongst the immediate predecessors of Kenneth MacAlpin in the “Duan of Alban,” the oldest known genealogy of the early kings of Scotland; whilst the name of Constantine, unknown amongst the paternal ancestry of Kenneth, was borne by his son and many of his race, who would thus appear to have looked for their title to the throne quite as much to their maternal as to their paternal line of ancestry—for the mother of Alpin, Kenneth’s father, was traditionally a daughter of the house of Fergus.[21] The foundation of Dunkeld, in Atholl, during the same reign, and of St. Andrews, in Fife, during the reign of the younger Angus, point to the incorporation of both those provinces amongst the dominions of the Pictish sovereigns; for it is observable that the erection of a monastery was generally coincident with the reduction under the royal authority of the province over which the newly instituted abbot exercised jurisdiction, the authority of the ecclesiastical superior confirming and sanctifying as it were the power of the sovereign; and it will be found that when regular dioceses were instituted in the twelfth century, the whole of Dalriada had long been incorporated amongst the districts acknowledging the jurisdiction of Constantine’s monastery of Dunkeld. The Anglian line of bishops also disappear during the same reign from the diocese of Whithern, and a population of Gaelic origin, distinguished from the earlier masters of the soil, whether of Cumbrian or Northumbrian race, is subsequently discovered in possession of the entire district.[22] The power of Northumbria was on the wane, her people, distracted by civil contests, were fast relinquishing the hold they had once acquired upon the districts to the westward of the Lothians; and as the Angles, weakened by internal discord, no longer opposed a formidable barrier to the Northern tribes, the latter, gradually increasing in power, seem to have been fast settling into a stronger and more compact kingdom, in which may be traced the nucleus of modern Scotland.

The erection of Dunkeld, the sole deed of Constantine that has descended to posterity, may be traced to the inroads of the Northern Vikings, who, four years after his accession, made their first recorded appearance upon the British coasts, ravaging in the same year Lindisfarne and Iona. A few of the Scottish monks who escaped with life bore with them the relics of their founder, distributing their sacred charge between the new foundation of the Pictish sovereign and another monastery raised at Kells in Ireland; whilst the pre-eminence throughout North Briton, which had passed to Abernethy from Iona, appears to have been again transferred from the former monastery, and vested in Dunkeld, which was destined in its turn, before the close of the century, to be eclipsed and supplanted by St. Andrews.[23]

A. D. 839.

The male line of the family of Fergus appears to have terminated in the sons of the younger Angus, Eoganan and Bran, who were both killed in a disastrous battle with the Northmen; and for three years the two sons of Bargoit, Feredach and Bruidi, reigned over the Picts, the death of Bruidi making way for the first prince of the line of Dalriada, A. D. 843. Kenneth MacAlpin, who seems to have ascended the throne in right of the maternal ancestry of his father. For the next two centuries the united people of the Picts and Scots acknowledged the dominion of the MacAlpin dynasty; and though Kenneth and his immediate successors were still recorded in the annals of the age under the original title of “Kings of the Picts,” from the opening of the tenth century the ancient name of Pict, gradually dying out, was superseded by the more familiar appellation of Scot, extending, in course of time, to every tribe and every race from the Tweed and the Solway to the Pentland Firth, whose chieftains and leaders, whether native noble, or feudal baron, owned the authority and followed the banner of the representatives of the princes of Kintyre.[24]

CHAPTER II.
The Kingdom of Scotland—843–900.

The history of Scotland as a kingdom may be said in general terms to begin with the accession of the family of Kintyre; but the Scotland of the period of the MacAlpin dynasty, both in the extent of the territory to which Kenneth actually succeeded, as well as in the nature of his authority over the remainder of the kingdom, bore only a partial resemblance to the more compact feudal monarchy of a later era. Gaul, before the achievements of Julius Cæsar annexed that country to the dominion of Rome, must have presented an example of a pure Celtic system of government; and the features of that system, as described in the Commentaries of the conqueror, are plainly traceable amongst the kindred Celtic populations of the British Isles. The greater states, such as the Ædui, appear to have been aristocratic confederacies, generally exercising a sort of leadership over a number of lesser dependencies, electing annually a magistrate, judge, or Vergobreith, to govern with royal authority, and the power of life and death, and guarding, with jealous care, against the perpetuation of this authority as a hereditary appanage in any one family. In other confederacies this second phase had been brought about with more or less permanent success, and Tasgetius was re-established by Cæsar in the “kingdom” which his ancestors had acquired over the Carnutes—a proceeding which within three years cost him his life—whilst Cavarinus was confirmed in a similar hereditary authority over the Senones, which appears to have descended to his brother Moritasgus from their joint forefathers. Occasionally a number of the leading states were united in one great confederacy under a temporary head, chosen for the occasion, who was invested with royal authority over every member of the alliance, and obedience enforced to his behests by the exaction of hostages. As war was the bond of union in such confederacies, the character of the supreme leader was military not judicial; he was the Toshach not the Vergobreith; the War-king, exercising the same authority over the whole confederacy with which every Duke or Toshach was invested by each member of the alliance over their separate contingents. Attempts had not been wanting to convert this temporary authority into a permanent supremacy, as in the case of Celtillus, the father of Vercingetorix; but Cæsar records no instance of success in a course of policy which would evidently have laid the foundation of a wider and far more formidable kingdom than any that had been established by the mere conversion of the elective into the hereditary principle within the boundaries of a single state. In all these features of the government of the greater states of Gaul, there is nothing that can be considered peculiar to the people of that country alone. The annual Vergobreith is but the counterpart of the Princeps chosen in the German assemblies, and dispatched with a hundred Comites to administer justice amongst the confederated clans. Aristocratic confederacies, occasionally united under the rule of one head, or Heretoga, prevailed amongst the continental Saxons in the days of Beda, and probably of Charlemagne; a judge, perhaps elective, still governed the Visigoths at the close of the fourth century, when an infant king was the hereditary ruler of the Ostragoths; whilst Maraboduus is an example that the authority of a permanent magistrate had occasionally prevailed over the elective principle amongst the Germans, even before the days of Tacitus, when the government of a king was not unknown amongst that people.[25]

The true peculiarity of the Celtic system, the “balance of power,” is to be found in that singular principle of divided authority, which is surely traceable to the original separation of the two leading classes, and their mutual jealousy of encroachment, a jealousy which seems to have settled into a fixed principle of policy in the Celtic system of government long after its probable cause had been forgotten. Every state, every group of clans, every family even, was thus divided; two confederacies took the lead amongst the whole people; and if the Ædui or the Sequani lost their pre-eminence, the Rhemi or the Arverni stept into the vacant place; for the undivided supremacy of one confederacy—unbalanced power—would have been totally contrary to all Celtic precedent.[26] Three leading characters are traceable amongst the Gauls,—one hereditary, the Princeps or head of the race, the Cen-Cinnitd or Pen-Cenedl of later times; two elective, the Judex, supreme magistrate or Vergobreith, and the Dux or Toshach, the leader of the host. These characters are equally recognisable amongst the early Germans, amongst whom they were probably known as the Cyning or Konung, the head of the kindred—the Lagaman and the Heretoga; and they existed to a recent date in every Celtic clan long after the elective had given place to the hereditary principle, as the chief, the Toshach, and the judge, Brehon or Deempster. As amongst the Germans so amongst the Gauls, the head of the lineage was not necessarily the leader of the host, though the offices were not unfrequently united in the same person. Sedulius was dux et princeps (captain and chief) of the Lemovices; and Vertiscus “princeps,” or chief of the confederacy of the Rhemi, was also “præfectus” (captain or toshach) of their cavalry.[27] But here the resemblance ceases, for the German Lagaman—the princeps who was elected in the assembly, and dispatched with a hundred Gasinds or Comites to judge the people—never appears to have necessarily laid aside his military authority. Athanaric was Dux as well as Judex of the Visigoths; and the Frank Gasind of a later period united in his own person both military and judicial functions, as Graf, Count or Judex Fiscalis. Such was not the case amongst the Celts, who appear to have separated the judicial from the military office—authority from power—with all that jealous care in which may be traced the anxiety of the original founders of the system to preserve an equal balance between two rival castes. The Vergobreith amongst the Ædui was strictly prohibited from crossing the frontiers of the confederacy,[28] and was of course incapacitated from holding the office of Toshach during the continuance of his supreme magistracy. That this prohibition lasted only during the year of office is evident from the example of Cotus, who, failing in his attempt to succeed his brother Vedeliacus as Vergobreith, appears immediately afterwards as Toshach of the Æduan cavalry. As the Vergobreith was inaugurated by the Druids,[29] and as that class monopolized the whole administration of the laws, it is very evident that the noble who was chosen for the supreme magistracy resigned his military character during his year of office, and was enrolled, as it were, for that period amongst the ranks of the Druids. Had such a personage existed as a permanent and hereditary Vergobreith giving law to the whole Celtic race, this sacred character would have become equally permanent and hereditary, and the ruler of the Celtic people would have resembled, in this respect, the monarchs of the great eastern empires of antiquity.[30] The Gauls, however, never appear to have arrived, in historical times, at the same point of unity in their political, as in their religious, constitution; and the Hierophant, or Arch-Druid, elected for life, stood alone, and without any parallel, amongst the equestrian order. Long after the introduction of Christianity, and a thousand years after the time of Cæsar, the old principle of separating the judicial from the military functions is still clearly discernible in the Welsh “Laws of Howel Dha.” Two officers were appointed over every royal Commot, the Cynghellwr and the Maer, the former administering justice, the latter collecting the royal dues and following the king to battle; and the same system is traceable in Gaelic Scotland, where, under the Teutonic disguise of Thane and Deempster, it is easy to discover the types of the Cymric Maer and Cynghellwr.

The Celtic principle of division, or balance of power, is recognisable amongst the Cymri both in their older confederacies of Deur and Bryneich, and in the later Gwynnedd and Dyved, or North and South Wales; but it is in Ireland that the best examples are afforded of this singular peculiarity of the continual subdivision of authority. The whole country was divided as usual into North and South, or Leth Cuin and Leth Mogh, the latter containing Muimhean and Laighean—Munster and Leinster—each again subdivided into North and South, or Thomond and Desmond, Tuath-Laighean and Deas-gabhar. Ulster and Connaught were the two historical provinces of the north of Ireland, two kingdoms are traceable in legendary Ulster, and after Uladh had ceased to share in the sovereignty of the North, two families, the Dalaraide and Dal-fiatach, long contested the supremacy within the circumscribed boundaries of the province. No sooner had the great family of the Hy Nial succeeded in monopolizing the supreme power than it was at once divided into the usual separate branches of Northern and Southern Hy Nial, each gradually subdivided into the clans of Eogan and Conal, of Colman and of Aodh Slane. The predominance of a single race was, as of old, the signal for its subdivision, even the smallest clan being subject to the divided authority of a chief and a toshach.

Once every year the Gallic Druids were accustomed to meet in solemn convention at a spot within the confines of the Carnutes, which was looked upon as the centre of Gaul, and had there been such a magistrate as an annual Vergobreith chosen to rule over the whole Gallic race, it is probable that he would have been inaugurated in this assembly in the same manner as the Æduan Druids consecrated the provincial Vergobreith, who ruled for his allotted year over that confederacy. A similar convention is traceable in Ireland under the name of the Feas Temora, or “Feast of Tara,” a place chosen probably for its centrical situation; and he who “held the feast” was the acknowledged Ardrigh of the whole nation, the “tribes of Tara” originally holding their lands on condition of quartering the king and his followers on the occasion of the great festival. This convention, undoubtedly in its origin a Druidical meeting like the solemn assembly within the borders of the Carnutes, was still existing in Ireland in historical times, dying out towards the close of the seventh century; though the Irish annalists long continued to give the title of “king of Tara” to the Ardrigh, who claimed the supreme authority over the whole Irish people.

The invariable Celtic principle of “division” is plainly traceable amongst the population of Northern Britain in their separation from a very early period into Caledones and Mæatæ, Dicaledones and Vecturiones, and latterly into Northern and Southern Picts. Towards the middle of the third century, when Dion wrote, the form of their government was still “democratic;” in other words, the various states or confederacies into which the Pictish people were divided, like the early Gauls and Southern Britons, were still ignorant of the principle of one elective or hereditary ruler.[31] The earliest bond of union may probably be traced to the time when they united under one common leader to resist or assail the Roman legionaries; and out of the Dux or Toshach elected for the occasion, like Galgacus, and exercising a paramount though temporary authority, arose the Ardrigh or supreme king, after some popular or ambitious chieftain had prolonged his power by successful wars, or procured his election to this prominent station for life. The nature of the sovereignty thus established, which was fully recognised in the days of Columba, resembled the dominion of the Ardrigh amongst the kindred Gael of Ireland, or of the Unben amongst the earlier Cymri, differing in a remarkable manner from the royal authority as it existed amongst the Welsh of a later age. Breith, or Law, was at the root of the later Welsh system. Privilege was Breint, the noble or man of privilege amongst the Southern Welsh, Breyr; the king, Breen-hyn—the senior Brehon or Lawgiver, the hereditary instead of the elective Vergobreith. In the laws of Howel Dha, the representative of the Druid, or of the noble enrolled amongst the Druids, the Cynghellwr who “divided with the Brenin” evidently took precedence of the Maer, the representative of the military noble; whilst the Rhy, and Twysawg, or Rex and Dux (though met with in the Welsh dictionaries), are never found in these laws. With the Gael, however, it was the Righ and the Toshach who were most prominent; the Brehon had no such intimate connection with the throne or with the privileged classes, and in the charter of king Robert Bruce to the Thane of Cawdor, it was the Judex who held his lands under the Thane or Toshach. The Gaelic Ardrigh represented the permanent Toshach, not the Vergobreith, the permanent holder of the office of Vercingetorix, the head of a wide confederacy bound together less by the ties of blood, or by an authority confirmed by the sacerdotal order, than by the actual power of the supreme ruler confirmed by the exaction of hostages.[32]

The different tribes enumerated by Ptolemy, and subsequently known as the Northern and Southern Picts, appear at some early period to have coalesced into seven lesser confederacies, answering to the “Pictish Provinces” of Beda. Allusion is evidently made to these principalities in the old verses ascribed by tradition to Columba, enumerating the seven sons of Cruithne—characters of the same description as the sons of Hellen—“Cait, Ce, Ciric of the hundred clans, Fiv, Fidach, Fodla, Fortreim.” In Fiv “the forest,” and in Cait, there is little difficulty in recognising “the ancient kingdom of Fife,” and a province of which the north-eastern extremity still retains the name of Caithness, the point or promontory of Caith. Meaningless alike in Gaelic and in Welsh, Caith is probably the Celtic form of Ketje, “the end” or “extremity” in Lappish, a relic of a time when an Ugrian population regarded this province as their northern limit. The recollection of Fortreim was long preserved in the Deanery of Fortrev or Fotheriff, lying along the banks of the Forth, from which river the name was most probably derived. Fodla or Fotla, a word sometimes used amongst the Irish Gael as synonymous with Ireland, or their native home, survives in Athfodla or Atholl; whilst the appellation of Fidach, or “the woody” may be safely conjectured to have belonged to that province which was once known to the Romans under the ancient British epithet of Celydon, or “the forest district.” No clue remains to identify Ce and Ciric, which may have answered to the provinces upon the coast included between the Grampian range and the eastern and northern seas. Nothing whatever is known of these seven provinces beyond the bare fact of their existence, though long after they had been broken up into earldoms, or united by conquest to the possessions of the crown, the tradition of this ancient sevenfold division of the Pictish kingdom, and of the rights of the provincial princes in electing a paramount Ardrigh, appears to have been revived amongst a party of the Scottish nobles for the purpose of adding to their overgrown power at the expense of their youthful king.[33]

The Pictish king was elective, unless he formed an exception to the universal rule prevailing amongst the Teutonic as well as the Celtic tribes in early times. The theory of election, indeed, pervaded all the institutions of the Gaelic people, who seem to have nominally chosen their heads of houses and chiefs of clans, as well as their Flaiths, Oirrighs, and Ardrigh, or their princes, provincial kings, and the supreme ruler of the whole nation. Brother succeeded to brother upon the throne, and the law of primogeniture, as amongst the early Germans, was only partially recognised, each “full-born” son having a claim upon the inheritance of his father, though the universal custom of “fosterage” led to the same results as Cambrensis deplored amongst his countrymen in Wales. Each child was placed in the family of a dependant, who regarded such a charge as a mark of the highest confidence and honour; and even in the seventeenth century, men of rank and station in the Scottish Highlands still esteemed it a privilege to educate in this manner one of the children of the head of their lineage. The child thus adopted shared in the property of his foster-father on the same footing as his foster-brethren, who profited in return from the protection and support of their more illustrious connection, and thus was formed a tie which generally proved a far surer bond of union than even the actual existence of blood relationship. The “fosterers” of the royal race must have invariably been chosen from amongst the greater nobles, each of whom, from mingled motives of affection and self-interest, was ever too ready to support the claims of his own foster-son, or Dalt, upon the supreme power; and the continual contests about the succession to the throne, which arose in this age in every country in Western Europe, are traceable less to the inveteracy of fraternal hatred than to the jealous rivalry of interested partizans, which must have been engendered by such a system of fosterage. Gradually, however, except in cases of incapacity, or where one of the junior members of the family far exceeded the rest in prowess or popularity, the precedency of the eldest-born grew into the rule, the contrary course becoming the exception.[34]

Upon the accession of a new monarch, he ascended the Sacred Stone, preserved inviolate for such occasions, and was inaugurated in the presence of the clergy and the laity by the principal bishop of the nation. Originally it is probable that the Druids were the necessary assistants on such occasions, their prerogatives passing to the clergy; for Columba is said by his biographer, Adamnan, to have “ordained” Aidan king of the Dalriads, an expression which cannot mean that Aidan’s title to the royal dignity was based upon the authority of the Abbot of Iona, but rather that the sanction of the sacerdotal order, which appears to have been considered indispensable to all political authority amongst the Celtic people from time immemorial, had been transferred upon the fall of the old religion, from the Druidical to the Christian priesthood.[35] Close to the Ardrigh, with his right foot planted on the same stone of honour, stood the Righdomna or Tanist, the heir-apparent of the monarchy, who seems to have been nominated on the same occasion in pursuance of the true Celtic principle of “a divided authority,” the office being immediately filled up, in case of the premature death of the Tanist during the lifetime of the reigning sovereign—a fatality of very frequent occurrence—the same rule being as applicable to the chieftain of the smallest territory as to the chosen leader of the nation. The power of the Ardrigh over the provincial kings must have depended upon his ability to enforce it, and to exact the hostages which were invariably necessary to secure the obedience of the subordinate princes. Can and Cuairt, or tribute and visitation, were amongst his rightful dues; in other words, in addition to the payment of a stipulated tribute, the Oirrighs were bound to entertain the Ardrigh and his followers in his annual progresses for a certain stated period in every year; a burdensome system of free-quarters by no means peculiar to the Celtic people, which could be exacted by every petty chieftain from the occupants of all the territory over which his influence extended.[36] The authority of the early Pictish kings over the various provinces of the confederacy was probably identical with that of the Irish Ardrigh over the subordinate principalities of Leth Cuin and Leth Mogh, and may be compared to the dominion exercised by Kent, Wessex, or Mercia, over the remaining South Humbrian kingdoms, at a time when either state was liable to exchange the situation of a ruling power for a subordinate and comparatively dependent position.[37]

After the union of the two branches of the Pictish nation under one elective sovereign, the next step in the progress of their amalgamation was to confirm the preponderance of one state, and thus render the elective monarchy hereditary in one family. In the attempts to accomplish this object, which were made by the elder Angus and his successors, the ancient sevenfold division of the nation appears to have been broken up and destroyed, and the real conquest of the Pictish people to have been effected. The tradition of a conquest is far too strong to allow it to be looked upon as a mere fable, though the total silence of all the early authorities, and the relative position of the Picts and the Dalriads render it utterly impossible that the insignificant tribe of Kintyre, occupying only a very small portion of the modern county of Argyle, could have conquered and exterminated the whole remaining population of North Britain beyond the Forth and Clyde. A very slight acquaintance, however, with early history, where it borders on the legendary and traditionary periods, will confirm the truth of the remark, that events which may have really happened are frequently misplaced and transferred to a wrong epoch, very often owing their misplacement to a wish to build up the fame of some favourite hero, by attributing to him the merit of every important action of several different periods. Scottish history abounds with instances of such misplacement, and the Scottish conquest is of the number; but by keeping strictly to the scanty records left by the annalists who lived nearest to the period in question, it will be found that the reign of the elder Angus offers the closest resemblance to an era of victory and conquest. His annexation of Atholl and the Lennox, of Lorn, and perhaps also of Kintyre, must have extended his authority to the western coast of Argyle, whilst his successive victories over three kings of the Picts appear to have enlarged his frontiers in the opposite direction, by establishing his predominance over the neighbouring district of Fife.[38] The modern shires of Perth, Fife, Stirling, and Dumbarton, with the greater part of the county of Argyle, may therefore be said to have formed the actual Scottish kingdom to which Kenneth succeeded, conquered originally by the elder Angus, and subsequently consolidated by his successors Constantine and the younger Angus, the union of the three provinces, of Fife, Atholl, and Fortreim under one family, paving the way for the permanent supremacy of the princes of the ruling race over the remaining provincial kings; and as Alpin, the father of Kenneth, was in later days confounded with the opponent of the elder Angus, so the triumphs of the latter monarch were gradually transferred to the earliest prince of the MacAlpin dynasty after the numerous and varied tribes who united in acknowledging the supremacy of Kenneth’s successors had identified their own origin with the Dalriad ancestry of their line of kings.

The Line of Kintyre:—

Never were the qualities more needed which earned for the first Kenneth the title of “the Hardy,” than during the sixteen years of his turbulent reign; for his kingdom was exposed to hostilities on every side. The Britons of Strath Clyde burnt Dunblane; the Danes carried their ravages to Dunkeld in Atholl, and to Cluny in Stormont, and if Ragnar Lodbroc is not the mere creation of some northern scald, it was probably under the leadership of that renowned sea-king that they destroyed the monastery of the Pictish Constantine. The Scottish king proved equal to the occasion, and six times leading his followers across the “Scots-water,” he repulsed the Britons, harried the Lothians, burnt Dunbar, and seized upon Melrose, stifling any doubts about his claim to the throne in the plunder of the fertile lowlands of “Saxony.”[39]

Iona, during the vicissitudes of this stormy era, had been far too much exposed to escape the fury of the northern pirates, and the revered asylum of Columba’s brotherhood, participating in the misfortunes of Lindisfarne, was deserted at an early period under the repeated attacks of the Pagan foe, neither island ever recovering the importance that had once attached to their hallowed shores. The destruction of Dunkeld, which had been destined by its founder to replace both Iona and Abernethy, gave occasion to the solitary peaceful action attributed to the Scottish sovereign, who, collecting the relics of Columba from the localities to which they had been borne for security, enshrined them in a new church at Dunkeld,A. D. 849. rebuilding the monastery on the same spot as had been chosen for the original foundation. An alliance with the Britons of Strath Clyde, whose prince, Cu, received the hand of his daughter in marriage, completes the record of Kenneth’s actions; and ten years after the restoration of Dunkeld he died in his capital A. D. 859. of Dunfothir or Forteviot, the victim of a painful and lingering disease.[40]

Donald MacAlpin succeeded his brother, and for four years filled the throne of Scotland, nothing being recorded of his short reign with the exception of a council at Forteviot, in which the “Laws of Aodh the Fair,” A. D. 863. of Kintyre, were confirmed by “the Gael” and their king.[41]

Constantine the First, 863–877.

Constantine, the son of Kenneth, and the first inheritor of the name of his Pictish ancestor, ascended the throne of Scotland at an era when the efforts of Gorm, Eric, and Harald Harfager to consolidate the petty states of Scandinavia into the respective kingdoms of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, had given a fresh stimulus to the incursions of the Vikings upon the British Isles, by dispossessing and driving from their homes many of the minor chieftains who refused to submit to their authority. Ireland as well as Britain had suffered from the attacks of these marauders as early as the close of the eighth century, but it was not before the middle of the following century that the Northmen first established themselves permanently in the former country, principally in Dublin and its neighbourhood, where the recollection of one branch of the invaders is still retained in the name of the adjacent district of Fingall.[42]

A. D. 850

About ten years after the first settlement of the Norsemen a fresh fleet arrived off the Irish coasts, under the command of leaders claiming to belong to “the royal race of Lochlan,” to whom the native annalists have given the name of Du Gall, or Black Strangers, in contradistinction to their predecessors the Fin Gall or White Strangers, epithets which were derived probably from some long forgotten distinction in dress or armour rather than from any difference in personal appearance or in nationality.[43] Driven from Dublin and from their settlements upon the coast of Uladh, the Fingall collected in great numbers from every quarter, and soon returned with their whole force to re-assert their lost ascendancy; but a combat between the two fleets, which is said to have lasted during three days and nights, confirmed the superiority of their rivals, and in the following year Olave the Fair, the son of Ingiald, an Upland chieftain of the same race as Harald Harfager, landed with his followers A. D. 854. amongst his countrymen, and at once assumed the lead over all the Northmen of Ireland. In alliance with the Norwegian Olave was the Danish Ivar or Ingvar, the most renowned warrior amongst all the northern chieftains, whom tradition has made a son of Ragnar Lodbroc, and the ruthless avenger of his slaughter.[44]

For several years after the arrival of the confederates their ravages were confined to the provinces of Ireland, until at length, in the same year in which Ivar and Halfdan first established themselves upon A. D. 866. the coasts of East Anglia, the storm burst upon the dominions of Constantine, and from the 1st of January to St. Patrick’s day, Olave and Auisle carried fire and sword throughout the region bordering on the Forth. A. D. 870. After a lapse of four years Olave again revisited the Scottish shores, and in company with Ivar laid siege to the rock of Dumbarton, capturing and destroying the ancient bulwark of the Britons of Strath Clyde after a lengthened blockade of four months, the sole means available to an unskilful age against a Dun so strongly situated. The confederates then marched southwards to join their countrymen in England; once more a king of Saxon race was sacrificed to the manes of Ragnar, and the fate of the Northumbrian Elli was inflicted upon the East Anglian martyr Edmund; nor was it until the close of the following year A. D. 871. that the allies returned to Dublin laden with the spoil of the Saxon, the Briton, and the Scot, and leaving behind them a fearful track of misery and bloodshed to mark the most lengthened and direful of all their inroads. Olave lost his life shortly afterwards in an obscure skirmish, fought, according to some accounts, in Scotland; and the death of Ivar in 873, A. D. 873. after surviving his confederate for only a few months, released the Saxon and Scottish princes from the ablest and most ruthless of their foes.[45]

Amongst the earlier opponents of Olave and Ivar in the course of their Irish wars was a certain Caittil the Fair, A. D. 857. probably the same person as Ketil Biornson, who established himself in independence amongst the islands along the western coasts of Scotland belonging to the mixed Scandinavian and Gaelic race who were known under the name of the Gallgael. His daughter Auda was subsequently married to his former rival Olave, and upon the death of her husband after his return to Dublin she sought the protection of Ketil in the Hebrides, whilst her son, Thorstein the Red, early treading in the footsteps of his father, pursued the career of a Viking.[46]

After the establishment of the power of Harald Harfager by the successful battle of Hafursfiord, many of his vanquished opponents fled to the Orkneys and the Shetland isles, periodically infesting the Norwegian coasts in revenge for their defeat and expulsion; and to put an end to these piratical inroads Harald at length fitted out a numerous fleet, devoting an entire summer to extirpating the hostile Vikings from the creeks and bays in which they sought shelter from his vengeance. In one of the numerous conflicts occurring during this expedition, Ivar, a son of Harald’s favourite and most trusted friend Rognwald, Jarl of Mœri, lost his life, and as some compensation for the death of his son the king bestowed his own conquests upon the father. Rognwald, however, preferring to return to his Norwegian home, transferred the royal donation to his brother Sigurd, who was accordingly confirmed as Jarl, and left behind, on the departure of the king, in possession of the Orkneys and the Shetland isles.

Not content with his newly acquired island territories Jarl Sigurd was ambitious of a wider dominion, and entering into an alliance with Thorstein Olaveson, the confederates employed their united force in invading the northern provinces of Scotland. The whole of the country as far as the banks of the Oikel,[47] embracing the modern counties of Caithness and Sutherland, was overrun and conquered by the allies, two Scottish magnates falling in an unavailing resistance; Meldun, whose wife, the daughter of an Irish king, became with her son the slave of Auda,[48] affording in their altered fortunes a striking example of the strange vicissitudes of the age; and Malbride “with the buck-tooth,” whose singular fate—if the Saga can be relied upon—avenged him after death upon the author of his misfortunes. Sigurd is said to have slain the last-named chieftain in single combat, and with the savage ferocity of the times to have cut off the head of his victim, suspending it in triumph from his saddle-bow, in which position the projecting tooth of the slaughtered chieftain is supposed to have inflicted so severe a wound upon the Jarl’s leg as ultimately to cause his death, and he was buried by his followers upon the banks of the Oikel, at the extreme limits of his conquests.

Though deprived of his ally, the Jarl of Orkney, Thorstein failed not to follow up his success, and whilst victory attended the banner of the king of the Dugall in the extreme north, the difficulties of Constantine must have been materially increased by the inroads of Halfdan A. D. 875. upon his opposite frontiers, who established himself in Northumbria during the same year, and made incessant incursions upon the neighbouring “Picts” and Britons.[49] A decisive defeat at Dollar, on the borders of Perthshire and Fife, at length forced the Scottish king to submit to the alternative imposed at a later period upon both the English Edmunds, the whole of the northern provinces were made over to the son of Olave, and Constantine purchased a temporary peace at the price of half of his dominions.[50]

The success of Thorstein was destined to be ephemeral, the very year of his triumph witnessing the close of his adventurous career. Attacked unexpectedly by the followers of Constantine, he appears to have fallen in an unequal contest; Halfdan was driven from his Northumbrian conquests, perishing soon afterwards in Ireland, and the death of Sigurd’s son Guttorm delivering his father’s earldom once more into the hands of the independent Vikings, the power of the Norsemen was broken up for a time, and the threatening cloud which had loured so darkly over Scotland melted away from the horizon.[51]

A. D. 877.

But the career of Constantine was also approaching its conclusion, and he had little time to profit by the events which had released him from his enemies. As his whole reign had been passed in a continual struggle to protect his country from the Northmen, so it was at length closed with honour on the battle-field in repulsing a hostile landing upon the coast of Fife; though tradition has hinted at a darker tale, that after repelling with success the enemy’s attack he was captured by a party of the retreating Norsemen, and sacrificed by a lingering and cruel death in the gloomy recesses of the Black Cave near Crail.[52]

In the British Islands, as indeed in every quarter to which the Norsemen penetrated, a change may be dated from their earliest incursions; and whilst in Ireland they broke the power of the Hy Nial, and taught the dynasties of Munster and of Connaught to aspire to the supremacy which had hitherto been the undisputed prerogative of the princely families of Ulster and of Meath; in England the remnants of independent sovereignty were overwhelmed and swallowed up in the flood, the line of Cerdic in Wessex, which alone was strong enough to bear up against the torrent, becoming from that very cause the sole representative in the eyes of the Saxon people of the ancient royalty of their race. Scotland, where the monarchy, though of comparatively recent date, was destined eventually to survive the crisis, appeared towards the close of the ninth century to be fast verging towards the fate of Ireland; for though Thorstein perished before his power was consolidated, the cession of the northern provinces to that enterprising sea-king revived the recollection of former independence, and many years elapsed before the authority of the Scottish kings was once more successfully asserted over the ancient territories of the northern Picts. On the accession of Aodh, or Hugh, the surviving son of Kenneth, his pretensions were disputed by Cyric—or Grig—MacDungal, a chieftain whose residence at Dundurn, or Dunadeer, in the Garioch, marks his pre-eminence amongst the northern magnates whose allegiance had been transferred to Thorstein.[53] The contest for superiority between north and south was decided in the neighbourhood of Strathallan, the locality of the battle-field, A. D. 878. within the dominions of Aodh, appearing to point to Cyric as the aggressor: victory declared in favour of the northern leader, and his opponent, wounded and a prisoner, was conveyed for security to the fortress of Inverury, where he died of his wounds after a few weeks’ captivity. Either the victor was content with asserting his own independence, or policy may have prevented him from aspiring to the vacant throne; for he appears to have been satisfied with reviving the divided sovereignty of former times; and by associating in the government a scion of the royal race of Kenneth, Eocha of Strath Clyde, a son of the British prince Cu, he may have sought to propitiate the hostile chieftains of the south, whilst the real authority over both kingdoms must have remained with the conqueror of Strathallan.[54]

Similar motives may possibly have dictated the benefaction to the church of St. Andrews, which has caused the name of Cyric to be handed down in the register of the ancient priory as “the Liberator of the Scottish Church, which had hitherto remained in a dependant and subservient position, according to the prevailing custom of the Picts.” The boon thus vaguely recorded by the grateful monks of the priory appears to have been nothing more than the transfer of the privileges which had latterly belonged to Dunkeld to the monastery endowed by the younger Angus; and St. Andrews, a diocese of the southern Picts, and often known in later days as pre-eminently the “bishopric of the Scots,” owed her primacy over the other Scottish bishoprics to the donation of a prince of the northern provinces.[55]

A. D. 889.

Upon the death of Eocha after an eventless career of eleven years, Donald, the son of Constantine, assumed his cousin’s place, and for seven years shared with Cyric the supreme authority over Scotland, on the same terms, apparently, as his predecessor the British prince. A decisive victory over a body of the Northmen, who were defeated at Collin on the banks of the Tay, signalized the commencement of the new reign, avenging the destruction of the Scottish capital of Forteviot, burnt by the invaders in the course of their inroads; and as the situation of the ruined town must have exposed it to the attacks of the pirates of the western seas, it appears to have been abandoned from this period, and the residence of the sovereign being transferred for security to the eastern bank of the Tay, the dignity of “the Royal City” belonged henceforth to Scone.[56]

The few remaining years of the century passed away without events—none at least have been recorded—Cyric died peacefully at Dunadeer after a A. D. 896. reign of eighteen years, and it was left for the chroniclers of a later age to encircle his memory with a halo of fabulous glory, and to oppose his triumphs, as the conqueror of England and Ireland, to the pretensions founded by the first Edward upon the exploits of the British Arthur.[57] No successor arose amongst the Northern Picts to emulate the policy of their departed leader, and Scotland, gradually recovering from the shock of Thorstein’s conquests, ceased for ever after the death of Cyric to be subject to a divided authority. Henceforth Donald ruled without a rival during the brief remainder of his reign; but though no competitor appeared from beyond the Grampian range to assert his equality with the representative of Constantine and Kenneth, the recollection of their early independence long survived in full force amongst the northern clans, and a continual struggle between the divisions of the ancient Pictish kingdom can still be traced after the lapse of centuries. The death of Donald, A. D. 900. who survived Cyric for only four years, would appear to have been brought about through this inveterate feud, for he is supposed to have been killed in the town of Forres, and he may have lost his life in the hostile province of Moray in attempting to re-establish the royal authority over the revolted districts of the north.[58]

CHAPTER THE THIRD.
CONSTANTINE THE SECOND—A. D. 900-943.

On the death of Donald, by the singular law of alternate succession which was in force amongst the Gaelic people, the son and representative of Aodh was raised to the throne as Constantine the Second; and, with better fortune than his father, the earlier years of his reign were signalized by a brilliant victory. A body of the Northmen, who appear, as usual, to have landed from Ireland or the Western Isles, A. D. 903. and to have chosen Fortreim as the scene of their ravages, were defeated in Strathearn with great slaughter, and with the loss of their leader Ivar hy Ivar, A. D. 904. a grandson of the famous Northman of the same name, whose family had been recently expelled from their Irish possessions.[59] Released by his victory from all fear of further invasion, Constantine seems to have turned his attention towards regulating the affairs of the Church, for his next appearance is upon the Moot-hill of Scone, a well-known eminence in the neighbourhood of the new capital, where, in conjunction with Fothadh, the bishop of St. Andrews, he presided at the earliest ecclesiastical council recorded in the annals of Scotland.[60] A far more important object, however, in its ulterior consequences, was accomplished shortly afterwards by a bloodless revolution, which enabled him to take the first steps towards enlarging his kingdom on her southern frontiers, and to place a member of his own family upon the throne of an adjacent principality.

An occasional brief entry in the early chronicles reveals the anxiety of the rulers of the Picts and Scots to avail themselves of the gradual decline of the Northumbrian power for the purpose of extending their own influence over the neighbouring province of Strath Clyde. Some such motives may have instigated Kenneth to seek for his daughter the alliance of a British prince; and a few years later, the death of Artga, king of Strath Clyde, which is attributed by the Irish annalists to the intrigues of Constantine the First,[61] A. D. 871. may have been connected with the same policy of aggrandizement, and have furthered the claims of Eocha, the son of Constantine’s sister. The advancement of Eocha to the A. D. 878. Scottish throne was shortly followed by important consequences to his native province, and after the flight and death of the Welsh prince Rydderch ap Mervyn had deprived the northern Britons of one of their firmest supporters, a considerable body of the men of Strath Clyde, relinquishing the ancient country of their forefathers, set out, under a leader of the name of Constantine, to seek another home amongst a kindred people in the south. Constantine fell at Lochmaben in attempting to force a passage through Galloway; but his followers, undismayed at their loss, persevered in their enterprise, arriving in time to assist the Northern Welsh at the great battle of the Conway, where they won the lands, A. D. 880 as the reward of their valour, which are supposed to be occupied by their descendants at the present day.[62]

With the retreating emigrants, the last semblance of independence departed from the Britons of the north; and upon the death of their king Donald, who was probably a descendant of Kenneth’s daughter, Constantine the Second experienced little difficulty in procuring the election of his own brother Donald to fill the vacant throne.[63] A. D. 908. Henceforth a branch of the MacAlpin family supplied a race of princes to Strath-Clyde; and although for another hundred years the Britons of that district remained in a state of nominal independence, they ceased to exist as a separate people, appearing, on a few subsequent occasions, merely as auxiliaries in the armies of the Scottish kings.

Fifteen years after his victory over Ivar in Strathearn, Constantine was called upon for the last time to oppose an inroad of the Northmen. At the beginning of the tenth century by far the most celebrated of all the northern leaders were the Hy Ivar or grandsons of Ivar, and sons, apparently, of a daughter of that chieftain married to a Scottish Viking, who seems to have succeeded Ketil in the dominion of Inch Gall or the Hebrides. Driven from Dublin after its capture by the Irish king Malfinan, in 902, they appear, like Thorstein, to have sought the shelter of the Western Isles; and it was owing probably to the loss of their Irish possessions that they attempted, under the command of the younger Ivar, to establish themselves upon the Scottish coasts in 903, from whence, as has been already stated, they were expelled in the following year.[64] A. D. 904.

Ten years passed away before the Hy Ivar again appear on the scene. Reginald, who had now succeeded to the leadership of the family, defeated and destroyed the fleet of a rival Viking, Barith MacNocti, A. D. 914. in an engagement off the Isle of Man; and from the date of this victory the Norsemen again began to collect upon the Irish coasts, arriving every year in increasing numbers. Three years later, Reginald, known by this time as king of the Dugall, landed at Waterford A. D. 917. to assume the command, whilst his brother Sitric, appearing upon the coasts of Leinster, soon succeeded in re-establishing the power of his family over their former dependency of Dublin; and in the following year Reginald and his brother Godfrey, with the Jarls Ottir and Gragraba, who seem to have recently returned from an unsuccessful inroad upon the coast of Wales, leaving the harbour of Waterford, sailed for the northern shores of England to assert the claim of the king of the Dugall as heir of his kinsman, the Danish Halfdan, to the fertile lands of Northumbria.[65]

A. D. 918.

Landing amongst the kindred Danes of the north, as a welcome auxiliary against the increasing power of Ethelfleda, Reginald marched at once upon York, seizing upon, and portioning out amongst his followers and allies, the whole of the sacred patrimony of St. Cuthbert, with many a broad acre besides. Edred, whose wide possessions reached to the Derwent, the son of that Rixinc who for three years had ruled the Northumbrian Angles under the dominion of the Danes, together with Aldred of Bamborough and his brother Uchtred, sons of Eardulf, of the old Bernician race, and lords of a territory extending from the Tyne to the Forth, abandoning their dominions at the approach of the Norsemen, implored the aid of the Scottish Constantine to stem the torrent of invasion. In Constantine they found a prompt ally, and strengthened by the support of a Scottish army, the Northumbrian leaders prepared, with renewed courage, to march against the foe.

The hostile armies met upon the moor near Corbridge-on-Tyne, where Reginald, who had decided upon awaiting the attack of the confederates, holding his immediate followers in reserve in a position where they were concealed from the assailants, had ranged the main body of his army in three divisions, under the command respectively of his brother Godfrey, the two Jarls, and the chieftains to whom the Irish annalist gives the title of “the Young Leaders.” So impetuous was the onset of the Scots and Northumbrians, that at the first shock the Norsemen were overthrown, the heaviest loss falling upon the followers of the Jarls, a contingency upon which Reginald had probably calculated, as they bore the brunt of the battle. Animated at their success, and anxious to improve their advantage, the allies pressed eagerly onwards, regardless of the enemy’s reserve, which Reginald now poured upon the flank and rear of the victors, disordered in the confusion of pursuit, inflicting, in his turn, severe loss, and retrieving the fortune of the day. Edred was slain in this final struggle, with many of his Northumbrian followers, who appear to have suffered most severely, until the approach of night separated the combatants, and put a stop to a contest which led to no decisive result. As the Norsemen remained in possession of their conquests, the historian of Durham mourns over a defeat which left the patrimony of the bishopric a prey to the heathen invaders. The Scottish chronicler claims the battle for a victory, neither king nor Mormaor falling in the engagement, and no hostile Norsemen penetrating to the banks of the “Scots-water;” and as no portion of the territories of Aldred to the northward of the Tyne was occupied by the followers of Reginald, the advance of the enemy beyond that river must have been effectually prevented; and Constantine and his surviving confederate had good reason to be satisfied with the successful issue of the engagement.[66]

The result of the battle of Corbridge-on-Tyne secured Reginald in his conquest of Danish Northumbria, where he was succeeded, upon his death, about three years later, by his brother Sitric, the Irish possessions A. D. 921. of the family reverting to Godfrey, who hastened to establish himself in Dublin.[67] The alliance of the new ruler of the Northumbrian Danes was courted by the neighbouring princes, and Athelstan, soon after his accession to the English throne, A. D. 926. bestowed his sister’s hand upon the powerful chieftain of the Norsemen; though upon the unexpected death of Sitric, who only survived this union for a few months, dying in the prime of life in 927, A. D. 927. the Saxon prince seized upon the opportunity for asserting his own authority over the province, annexing it at once to the English crown.[68] Olave Sitricson, the youthful son of the deceased king, escaped across the sea to Ireland; but Godfrey, who had quitted Dublin upon hearing of his brother’s death, endeavoured to enlist the co-operation of his ancient antagonist the Scottish king in an attempt to dispute the claims of Athelstan. Constantine, however, was not to be won over, and as the former supporter of the Northumbrian Saxons still preferred the alliance of the English king to a hazardous confederacy with the Danish adventurer, Godfrey, after a vain attempt to establish himself in York, once more left the English shores and returned to rule over the Irish Norsemen.[69]

The subsequent union of Olave Sitricson[70] with a daughter of the Scottish king endangered that alliance between the two princes which Godfrey had failed to disturb, and from this moment Constantine became an object of suspicion to his southern neighbour. A. D. 934. The unwonted spectacle of an English army appeared before long upon the Forth; and though the whole of this interesting epoch in the annals of Saxon England is enveloped in uncertainty and confusion, from the coincidence of this expedition with the death of Godfrey in Ireland, it may be conjectured that it was the policy of the English king to prevent any movement on the part of his former ally Constantine, in support of the claims of Olave, now the head of the Hy Ivar family, upon the Northumbrian possessions of his father’s family. Fortreim, as usual, was the suffering province, and the army of Athelstan, penetrating as far as Forteviot, the ancient capital, wasted the country in every direction, whilst a powerful fleet, sweeping the coast to the distant shores of Caithness, prevented the arrival of any assistance from Ireland. The limits of the incursion were now reached; and by frustrating the projects of Constantine and his new allies, its object was probably attained, though the success of Athelstan was merely temporary, and three years later the storm, which had thus been averted for a season, burst in all its fury on the English coasts.[71]

A. D. 937.

At the head of the confederacy which was now combining to wrest Northumbria from the grasp of Athelstan, were Constantine and the two Olaves, the great-grandsons of the Danish Ivar, one of whom, the son of Sitric, was the son-in-law of the Scottish king, and the other, the son of Godfrey, had succeeded his father three years previously in the government of the Irish Norsemen.[72] A British prince, to whom the Saga gives the name of Adills, a chieftain probably of the northern Welsh, together with Yring, a Norseman from his name, though described by the same authority as also of British race, joined the ranks of Athelstan’s opponents, and Eogan, the son of the Scottish Donald, in obedience to his allegiance to his kinsman and chief, led his followers from the vale of Clyde to swell the numbers of the allies. To aid in opposing this formidable array, Athelstan had invoked the assistance of the Vikings, and the pagan rovers of the German Ocean now marched side by side in the English host with the Angles of Mercia, the Saxons of Wessex, and the Christian descendants of Guthrum’s Danes. The advantage at first leant to the side of the invaders, for in spite of his preparations for the impending contest, Athelstan appears to have been partly taken by surprise. Alfgar and Godric, his lieutenants in Northumbria, were either driven from the field or slain, and the English king was reduced to negociate with the enemy in order to gain time for the union of his whole force. The negociations were quickly broken off when the required end was attained, and after the failure of a night attack, skilfully planned by Olave Sitricson, who is said to have visited the camp of Athelstan in the disguise of a wandering harper, the rival armies met upon the long-forgotten site of Brunanburgh. The victors alone have described that celebrated battle; and whilst the Saga, forgetful alike of the English and Scottish kings, awards the palm to the Norsemen in the pay of Athelstan, the ancient ballad in the Saxon Chronicle extols the deeds of the native warriors, and renders full justice to the valour of Constantine and Olave. Five kings and seven Jarls, a son of Constantine, and two brothers of Athelstan, were left amongst the slain upon the field of Brunanburgh; and whilst the baffled survivors of the Irish Norsemen returned in their galleys to Dublin, and the remnants of the Scots with their sorrowing king mournfully withdrew beyond the Forth, the unchallenged dominion of the whole of Saxon England, the submission of the Welsh and of the Northumbrian Danes, and the alliance and admiration of Flanders, France, and Germany, rewarded the victor of this glorious day.[73]

Shortly after the battle of Brunanburgh, Eric of the Bloody Axe, the favourite son of Harald Harfager, and his successor in the Norwegian kingdom, appeared with a numerous fleet off the northern coasts of England. Driven from his native country by his half-brother Hakon, after a reign of less than a year, in which brief space he had contrived to incur the unanimous hatred of his people, he was now seeking another theatre for the display of the same qualities which had already lost him his paternal inheritance; and Athelstan, either unwilling to provoke so soon the chances of another conflict, or anxious to raise up in Eric a rival to the pretensions of the Hy Ivar, welcomed the banished prince as an ally, reminded him of the friendship existing of old between himself and his late father Harfager, and offered him an asylum in his own dominions, if he would undertake to hold the Danish province against the Olaves. Eric readily consented to the arrangement, and according to the account of the Norwegian Heimskringla such was the origin of his earliest connection with the Anglo-Danes of Northumbria.[74]

It was destined, in the first instance, to be transitory, for upon the death of Athelstan, the Northmen, refusing to acknowledge his successor, chose Olave of Ireland for their king; and the two Olaves, again uniting their forces, and with better success, relinquished their Irish home, and forced from the brother of Athelstan the cession of the whole of his dominions A. D. 940. to the north of Watling Street.[75] Eric attempted no resistance, but sailing away with his followers, he entered upon a course of piracy which carried him before long to the Western Isles, from whence he drove out a son of Reginald Hy Ivar, who was little prepared for so unexpected an attack.[76] Two years after the death of Athelstan Olave Godfreyson A. D. 941. followed him to the grave, losing his life in some obscure skirmish near Tyningham, when Reginald Godfreyson, succeeding to his brother, shared the supremacy over the north of England with the survivor of the two Olaves.[77]

As no allusion is made to Constantine in connection with the second expedition of the Olaves, it must remain a matter of conjecture whether any assistance on his part contributed to its successful issue; though the previous career of the Scottish king, as well as his conduct on a subsequent occasion, might almost warrant such a supposition. The remembrance of Brunanburgh, however, may possibly have deterred him from such a step, and by this time age and its accompanying infirmities must have begun to weigh heavily upon the venerable monarch; for nearly seventy years had now elapsed since the death of his father Aodh. It was an era in which the sword in a vigorous hand was necessary for the defence of the crown; and Constantine may have been actuated by prudent motives when he resigned the sceptre before it slipped from his grasp, and retiring to the seclusion of the monastery of St. Andrews, A. D. 943. relinquished the cares and duties of his kingdom to assume the office of abbot.[78]

Throughout a reign extending over forty years and upwards, Constantine wielded his authority with vigour, if not always with success, and even in his declining years maintained the reputation of a valiant and experienced warrior. The most important event in his career, and that which exercised the greatest influence over the future prospects of his kingdom, was the establishment of a branch of his own family over the British principality of Strath Clyde, as it unquestionably tended to the gradual amalgamation of the inhabitants of that district with their more numerous and powerful Scottish neighbours, and prepared the way for the permanent annexation of the province during the reign of Malcolm II. In his efforts to assist another member of his family in obtaining a footing in Danish Northumbria he was not equally successful; but though his connection with Olave Sitricson embroiled him with the warlike Athelstan, it relieved his kingdom from the incursions of the Northmen, for with the exception of the contests which arose in later times between the Jarls of Orkney (a different race from the Hy Ivar), and the lords of the northern provinces—a rivalry which incidentally tended to strengthen the authority of the Scottish kings at the expense of their too powerful dependants—no further allusion is made to the attacks of the Scandinavians beyond an occasional and isolated inroad upon the eastern coasts of Scotland. The contemporary of four of the Anglo-Saxon kings, Constantine, during the course of his lengthened and chequered reign, was a witness of momentous changes; the enemies of his youth and manhood became the firm allies of his later years, and the neighbouring monarchy, which had been rescued from ruin by the genius of the great Alfred, strengthened by the steady policy of Edward and his talented sister, and raised to an unexampled pitch of glory by the energy and valour of the indomitable Athelstan, threatened, before the close of his eventful career, to relapse into its original disunion when no longer upheld by the arm of the mightiest warrior who ever sat upon the throne of Saxon England. The dynasty of Wessex, indeed, survived the crisis; but the permanent settlement of the Northmen during these reigns, in the southern division of ancient Northumbria, introduced a foreign element between Bernicia and the Southumbrian provinces, thus preventing the consolidation of the Anglo Saxon kingdom, and contributing materially to the success of those incessant encroachments of the Scottish kings upon the Northumbrian Saxons, which were only checked by the Norman Conquest.[79]

Malcolm the First. 943–954.

A. D. 943.

Malcolm, the first of his name, and a son of the second Donald, succeeded to the authority relinquished by his venerable kinsman, whilst the brother of Athelstan step by step was winning back the territories ceded to the Northmen at the commencement of his reign. The great Mercian confederacy of “the Five Burghs” was first reduced to submission, and Northumbria ere long again acknowledging the authority of the English king, A. D. 944. Olave Sitricson abandoned the province, driving Blacar Godfreyson out of Dublin, and establishing his authority over the Irish Norsemen, whilst his confederate Reginald, Blacar’s brother, disappears from history, and Edmund, released from his Danish foes, was at liberty to turn his arms against Cumberland.[80]

Much confusion has arisen from the ambiguous use of the appellations of Cumbria and Cumberland. The former name was undoubtedly applied at one time to a wide extent of country stretching at least from Dumbartonshire to North Wales, from which district it was early separated when the greater part of modern Lancashire was added to the Northumbrian dominions. A little later the grants of Egfrid to St. Cuthbert must have severed the modern counties of Cumberland and Westmoreland from the northern Cumbria or Strath Clyde, which was still further curtailed by the settlements of the Angles in the diocese of Candida Casa, a district of which the greater part, if not the whole, had by this time probably fallen into the hands of the ancestors of the Picts of Galloway.

Southern Cumbria or Cumberland does not appear to have been included amongst the conquered districts recovered by the Britons after the defeat and death of Egfrid at the battle of Nectan’s Mere. When Eardulf the bishop carried off the relics of St. Cuthbert and St. Oswald from the profane violence of a pagan as fierce as Penda, the most trusted companion of his hurried flight was Edred, the Saxon Abbot of Carlisle; and there is little reason to doubt that at this time the descendants of the men who won the land in the days of Egfred still peopled the broad acres granted to the monastery of St. Cuthbert. Forty years later it is told how Edred, the son of Rixinc, the foremost chieftain amongst the nobility of Deira, rode “westward over the hills,” slew the Lord Eardulf, a prince of the Bernician race of Ida, carried off his wife “in spite of the Frith and the people’s wishes,” and held forcible possession of territories reaching from Chester le Street to the Derwent, till he lost both lands and life in the battle of Corbridge Moor.[81] All these names are genuine Saxon, and though the original British population may still have lingered amidst the lakes and mountains of their picturesque region, it may be safely doubted whether they paid either tribute or submission to the Scoto-British prince who yet retained some vestiges of authority over the fertile valley of the Clyde; and whilst Scottish Cumbria or Strath Clyde continued under the rule of a branch of the MacAlpin family from the opening of the tenth century till the reign of Malcolm the Second, English Cumbria or Cumberland, when it was not under the authority of the Northumbrian earls, in whose province it was included, may be said to have remained in a state of anarchy till the conquest.

The numerous lakes of the latter district, and its situation upon the north-western coast of England, must have offered at this time an admirable retreat to the Vikings from Ireland and the Islands; and Edmund, after clearing the province of these dangerous intruders, A. D. 945. made it over to the Scottish king, on condition that Malcolm should become his faithful “fellow-worker” or ally, by land and sea.[82] Upon the death of Edmund, the same arrangement was renewed with his successor Edred, when he received the submission of the Northumbrian Danes; A. D. 948. and when Eric attempted to re-establish himself in York, he received no assistance from Malcolm, and was hardly chosen king before he was again driven from the province.[83] The case was different in the following year, when Olave Sitricson returned for the last time A. D. 949. to claim the inheritance of his father; for though the Scottish king was bound by his oath to be faithful to his alliance with Edred, the weight of years had not yet quenched the fire of his aged predecessor, nor had the peaceful life of the cloistered monk obliterated the recollections of the soldier. Roused at the approach of his relative and ancient ally, Constantine, to satisfy the scruples of his kinsman, resumed for a time the sceptre he had relinquished, and forgetting the abbot in the king, he once more led his countrymen against the foe, and they long recounted with exultation and pride how royally their veteran leader swept the patrimony of St. Cuthbert to the distant borders of the Tees. Returning in triumph from his successful foray, the warrior-abbot resigned for the last time his ephemeral authority, and again assuming the character of a churchman, ended his days three years later, within the walls of the monastery of St. Andrews.[84]

A. D. 952.

In the year in which his aged predecessor at length sunk to rest, Malcolm, uniting with the Saxons and Britons, opposed an inroad of the Northmen, and on this occasion he may have faithfully fulfilled the compact which he appears formerly to have evaded. The Northmen were victorious over the united forces of the allies, and the result of the battle probably re-established Eric in Danish Northumbria.[85] His arrival was fatal to the supremacy of Olave, who, quitting England for the last time, settled finally in Dublin, where he soon acquired an ascendency surpassing that of all his predecessors, establishing his family as the rulers of the Irish Norsemen, and exacting hostages and levying tribute over the whole extent of Ireland, from the Shannon to the sea. A. D. 980. For nearly thirty years his power was unbroken, until the decisive victory of Tara first re-established the superiority of the native Irish, which the more celebrated but less important battle of Clontarf A. D. 1014. was destined subsequently to confirm. Olave, who was not present at the battle, did not long survive its issue. The spirit of the aged Northman was broken by the death of many of his sons, and relinquishing his authority to Sitric, one of the survivors, he quitted the scene of his former triumphs, and the last days of the most formidable opponent of the great Athelstan were passed in the seclusion of Iona.[86] Long before the death of Olave, the career of his rival Eric had been brought to a close. Driven from Northumbria after a reign of only two years, he appears to have fallen in a skirmish on Stanemoor, slain by Magnus Haraldson, through the treachery of Osulf, who was rewarded with the Eorldordom of Northumbria, whilst Man and the Hebrides fell to the share of Magnus.[87]

A. D. 954.

Two years after the death of Constantine, Malcolm followed him to the grave. He was slain at Ulurn, not far from Forres, in the vicinity of the same spot where his father had perished upwards of half a century previously. The northern districts appear to have been peculiarly fatal to this branch of the reigning family, and Malcolm’s death may probably be attributed to the vengeance of the men of Mærne, for the death of Cellach, a northern Mormaor, whose defeat in the earlier years of the king’s reign is amongst the occasional vague notices in the Scottish chronicles, which alone remain to shed a dim light upon the incessant contest waged for many generations between the northern and southern provinces of Scotland.[88]

Three kings followed in the usual alternate succession during the next seventeen years, half of that period being comprised in the reign of Indulf, the son of Constantine the Second. The grant of Cumberland was not renewed, either on account of the distracted state of England after the death of Edred, or possibly because of the somewhat doubtful manner in which the former king fulfilled his engagements, and the connection of his successor with the still formidable ruler of the Dublin Norsemen; but the loss of the English province was soon compensated by the capture of Edinburgh, the first known step in the progress of the gradual extension of the Scottish kingdom between the Forth and Tweed. A century previously the jurisdiction of the successor of St. Cuthbert still reached as far as Abercorn upon the Forth, but henceforth it was bounded by the Pentland hills until about fifty years later, when the historian of Durham has to record a more important loss, and to mourn over the contraction of the diocese within still narrower limits.[89] Twice was Indulf called upon to repel the inroads of the Northmen, who appear to have crossed the eastern seas, and endeavoured to effect a landing upon the coasts of Buchan and Banff. On both occasions he was successful, driving the invaders to their ships, the latest victory, however, costing him his life, for he fell in opposing the descent of the Norsemen at Invercullen.[90]

Sufficient time had now elapsed since the accession of the Dalriad princes to the throne of Scotland to develope the principle of division inseparable from the Gaelic system of government, each branch of Kenneth’s family endeavouring, after the lapse of a few generations, to shut out the other from the throne, and to monopolize the right to the alternate succession as the exclusive prerogative of their own peculiar line. Accordingly the reign of Duff, the eldest son of Malcolm the First, and representative of the senior branch of the royal family, appears to have been passed in a continual struggle against the pretensions raised by the now rival line of Aodh in the person of Indulf’s son Colin, and though at first successful, defeating Colin at the battle of Duncrub, A. D. 965. in which the Mormaor of Atholl and the Abbot of Dunkeld, partizans apparently of the defeated prince, were numbered amongst the slain,[91] he was subsequently less fortunate, and was driven by his rival from the throne, losing his life on a later occasion at Forres, a place so disastrous to every member of his family, where his body is said to have been hidden under the bridge of Kinloss, A. D. 967. tradition adding that the sun refused to shine until the dishonoured remains of the murdered monarch received the burial of a king.[92]

An uneventful reign of four or five years is assigned to his successor Colin, terminated as usual upon the field of battle, where he is said to have fallen with his brother Eocha in a battle fought against the Britons of Strath Clyde. A. D. 971. Such at least is the account left by the earlier authorities, though he is generally represented in the pages of later chronicles as the victim of private revenge, assassinated in the Lothians by Andarch MacDonald, a British prince, who avenged in the blood of the king an insult offered to his daughter.[93]

CHAPTER IV.
Kenneth the Second—971–995.

No opposition seems to have been offered upon the death of Colin to another son of Malcolm the First, A. D. 971. who ascended the throne as Kenneth the Second; though the subsequent death of Colin’s brother Olave, about six years later, may point to a continuance of the struggle between the rival branches of the reigning family, and appears to have established Kenneth for the remainder of his life in undisputed possession of the throne.[94] Immediately upon his accession, after providing for the safety of his kingdom by throwing up entrenchments at the fordable points of the Forth, he followed up the successes of his predecessor Indulf, ravaging Cumberland to Stanemoor and Deerham, and carrying off a captive of high rank amongst the neighbouring Saxons of Northumbria.[95] Unfortunately the old chronicle, which has hitherto so faithfully noted down the events of this distant period, breaks off abruptly at the approach of a more interesting epoch, and the history of Scotland must for many years be sought for principally in the chronicles of other countries. Considerable light is thrown upon the state of the extreme northern districts during the reign of Kenneth by the accounts in the Norwegian Sagas, as in the time of this king the powerful Jarls of Orkney were first brought into collision with the neighbouring Mormaors on the mainland.

A. D. 875.

When Rognwald, Jarl of Mæri, heard of the death of his nephew Guttorm Sigurdson,[96] he immediately dispatched Hallad, one of his own sons, to take possession of the Orkneys; but after a year’s experience of the troublesome acquisition the newly appointed Jarl abruptly relinquished his dominions, preferring the comparative peace of a Holder’s life in Norway to the arduous dignity of a Jarl amongst the Vikings. Vehemently incensed at his return, Rognwald bitterly reproached Hallad and his brother with inheriting the servile blood of their mother,[97] upon which Einar, hitherto conspicuous only for his excessive ugliness, and the harshness of whose features was increased by the loss of an eye, professed his readiness to undertake the government of the Orkneys, remarking that he should relinquish a home which he had little cause to love, and only requiring to be supplied with a ship and a sufficient force to enable him to assert his claims successfully. He added a promise, that if his offer were accepted his father should see his face no more, a stipulation, as he drily observed, that was likely to prove the most gratifying part of the arrangement. In his estimate of his father’s feelings he was not mistaken, Rognwald frankly avowing that were it for this sole purpose he should be provided with a ship, though he feared little honour would result from the expedition. Such were the circumstances under which the ancestor of the powerful Jarls of Orkney first set sail from his native shores of Norway.

Arrived amongst the islands he soon cleared them of the Vikings, who found in Einar a far more formidable opponent than the indolent and peaceful Hallad. His promise to his father he kept to the letter, and he saw his face no more; though when the increasing favour shewn to Rognwald so provoked the jealousy of two of Harold’s sons that they burnt the Jarl in his own house, Einar gloried in becoming his avenger. Halfdan, one of the murderers, flying from the vengeance of his incensed father, arrived so unexpectedly at the Orkneys that Einar was taken by surprise and had barely time to escape to the mainland; but his absence was of short duration, and surprising Halfdan in his turn, he seized upon the wretched prince, inflicting on him the cruel death of the Spread-eagle. Whatever punishment Harfager might have intended for his son, he was exasperated on learning that Einar had forestalled him, and immediately prepared a fleet for an expedition against the Orkneys; but he suffered himself in the end to be diverted from his intention, and was eventually satisfied with the exaction of a heavy fine from the islands. Einar, however, turned even the intended punishment to his own advantage, undertaking to pay the whole sum on condition that the Odallers or Freeholders resigned their Odal rights in his favour, or in other words submitted to be taxed and to hold their lands of the Jarl; and from the date of this arrangement all the lands in the earldom remained for many years the sole property of the Jarls.

The rest of Einar’s life was passed in undisturbed possession of the earldom he had so unexpectedly acquired; and upon his death it was equally divided, according to the ancient custom, amongst his three surviving sons. Arnkel and Erlend, the two eldest, followed the fortunes of Eric Blodæxe, losing their lives in his service, when the whole earldom was again reunited under the sole authority of the surviving brother Thorfin the Skull-cleaver. In spite of his formidable name, Thorfin was of a peaceful character, resembling his uncle Hallad in his aversion to war, rather than his father Einar; and when the sons of Eric arrived in the Orkneys with the shattered remnants of their followers, he at once acknowledged their claim to his allegiance, submitting without a struggle to their authority;[98] though they soon released him from further annoyance by sailing for Norway to try their fortunes in their ancestral dominions, when Thorfin ruled his earldom in peace, dying about the commencement of Kenneth’s reign.[99] He married Grelauga, a daughter of Duncan Mormaor of Caithness, by Groa, the sister of Thorstein Olaveson, and upon his death left five sons to inherit his island earldom, and possibly with some claims upon the mainland inheritance of their maternal grandfather.[100]

Three of the brothers in succession married Ragnhilda, the daughter of Eric and Gunhilda. The mother had been celebrated as the most treacherous, as well as the most beautiful woman of her time, and the daughter appears to have inherited a full share of both the maternal qualities. After contriving the murder of her first husband Arnfin, she married his brother Havard, but soon repenting of her second choice, she released herself with as little compunction as before, exerting her influence over the Jarl’s favourite nephew with such success that the luckless Havard was surprised and put to death by a kinsman of whom he harboured not the remotest suspicion; and the scene of the foul murder, the mysterious and once sacred “stones of Stennis” are still sometimes known as Havard-Steigr. The first to exclaim against the treacherous deed was the widowed consort of the Jarl, and Ragnhilda’s whole soul appeared absorbed in a burning desire for vengeance, until the hope of winning the favour of the beautiful mourner induced another relative to undertake the sacred duty of revenge. Upon his return to claim the promised reward—a fair wife and an earldom—he found them both in the possession of the third brother Liotr, and he lost his life in a vain attempt to wrest, at least the latter, from the more fortunate son of Thorfin. Whilst Liotr was in possession of the earldom, Skuli, one of his surviving brothers, presented himself at the court of the Scottish king Kenneth, and obtained from him either a grant of the possessions of his maternal ancestor the Mormaor of Caithness, or a promise to support the pretensions he was encouraged to raise upon the island dominions of his brother. Collecting an army in Caithness, Skuli crossed the Pentland Firth to establish his claim upon the Orkneys, but he failed in his attempt and was driven out of the islands; when Liotr, emboldened by success, passed over to the mainland and again defeated his brother in the Dales of Caithness, where Skuli lost his life, continuing to fight bravely after the rout and dispersion of his army. Liotr then subdued the whole of Caithness, a proceeding which aroused the jealousy of his powerful neighbour Malbride MacRory the “Earl,” or rather perhaps the “Oirrigh of Moray,” and both parties preparing for a contest, Malbride advanced to Skida Moor to drive the intruder from the country. The struggle was obstinate, victory in the end declaring for the Orkneymen, though it was purchased with their leader’s life, Liotr dying soon afterwards of a wound he received in the battle. Lodver, the last surviving son of Thorfin, now succeeded to the earldom, bequeathing it very shortly to his son Sigurd. He was the only member of his family who died a peaceful death, owing perhaps to his marriage with Auda, a daughter of an Irish king Kerval, an alliance through which he was fortunate enough to escape the dangerous fascinations of Ragnhilda.

Jarl Sigurd Lodverson retained forcible possession of Caithness, intrusting it to the charge of his brother-in-law Havard, until intelligence reached him ere long that two Scottish nobles, whom the Saga describes as “Earls,” had slain Havard in Threswick and were ravaging his territories on the mainland. The Jarl waited only to collect his followers from the Orkneys, and crossing the Firth was joined by the men of his other earldom, who informed him that the Scottish leaders, to whom the Saga gives the names of Hundi and Malsnechtan, were at that moment in the neighbourhood of Duncansby Head. Unlike Sigurd, who was now advancing with his whole force united, the Scots allowed themselves to be drawn into action before the arrival of an expected reinforcement; and although victory inclined to their side in the early part of the battle, Malsnechtan was slain at the close, and Hundi driven from the field; though any advantage that might have arisen from Sigurd’s success was neutralized by the approach of “Earl” Malcolm, who appears to have landed during the contest with a considerable force at Dungall’s Bay. The Jarl’s men, already exhausted by a protracted and hardly contested struggle, were in no condition for a second engagement with the fresh army advancing under Malcolm, so collecting the trophies of his barren victory, Sigurd retreated to his island fastnesses, and the mainland conquests of the Orkney Jarls reverted for the time to other possessors.[101]

It must have been soon after this battle that Olave Tryggveson, returning from England to Norway, touched at the Orkneys, and seizing upon Sigurd, who was totally unprepared for an attack, with all the zeal of a recent convert, offered him the alternative of immediate execution or of at once embracing the Christian faith, and acknowledging himself a tributary of Norway. Any lingering love of Odinism vanished before the necessity of the case, Christianity became the religion of the islands, and Olave carried off Hundi Sigurdson as a hostage for the fidelity of his father. His allegiance to Norway sat lightly on the Jarl, and ceased with the life of his son a few years afterwards; but as the conversion of the Orkneymen dates from this summary proceeding, and no allusion is ever made to a relapse, it may perhaps be concluded that his Christianity was more enduring.[102]

Whilst these events were occurring in the North, and the attention of the Moray chieftains was fully occupied by the encroachments of their powerful neighbours, Kenneth, who appears to have been an able and energetic prince, seems to have been actively engaged in another quarter of his dominions; and although no account has been handed down of the nature of the transaction which eventually cost the king his life, there is much reason to connect it with an attempt on his part to reduce under his more immediate power a portion of the kingdom which had hitherto continued in a condition of comparative independence.

Extending along the eastern coast of Scotland was a district of which the whole or part was known as Angus, though it would be difficult to define its ancient limits with accuracy. In later days the name of Angus has been looked upon as equivalent to Forfarshire, but the old Pictish kingdom may once have reached to the Isla and the Tay, on its southern frontiers, whilst towards the north it bordered on the marches of Mar, or by whatever name the district may have been known, which was once the principality of Cyric.[103] Originally an independent province, it probably became subordinate at some remote period to the kingdom of which the foundations were laid by the elder Angus and Constantine, in other words, the lord of the district paid can or cios to the king of Scots in peace, or acknowledged his authority in some similar manner, and led his followers to support the royal cause in war; but beyond such vague tokens of dependence he ruled with undiminished authority over all who acknowledged his claim to be their Cen-cinneth, or the head of their race by “right of blood.”

During the earlier reigns of the kings of the line of Kintyre, the “Mormaors” of Angus were evidently personages of considerable importance, as their deaths are occasionally entered in the oldest existing chronicle, the latest notice of a member of the family occurring during the reign of Colin. In the time of Kenneth the direct male line appears to have ended in Cunechat or Connor, who transmitted his rights to a daughter of the name of Finella, and she hoped in her turn to bequeath them to her son. In this expectation she was disappointed, for upon some long forgotten pretext the heir of Angus was condemned and executed at Dunsinnan;[104] and as the greater part of this province was included in the deaneries of Gowrie, Angus, and the Merns, which, after the changes introduced into the constitution of the Scottish church by David the First, appear under the episcopal jurisdiction of St. Andrews, it is highly probable that the “Bishop of the Scots” first acquired his spiritual authority in this direction when “the King of Scots” cut off the last heir of the ancient line of princes and annexed his province to the crown, exercising the rights of a conqueror by “giving Brechin to the Lord.”[105]

The bereaved mother never forgave the outrage, and the scene of Kenneth’s death, Fettercairn in Kincardineshire, where he is said to have perished through the treachery of his immediate attendants, favours the tradition connecting the catastrophe with the vengeance of Finella. If any credit can be attached to the accounts of authorities who wrote four centuries after the occurrence, policy induced her to wear the appearance of forgetfulness until she had succeeded in persuading the king to entrust himself within the walls of her “castle of Fettercairn,” where he lost his life by a curious and complicated machine, most ingeniously contrived for the fatal deed! A. D. 995. Be this as it may, Kenneth was assassinated after a reign of twenty-four years, and if Finella, as is not improbable, was the author of his death, it is likely that her purpose was accomplished without the aid of any very elaborate mechanical contrivance, and scarcely within the walls of a feudal castle.[106]

Fordun has attributed to this king the idea of limiting the succession to his immediate family, gravely adding, that the example of the German empire exercised much influence in deciding Kenneth to adopt this line of policy.[107] The fate of Olave MacIndulf, at the commencement of this reign, lends some degree of probability to the suggestion of the historian, though the king was hardly successful in his supposed policy, as the usual order of succession was preserved, and two princes intervened before the accession of his son Malcolm. More than one fabrication has been palmed upon this reign, and the memory of the king has been needlessly blackened by the assumed murder of Malcolm MacDuff, a personage of more than questionable reality, for whose existence Fordun is the earliest authority; though it is possible that some confusion may have arisen between the imaginary king of the Cumbrians and the real Olave, whose death is noticed by Tighernach the Irish annalist, a few years after the accession of Kenneth to the throne.[108]

Hector Boece is the first writer who places the victory of Loncarty in this reign, for Fordun makes no allusion to it, though his continuator Walter Bowyer mentions “the wonderful battle of Loncarty,” fought at a time when a Norwegian army, after ravaging the country in every direction, had shut up a Pictish king within the ancient city of Perth. The provisions of the besieged were upon the point of failing, when the wily Pict, by a judicious present of his two last casks of wine, reduced his enemies to a state that ensured him an easy victory. A successful sortie was directed against the invaders’ camp, their ships were burnt and sunk at the mouth of the Tay, obstructing the river, and originating the sandbanks of Drumlay, and every subsequent invasion of the northern foe, down to the expedition of Haco, in the reign of Alexander the Third, was supposed to have been undertaken in revenge for this fatal disaster.[109]

Such is the earliest account of the famous battle of Loncarty. There can be little doubt about its real occurrence, and it was fought probably upon the occasion of one of the earlier inroads of the Northmen at the most formidable epoch of their power. The recollection of a great victory gained upon this spot would long be preserved in the traditions of the surrounding neighbourhood, but for the circumstantial narrative embellishing the pages of Boece, that ingenious historian was probably indebted to the same sources from which he procured such accurate information about the elaborate machine for accomplishing the vengeance of Finella.[110]

The assassination of Kenneth at Fettercairn raised Colin’s son Constantine to the throne of Scotland. The last inheritor of the blood of the second Constantine, his reign, like his father’s, was short and troubled, as he lost his life two years after his accession, in a vain attempt to resist the pretensions of Kenneth MacDuff.[111] A. D. 997. Upon the extinction of the Scottish branch of the “Clan Aodh MacKenneth,” the radical defect of the old system of succession was at once developed in the immediate division of the “Clan Constantine MacKenneth,”—hitherto united by a common enmity,—into two hostile “factions,” headed respectively by the grandsons of the first Malcolm. Nothing whatever is recorded of the reign of Kenneth the Third, sometimes known as Grim or Græme, a name supposed to signify the profession of great strength, or a certain sternness of character. The chronicles are silent beyond the barren facts of his accession and death, A. D. 1005. placing the latter at Monaghvaird in Strathearn, where his defeat eight years after his victory over Constantine raised his cousin Malcolm, the son of Kenneth the Second, to the vacant throne of Scotland.[112]

Malcolm the Second. 1005–1034.

In imitation apparently of the example of his father, Malcolm signalized his accession by one of those inroads upon Northumbria which point significantly to the gradual extension of the Scottish kingdom on her southern frontier. Borne down by the weight of years, Ealdorman Waltheof, shutting himself up within the walls of Bamborough, placidly let the storm sweep by; but his son Uchtred, who had married the daughter of the bishop, was neither of an age nor of a temperament to look quietly on while the broad lands he had received in dowry with his bride were wasted by the northern invaders. Summoning the men of Northumberland and Yorkshire to join his standard, he soon collected a numerous force, A. D. 1006. and suddenly attacking Malcolm before the gates of Durham drove him from the territory of St. Cuthbert.[113]

The next step of the victorious Uchtred affords a singular example of the manners of the age. Severing from the bodies of the fallen Scots a sufficient number of the best-looking heads, he committed them to the charge of four women, each of whom was to receive a cow in payment for plaiting the hair and arraying to the best advantage these grim relics of the foe, which were then placed on stakes at equal intervals around the walls of Durham, to answer the double purpose of striking terror into any future band of marauding Scots, and of recalling to the grateful townsmen the services of their brave deliverer. Having cleared the country of the enemy and seen to the arrangement of his revolting trophies, Uchtred bore to Ethelred the welcome news of his victory, and was rewarded for his gallantry with the hand of the king’s daughter—he seems to have had neither scruple nor difficulty in releasing himself from his former wife—as well as with a grant of the eorldom of the Yorkshire Danes, in addition to his father’s ealdordom beyond the Tyne.[114]

About the same time as Malcolm’s disaster before Durham, Finlay MacRory, who had succeeded his brother Malbride in the chieftainship of Moray,—in the words of the Norwegian Saga—“marked out a battle-field for Jarl Sigurd on Skida Moor.” To decline the proffered contest would have been disgraceful, but the Jarl had serious doubts about the result, for he was afraid that the Scots would outnumber him; and as his followers were infected with a similar misgiving, they murmured at the risk until Sigurd promised to restore the Odal privileges which their ancestors had resigned in the days of Einar Rognwaldson. On this agreement they followed him with alacrity, and to increase their confidence Sigurd bore with him one of those mystic banners, so famous amongst the ancient Northmen, wrought in the form of a flying raven whose wings expanded in the wind. It was the work of the Jarl’s mother, the daughter of the Irish Kerval, and upon it she had expended all the magic lore for which she was renowned, promising victory to all who followed, but death to him who bore it. On this occasion the charm was successful, three warriors who carried the fated standard falling one after the other in the battle; but Jarl Sigurd won the day, and the Bonders of Orkney were rewarded for their valour by the restitution of their Odal privileges.[115]

The success of Sigurd against the Moray Mormaor, far from embroiling him with Malcolm, appears to have been rather gratifying to the Scottish king, who immediately gave him the hand of his younger daughter in marriage; and from this union sprung Thorfin Sigurdson, who upon the death of his father in the memorable battle of Clontarf, was immediately confirmed by Malcolm in the mainland earldom of Sutherland and Caithness, whilst the Orkneys and other island possessions fell to the share of the elder sons of Sigurd.[116]

Soon after Malcolm had thus established his grandson in the northern extremity of his kingdom, an opportunity again occurred for extending his dominions on the Northumbrian frontier, which ever since the days of Indulf had been the object of the aggressions of the Scottish kings. The sceptre of a great nation was fast escaping from the feeble grasp of Ethelred, and Uchtred, the opponent of Malcolm’s earlier years, after twice submitting to the Danish invaders, had been put to death with the connivance of Canute from mingled motives of policy and revenge.[117] The guardianship of the northern frontiers then fell into the hands of Eadulf Cudel, the imitator of the supineness of his father Waltheof, rather than of the energy of his brother Uchtred. He could expect but little assistance from the Yorkshire Danes, who upon the death of Uchtred had been placed under the authority of their countryman Eric, and as the distracted state of Northumbria was not lost upon Malcolm, twelve years after his former disaster, collecting his followers for a second invasion, he prepared to exact a fearful retribution for the trophies mouldering around the walls of Durham.

A. D. 1018.

During thirty days and nights, a comet, a baleful and ill-omened prodigy in the eyes of the Northumbrians of the eleventh century, blazed forth, a presage of impending woe; and when the men of St. Cuthbert’s joined their countrymen at Carham, on the banks of the Tweed, it was only to participate in the disasters of a defeat, and to perish in multitudes in a disorderly flight. The aged bishop sunk under the shock, dying within a few days of the battle, and such was the confusion throughout the diocese of St. Cuthbert’s that for three years no successor was elected. Despairing of resistance against the power of the conqueror, Eadulf Cudel purchased an inglorious peace at the price of relinquishing Lothian, the whole of ancient Bernicia beyond the Tweed was ceded to the Scottish king, and Malcolm returned in triumph to the north, having effectually obliterated the remembrance of his failure by a more brilliant and substantial success than any of his predecessors had hitherto achieved.[118]

A. D. 1031.

Towards the close of his life, and about thirteen years after his successful invasion of Northumbria, Malcolm was brought into contact with the most formidable antagonist that ever crossed his path, for upon his return from Rome, Canute, now king of England, Denmark, and Norway, marched with an army to the north, and both kings met upon the frontiers of their respective dominions. As no allusion is made to the cause which led to the expedition of Canute, it would be impossible to determine whether it had any reference to Malcolm’s acquisition of Lothian. A brief notice in the Saxon chronicle—all that is known of the transaction—barely records that Malcolm met Canute, “bowed to his power, and became his man, retaining his allegiance for a very short time.” Canute with his army returned to the south, and the results of the meeting faded away with the retreating footsteps of the mighty Dane.[119]

A. D. 1033

Amongst the latest notices of this reign contained in the Irish annals, an action is recorded of Malcolm, towards the close of his career, which clearly demonstrates his determined purpose to transmit the regal dignity to his own immediate descendants. According to the rule of alternate succession hitherto observed amongst the Scots—a rule which the later princes had invariably attempted to violate—the next king after Malcolm’s death ought to have been chosen from the family of his predecessor Kenneth. Boedhe, the late king’s son, was no longer living, but he had left a son whose name is no longer preserved, the last male representative of his race, and perhaps the Tanist, or heir apparent of the king. The death of this prince is attributed to Malcolm, whose aim it is evident in this deed of violence was to remove from the path of his grandson Duncan the sole rival claimant of the throne.[120] In this he was completely successful, no opposition awaiting his grandson when he was called soon afterwards to reign; nor had Duncan long to wait for the crown, for in the following year A. D. 1034. Malcolm was assassinated at Glammis, in the same province of Angus which forty years before had proved so fatal to his father.[121]

Of the direct male line of Kenneth MacAlpin, Malcolm the Second was the last and greatest king, his renown extending to the neighbouring countries, and procuring for him the title amongst the Irish annalists of the “Lord and Father of the West.” He enlarged and consolidated his ancestral dominions, advancing the frontier from the Pentland Hills to the Tweed, and effecting an object that his predecessors had vainly attempted—the transmission of the kingdom to his own immediate family. The means employed for this purpose, it is to be feared, were neither scrupulous nor just; but the annals of every country at this period prove but too clearly that it was an age in which neither the ties of relationship, nor indeed any other ties, were proof against the lust of ambition.

Scotland had now reached her permanent and lasting frontier towards the south, the dependent principality of Strath Clyde having apparently, during the course of this reign, been finally incorporated with the greater kingdom. When Donald, son of the Eogan who shared in the bloody fight of Brunanburgh, died on a pilgrimage in 975, he seems to have been succeeded by his son Malcolm, whose death is noticed by the Irish Tighernach under the date of 997.[122] The last king of Strath Clyde who has found a place in history is Eogan “the bald,” who fought by the side of the Scottish king at Carham,[123] probably a son of the British Malcolm whose family name he bears; and in the person of this Eogan the line of Aodh’s son Donald appears to have become extinct. The earliest authorities of the twelfth century give the title of “king of the Cumbrians,” meaning undoubtedly the northern Cumbria or Strath Clyde, to Malcolm’s grandson Duncan, and it is probable that upon the failure of the line of Scoto-British princes, the king of Scotland placed his grandson over the province, which from that time, losing the last semblance of independence, ceased to be ruled by a separate line of princes.[124]

To Malcolm the Second has sometimes been attributed the foundation of an Episcopal See at Mortlach, which was afterwards transferred to Aberdeen;[125] and though as far as relates to the establishment of a regular diocese this account must be rejected, Malcolm, in imitation of his father’s policy in the case of Brechin, may have “given Mortlach to the Lord;” or, in other words, he may have founded and endowed a Culdee monastery on this spot. As the erection of a religious establishment in those days necessarily implies the possession of the surrounding district, if the tradition is correct which connects Mortlach with the reign of Malcolm the Second, the plains of Lothian were not his only conquest; and, in the same manner as Kenneth acquired Angus, he must have annexed to the dominions of the Scottish crown some portion of the ancient kingdom which once aspired to be the leading principality amongst the Pictish provinces of the north.[126]

Certain other changes are attributed to this king, which, however they may have become warped and disguised by the feudal ideas of the authorities in whose pages they are found, when they are considered in connection with the actual historical events of the period, undoubtedly seem to point to Malcolm’s reign as the era of a certain advance towards the consolidation of the royal authority, such as is distinctly traceable at different epochs in many other countries. A twofold bond of union existed from a very early period amongst the communities into which the Celtic and Germanic people were divided, and the noble, prince, or king, was followed either from the “tie of blood,” as the actual head of the race, or from “the tie of service,” as the lord and master who repaid all who rendered such service according to the prevalent customs of the age; and as the former tie was at the root of the allodial, so out of the latter gradually arose the theory of the feudal system. Originally the tie of blood united freeman with freeman, whilst the tie of service connected the free with the unfree, but as inequality of rank grew up from various causes, the lesser freeman was glad to “take service” with the greater in return for his protection and support, thus forming the class known as Gasinds (or Gesiths) amongst the Germans, and amongst the Gael apparently in early times as Amasach—a word evidently akin to the old Celtic Ambact—who were either quartered temporarily upon the unfree tenantry of their patron as military retainers, or at a later period frequently exercised a delegated authority over the crown lands as Grafs, Gerefas, or Maors. As the royal power was increased by acquisitions at the expense of a neighbouring state, or as the head of one community acquired a permanent superiority over the rest, the importance and numbers of the royal Gasinds and Amasach increased proportionally, and very frequently, instead of the original usage, according to which the greater part of the newly acquired territory would have been portioned out more or less permanently amongst the conquerors, as Allod, Odal, or Duchas, land—untaxed freehold held by right of blood—as it was more advantageous to the sovereign to reserve as much as possible for the use of the crown, the older proprietary were retained as a tributary class, remaining undisturbed under the authority of the Gasinds and Amasach, who, acting as royal deputies, collected the king’s rents and led his dependants to battle, reserving for their “service” a certain portion of the royal dues, almost invariably a third. Such was the original tenure of the Graphiones of the early Frank kings, of the Ealdormen and Eorls, amongst the Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Danes, and of the royal Jarls established by Harald Harfagar and other kings throughout the north; in short, it was, in early times, the universal tenure of the royal official, before “knight service” and the feud gradually superseded nearly every other tenure amongst the nobility.[127]

In Scotland, the royal official placed over the crown or fiscal lands appears to have been originally known as the Maor (the type of the royal Maer amongst the Cymri), and latterly under the Teutonic appellation of Thane, either a corrupted form of the Gaelic Ti’ern, or a title like Earl, arising from the prevalence of Anglo-Saxon law and technical phraseology after the introduction of feudalism; for the feudalism introduced by David and his successors, though Anglo-Norman, was very much based upon the Anglo-Saxon, or what was much the same, the Lothian law and customs. The epithet of Thanage was applied as well to the office as to the district over which it was exercised, of which the old Scottish name may have been Triocha-ced or Cantred, a name long equivalent amongst the Irish to a barony.[128] The offices of Maer and Cynghellwr (or judge), amongst the Welsh, could never be conferred upon the head of a clan (or Pencenedyl), the same maxim of policy very probably being equally in force in Scotland, for it is in strict accordance with the immemorial Celtic principle “divide et impera;” though it may be equally referable to the invariable hostility of early royalty to Allodial or Duchas tenure from its independence of the sovereign authority. The original Thanage then would appear to have been a district held of the Crown, differing but little except in tenure, from a tract of land held by Duchas right; the holder, Maor or Thane, being accountable for the collection of the royal dues, and for the appearance of the royal tenantry at the yearly “hosting,” and answering to the hereditary Toshach or captain of a clan—for the king stood in the place of the Cen-cinneth, or chief—whilst the official who acted as judge, and was subsequently known as the Deempster (the Welsh Cynghellwr) represented the hereditary Brehon of the tribe, the place of the lesser Duchasach or Brugaidhs being generally supplied in course of time by the kinsmen of the Thane, planted on the Thanage to hold under the head of their race as Ogtierns, Mesne lords, or Vavassours.[129] The theory of “a Toshach over every Triocha-ced, and a Brugaidh over every Baile,” was equally familiar to the Irish Gael, and as the tie uniting the officials with the population of the whole Thanage was “service,” not “blood,” the Thane was often known amongst his followers as their Toshach or captain, rather than their Cen-cinneth or chief by right of blood.[130]

When lands were strictly retained in the crown, the Royal Thane or Maor was answerable directly to the king, but there was a still greater official amongst the Scots, untraceable apparently in his peculiar Scottish characteristics amongst the kindred Welsh and Irish, known under the title of the Mormaor or Lord High Steward. One example of the peculiar tenure of the Mormaor was still existing in the thirteenth century in the Earl of Fife; for when the second Alexander and his “Parliament” levied fines upon all who had failed in their attendance on the occasion of his expedition against “Donald MacNiel of the Isles,” the earls and their “serjeants” were strictly prohibited from entering the lands of any “tenant in capite”—holding directly of the king—to exact the penalty imposed, excepting only the Earl of Fife, who exercised this privilege throughout his district, not as the Earl, but as the Royal Maor of the county of Fife, “to claim his rights,” or, in other words, to secure his allotted portion of the mulct.[131] The ancient Scottish Mormaor, then, was evidently a Maor placed over a province instead of a thanage—an earldom or country instead of a barony—a type of Harfager’s royal Jarl, who often exercised as a royal deputy that authority which he had originally claimed as the independent lord of the district over which he presided. This change was rendered very popular amongst the aristocracy of the north, from the great increase of wealth they derived through retaining a third of the tribute exacted in the king’s name from the classes hitherto untaxed; and similar considerations may have exercised an influence in facilitating the conversion of the semi-independent Gaelic Oirrigh into a dependent, but probably far wealthier, Mormaor.

The existence of the royal Maor and Mormaor—officials in direct dependence on the king, and resembling the royal Jarls and Lendermen amongst the Northmen, or the king’s Ealdorman and Gerefa amongst the Anglo-Saxons—implies a greater consolidation and compactness in the Scottish monarchy than was ever attained amongst the kindred Celts of Ireland or Wales; and it is to the policy pursued during the reigns of Malcolm and his father Kenneth that this result is probably to be attributed. The Maor, indeed, was an official familiar to the Gaelic people long before the era of Kenneth and Malcolm, and he probably played an important part in the conquered provinces annexed by the elder Angus and his successors; but the Mormaor—the head of a province ruling as a royal deputy instead of an independent prince—points to a revolution in the tenure of land resembling the changes introduced by Harfager, when he cancelled “Odal right” wherever he could extend his authority, and levied land-tax by means of his Jarls and Lendermen; and it was a revolution of this description that may possibly have been carried out in the course of Malcolm’s reign and that of his father. Scotland, according to Fordun, was portioned out in ancient times into Thanages, or Fee-farms paying rent, held of course of the crown—for any other theory was incompatible with the ideas of the feudal era—until Malcolm, remitting the rents, gave away the whole kingdom, only reserving to himself the Moot Hill of Scone, when in return for the royal prodigality his people confirmed their sovereign’s right to wardship, relief, and other feudal privileges. Lurking under this singular statement there are probably some grains of truth, thoroughly misunderstood by the chronicler; and as in the partition of Scotland into Thanages a tradition may be recognized of its ancient division into Triocha-ceds and Bailes, or Baronies and Townlands—institutions of a character inseparable from the very existence of a settled community—so the reduction of the kingdom of Scotland as it then existed to a more direct dependence upon the royal authority, entailing land-tax, merchet, and other Celtic mulcts, in quarters hitherto exempt from such exactions, seems to be shadowed out under the feudal grant of the whole kingdom and the feudal return made by the gratitude of the Scottish people. Like Wales and Ireland, the whole kingdom was probably divided in theory into Triocha-ceds, Cantreds, or Thanages, the tribe lands held by chieftains as untaxed Duchas, the crown-lands by Maors or Thanes answerable for the rents and dues; and if Malcolm, by cancelling “Duchas right” as far as it lay in his power, assimilated the tenure of the whole kingdom to that of the royal Maor, or, in other words, taxed the hitherto untaxed Duchasach, he only brought about the same change which Harfager had already effected in Norway, and which the ministers of the Frank kings were continually aiming at five or six centuries before his era. As the Thanage was evidently regarded in feudal times as the ancient Scottish tenure throughout the whole kingdom, some such change must have been introduced upon the older state of society before the establishment of the feudal system, and both tradition and history seem to point to the second Malcolm as the sovereign who first carried out successfully a revolution so important for the aggrandizement of the royal authority.[132]

An apocryphal collection of laws, relating principally to the regulation of the court, has been also ascribed to the same king; and though the laws are unquestionably fabrications, it is not impossible that they were framed in a feudal era to represent the regulations which Malcolm was traditionally supposed to have enacted. The promulgation of a code of laws necessarily involves the acquiescence of all who submit to be bound by them in the supremacy of the lawgiver; and when a king is said to have established or re-enacted such a code, it may be regarded as an indirect proof of a certain stability in the authority thus centred in the royal person. When “the Gael” assembled at Forteviot to ratify with their king, Donald, the laws of his ancestor Aodh the Fair, and when they gathered round the Moot Hill of Scone, to confirm perhaps with Constantine the privileges conferred by Cyric on the See of St. Andrews, the superiority of the dynasty, whose representative presided in these assemblies, was evidently acknowledged by all who attended at their summons. The establishment of a court, the enhancement of the dignity of personal attendance on the sovereign, and the regulation of the duties and privileges attached to such service, point again to a further advance of the royal power, and to a certain increase in the kingly dignity attendant upon a fixed court and residence; marking as it were an approach to the gradual conversion of a migratory king quartering himself during his yearly progresses upon the provincial aristocracy, and upon the stewards of the royal manors, into a stationary monarch, summoning his dependent nobility to attend upon their sovereign’s person in his own court and palace. The laws of Howel Dha, relating entirely to the duties and privileges of “the Court of Aberfraw,” and the similar arrangements of the Norwegian Olaf, probably have reference to the commencement or the progress of a revolution of this description; and if the apocryphal regulations of the Scottish court may be regarded as the feudal embodiment of a true tradition, Malcolm may be looked upon as the originator of that change through which the Scottish king, ceasing gradually to migrate from one province to another, enhanced the dignity of personal attendance upon the sovereign, and assembled his nobility in his own “palace” of Scone.

CHAPTER V.
The Line of Atholl.

Duncan the First—1034–1040.

Upon the death of Malcolm the Second the direct male line of Kenneth MacAlpin became extinct; but the rights of the royal race, originally inherited through the female line, were transmitted in the same manner through heiresses to the two great families of Atholl and Moray, whose disputes for the crown were destined to become as fruitful a source of strife and bloodshed as the sanguinary struggle between their immediate ancestors, or the earlier feuds between the lines of Constantine and Aodh.

Boedhe, the death of whose son has been already noticed, left a daughter, Gruoch, who, by her marriage with Gilcomgain, the son of Malbride MacRory, carried the claims of the line of Duff, after the death of her brother, into the family of the Moray Mormaors. Finlay MacRory, the antagonist of Sigurd Lodverson, lost his life in a feud with his nephews Malcolm and Gilcomgain, to the former of whom the earldom reverted according to the Gaelic rule of succession, until his death in 1029, when it fell into the possession of his younger brother Gilcomgain. Three years later the Mormaor was surprised and burnt in his Rath or fortress, with fifty of his immediate followers, leaving an infant son, Lulach, who, after the death of Boedhe’s son in the following year became the sole remaining representative of the line of Kenneth Macduff. Gruoch, the widow of Gilcomgain, was married eventually to Macbeth MacFinlay,[133] who had succeeded her late husband and his own cousin in the Mormaorship of Moray, when, as the husband of Gruoch and the guardian of the infant Lulach, Macbeth became the representative during the minority of the latter of his claims upon the crown of Scotland.

Bethoc, or Beatrice, the eldest of the late king’s daughters, carried her claims to the race of Atholl by her marriage with Crinan, Abbot of Dunkeld, who was also the head of the Atholl family.[134] Their son was Duncan, the heir and successor of his grandfather, who, before his accession to the throne of Scotland, had been placed by Malcolm over the dependent province of Strath Clyde.

Another of Malcolm’s daughters, a younger sister of Beatrice, married Sigurd Lodverson soon after his victory over the Mormaor Finlay, the father of Macbeth, when it was evidently the object of the late king to secure the alliance of the Orkney Jarl as a formidable rival to the hostile family of Moray. A. D. 1014. After the fall of Sigurd in the battle of Clontarf, his son Thorfin, as has been already mentioned, when a mere child, was placed by his grandfather over the earldom of Sutherland and Caithness, whilst the Orkneys were inherited by his three half-brothers, Einar, Somarled, and Brusi. Upon the death of Somarled, a few years later, Thorfin claimed a share of the islands, when Einar prepared to resist his pretensions by force, but through the intervention of the other brother, Brusi, Thorfin succeeded in attaining his object, and in this manner he first acquired a footing in the Orkneys.

Einar perished shortly afterwards in a feud, when a fresh difficulty arose upon his death about the division of his portion of the islands. Brusi, fearful lest king Malcolm, who was then alive, should support the claims of his grandson, determined upon enlisting the king of Norway in his own behalf, and for this purpose he sailed for the latter country, whither he was soon followed by Thorfin, who thought with much justice (to use the words of the Saga), “that though he stood well with Olaf, and many would support him in his absence, many more would do so if he were present.” Before the arrival of his younger brother, Brusi had already resigned his Odal rights into the hands of Olaf, agreeing to be bound by the royal decision, and to hold all his lands as a Lenderman or royal Jarl at the will and pleasure of the king. When a similar resignation was demanded from Thorfin, he hesitated at first to acquiesce in any such arrangement; but after consulting with his friends he agreed with such alacrity to every proposition of Olaf, that the suspicions of the king were aroused, and deciding that Einar’s portion had reverted to the Norwegian crown, he restored it to Brusi, relying more upon the fidelity of the elder brother than upon the youthful but ambitious Thorfin.

The pacific Brusi soon found reason to complain of his brother, after their return to the Orkneys, for neglecting to contribute his allotted portion towards the defence of the islands; as Thorfin, residing continually on the mainland, was satisfied with limiting his connection with his insular fiefs to the punctual exaction of his dues. The younger Jarl offered to rectify his neglect, by taking the whole trouble out of the hands of his elder brother, on condition that the latter in return should surrender the disputed share; and as peace, not power, was the object of the indolent Brusi, he willingly purchased it at the price of insignificance, and at his death, which occurred about the year 1030, Thorfin, A. D. 1030. without further scruple, annexed the whole of the Orkneys to his dominions.[135]

Such was the state of Scotland when Duncan the First succeeded to the throne of his grandfather. In the extreme north, dominions more extensive than any Jarl of the Orkneys had hitherto acquired, were united under the rule of Thorfin Sigurdson, whose character and appearance have been thus described—“He was stout and strong, but very ugly, severe and cruel, but a very clever man.” The extensive districts then dependant upon the Moray Mormaors were in the possession of the celebrated Macbeth, and though the power of those northern magnates must undoubtedly have been weakened by the aggressions of the Norwegian Jarls, it tells not a little for the energy and vigour of the late king, that his grandson was able to ascend the throne without encountering any opposition from the formidable representative of the claims of the rival family.

The early portion of Duncan’s reign is void of incident, but, before long, the mainland possessions of Thorfin appear to have become an object of dispute, the king demanding the usual tribute due from a dependancy of Scotland, whilst the Jarl denied the justice of his claim, maintaining that he held his earldom by Odal right, as an absolute and unconditional gift from their joint grandfather Malcolm. At length Duncan, to punish his kinsman’s contumacy and assert the rights of the crown, determined upon appointing another member of his family, Moddan or Madach, to replace Thorfin in the earldom, and dispatching Madach with an army to the north, he empowered him to take possession of the royal grant.[136] A. D. 1040. Much about the same time, the Scottish king, desirous of extending the conquests of his grandfather towards the south, laid siege to Durham, but the town was destined to become as fatal to the hopes of Duncan as it had once been disastrous to those of Malcolm, a sudden and unexpected sally spread confusion amongst the besieging army, and again the heads of the Scottish slain were ranged in triumph around the hostile walls of Durham.[137]

Madach had been equally unsuccessful in his attempt upon the earldom of Thorfin. Warned of the approach of his rival, the Jarl summoned Thorkell Fostri to join him with the Orkneymen in Caithness, and Madach, perceiving that an engagement with their united forces would only be attended with a disastrous result, retreated southwards for reinforcements, whilst Thorfin availed himself of the opportunity to overrun the neighbouring district of Ross. Intelligence of his proceedings reached the king at Berwick, deciding him to march at once towards the north, in order to support in person his grant of the earldom to Madach. It appears to have been Duncan’s object to cut off Thorfin from the Orkneys, thus preventing his junction with Thorkell Fostri and his Norwegians, whom the Jarl, on the retreat of his rival, had permitted to return to the islands; and to carry out his purpose, he despatched Madach towards Caithness with the land army, whilst with eleven vessels he sailed round Duncansby Head to interpose his ships between the Jarl and his island home; hoping thus either to force him to fight at a disadvantage with the superior numbers of Madach, or to drive him southwards upon those Highland districts which were less well affected to his cause.

The sight of Duncan’s sails in the Pentland Firth conveyed to Thorfin the earliest intelligence of his enemy’s approach, and, baffled in an attempt to put to sea, and thus escape to Sandwick, he was forced to lie off Dyrness for the night and to await the king’s attack on the following morning.[138] The ships of Thorfin were laden with the plunder of the northern provinces of Scotland, and his men fought so desperately in defence of their booty, that the king was beaten off and obliged to make for the coast of Moray, whither he was speedily followed by the united forces of Thorfin and Thorkell Fostri; the Jarl watching the movements of Duncan and collecting reinforcements from Caithness, Sutherland, and Ross, whilst he dispatched Thorkell to surprise Madach, who had now reached Thurso, where he was resting in unguarded security. The fidelity of the men of Caithness ably seconded the projects of their Jarl, so effectually concealing the approach of Thorkell, that the first notice of danger was conveyed to the unfortunate Madach by the flames of his burning house, and he perished in a vain attempt to burst through the ranks of his enemies, and escape from the blazing ruins.

The Scottish king was still occupied in the province of Moray, where he appears to have assembled a considerable force, to which Ireland contributed her share. Strengthened by the return of Thorkell Fostri, and by the arrival of the friendly clans from the Highland districts of the north and west, Thorfin crossed the Moray Firth, and assuming the offensive, attacked the royal army, which is said to have been stationed in the neighbourhood of Burghead.[139] Duncan was defeated after a severe struggle, and Thorfin, following up his success, plundered the country to the frontiers of Fife, and returned without molestation to his northern earldom; whilst the double failure in Northumbria and Moray hastening the catastrophe of the youthful king, he was assassinated “in the Smith’s bothy,” near Elgin, not far from the scene of his latest battle, the Mormaor Macbeth being the undoubted author of his death.[140]

The reigns of this king and his predecessor have been adorned in the pages of Buchanan and Boece with numerous victories gained over the Northmen which were totally unknown to the earlier authorities Wynton and Fordun. Many difficulties beset the path of the early compiler of Scottish history. The dearth of materials; the English claims so thoroughly interwoven with the accounts which the rival chronicler was fain to accept for his principal authorities; the necessity under which he lay of distinguishing the “genuine Scots”—as he considered them—as well from the “Irishry” to the northward of “the Mounth,” as from the English to the southward of the Tweed, all combined to render it a matter requiring no little trouble and ingenuity to compose an appropriate history of his country. Under these circumstances the numerous tumuli along the coast, each marking some spot where the men of the olden time repulsed or fell before the invaders, suggested the groundwork of a historical fabric which might at any rate escape much questioning; and of these memorials of bygone conflicts Boece has availed himself without scruple. Lords of the Isles and Thanes of Strathearn valiantly sustain the contest against Sueno or Camus, Olave or Onetus; and at a time when surnames were as yet unknown, a Keith or a Hay, a Graham or a Dunbar, revives the failing courage of his countrymen and points the way to victory. The fate of Loncarty must attend upon the triumphs of Malcolm and his grandson. The crumbling bones of the dead bear faithful witness to the reality of the battles, but the circumstances and the characters called into existence by the pen of Boece, must fade away from the page of history, and pass into the realm of fiction.[141]

The Line of Moray.

A. D. 1040.

Very few kings of so remote a period have attained to the undying celebrity of Macbeth. As long as the English language endures, his name will be as widely known as that of the great Alfred, his character will retain the familiar features impressed on it by the magic genius of Shakspeare, and it will be as impossible to disentangle the historical personage from the weird being of romance, as to picture “the meek and hoary Duncan,” a young and inexperienced prince, meeting his untimely fate in the flower of youth.

The quaint verses of the prior of Lochleven have embodied some of the tales and traditions handed down by the partizans of the rival families; and it will create little surprise to find that in a state of society in which “the rights of blood” were paramount, the stigma of illegitimacy was freely cast upon both competitors for the crown. Wyntoun has recorded how Duncan, wearied with the chase, and separated from his usual attendants, found rest and shelter within the humble mill of Forteviot; how love bade the king return where chance had shown the way; and how Malcolm, whose blood has flowed in the veins of every English and Scottish king but Stephen, from the days of Henry Beauclerc, sprung from this intrigue with the “milnare’s dowchtyr of Fortewyot.” As the taint upon the blood of Malcolm was supposed to be inherited from his mother, so the stain upon the pedigree of Macbeth was attributed to the Mormaor’s father; and in the same old verses it may be read how the mother of the Moray chieftain, wandering by chance in the woods, met with “ane fayr man, nevyr nane sa fayre as scho thowcht than,” and how Macbeth was born “the Dewil’s sone,” and the inheritor of all his father’s evil propensities. As the talisman of success was eventually upon the side of Malcolm, so the tales of the tyranny and crimes of his antagonist increased and multiplied, until they assumed the well-known form in the pages of Boece, which, copied into the chronicle of Holinshed, attracted the notice of the master-mind that has stamped the fiction with immortality.[142]

It may be gathered from the circumstances of his early life that Macbeth did not attain even to the position of Mormaor without a struggle. The two sons of Ruadhri—Roderic or Rory—the first known member of the Moray family, succeeded according to the Gaelic custom, Finlay filling the office of Tanist during the lifetime of his brother Malbride. He was slain, as has been already mentioned, by his nephews, who evidently intended to retain the right of succession within their immediate branch of the family; Gilcomgain, who must have been chosen Tanist on his brother’s accession to the Mormaordom, following Malcolm to the exclusion of Finlay’s son, Macbeth, whose right to the Tanistship was undoubted, and who must have thus found himself shut out from the seniority to which he was fully entitled to aspire as the representative of the junior branch of Rory’s family. The union of Gilcomgain with a daughter of the MacAlpin family must have still further strengthened his position, and as Macbeth is subsequently entitled Dux by the contemporary Marianus, it may be conjectured that if he filled the office of Toshach—Duke or Constable of the kingdom—during the reign of Duncan, it may have been conferred upon him originally as the natural opponent of the rival line of Kenneth MacDuff, with which the kinsman who had supplanted him was closely connected. The last two years of Malcolm’s reign, however, witnessed the deaths of Gilcomgain and of his wife’s brother; and though the name of the Mormaor’s enemy is not mentioned, it is hardly possible to doubt, that when he was surprised and burnt with fifty of his followers, it was the deed of Macbeth avenging the murder of his father, and re-asserting his claim upon the Mormaorship. The subsequent death of Boedhe’s son transferred his claims upon the throne to his sister Gruoch, whose marriage with Macbeth reversed the position in which the Mormaor had hitherto stood, and placed him in the position of Gilcomgain. Henceforth his interest was closely bound up with the family to which he had hitherto been hostile, though, had Duncan been prosperous, his fidelity might have stood the test. It was the disastrous career of this unfortunate prince which first seems to have aroused the ambition of Macbeth; but even then his hostility was secret. It was not in open battle that Duncan lost his life, nor was the crown of Scotland the prize of the victor in a hard fought field, the final scene in “the Smith’s bothy” being strongly suggestive of treachery.

The historical Macbeth appears to have been an able monarch, and religious after the fashion of the age, for his reign has been handed down in tradition as an era of fertility and prosperity—generally a sign of the ability of the ruler; and he is recorded with his queen amongst the earliest benefactors of the Culdee society of Lochleven.[143] With their joint grant to the little priory is associated the only historical mention of the true descent of the Lady Gruoch; and the venerable Culdee who briefly registered their donation, little thought that, in entering the simple notice, he was perpetuating the sole record of the real nature of the claims of his benefactors upon the throne they were accused of usurping. His liberality to the poor of Rome is also mentioned by a contemporary historian; but in such a manner as to leave it a matter of doubt whether the king was ever present in person at the Eternal City.[144]

For five years after the fall of Duncan his successful rival reigned in peace, when an attempt was made by the adherents of the late king to regain their lost ascendancy. A. D. 1045. The children of Duncan were still in their infancy, and their cause was sustained by their grandfather, Crinan, the aged abbot of Dunkeld; but his defeat and death, “with nine times twenty warriors,” extinguished for a time the hopes of the House of Atholl, and only served to secure the throne more firmly in the power of Macbeth.[145] Seven years elapsed and the fortunes of the House of Moray were still in the ascendant, when several of the Confessor’s Norman favourites, A. D. 1052. who were driven from England on the return of Earl Godwin, fled for refuge beyond the Tweed,[146] and the asylum granted to the fugitives at Macbeth’s Court may have afforded a pretext for the hostility of Siward, who, two years later, invaded the dominions of the Scottish king. A. D. 1054. The whole force of the Northumbrian provinces collected around the banner of the Danish earl, and attacked Macbeth on the day of “the Seven Sleepers;” 27th July. fifteen hundred of the Anglo-Danes fell in the contest, with the son and nephew of the earl, but Siward gained the day, slew three thousand of the enemy—the detested Normans amongst the number—and carried off a booty unprecedented in the annals of Border warfare.[147]

The great success of the Anglo-Danish earl is generally supposed to have reinstated Malcolm on the throne, but no such inference can be drawn from the accounts of contemporary writers, by whom no allusion is made to the Scottish prince; the espousal of the suppliant’s cause by the Confessor, and the directions given by the saintly king to Siward to re-establish the heir of Duncan in his ancestral kingdom, only appearing in the pages of the Anglo-Norman chroniclers for the purpose of indirectly furthering the subsequent feudal claims of the English kings. As the rout of the Scottish army before the walls of Durham, and their subsequent contest with Thorfin Sigurdson hastened the catastrophe of the first king of the House of Atholl, so the unsuccessful issue of his encounter with Earl Siward may have eventually proved fatal to the Mormaor; but Macbeth held his ground for four years, and the grave had long closed over the Danish earl, A. D. 1058. when the defeat and death of his former antagonist at Lumphanan, in Aberdeenshire, removed the first obstacle from the path of the youthful Malcolm.[148] For three or four months the contest still continued to be maintained by Gilcomgain’s son Lulach, the feeble successor of his able kinsman, until his death at Essie in Strathbogie, where he is said to have been betrayed, or to have lost his life through some stratagem of his enemies, put an end for the time to the struggle between the rival houses, and the heir of Duncan without further difficulty obtained possession of the vacant throne.[149]

CHAPTER VI.
The Line of Atholl Restored.

Malcolm the Third (Ceanmore). 1058–1093.

Three centuries had now elapsed since the conquests of the Pictish Angus established the supremacy of his native province, and laid the foundation of the future kingdom of Scotland. During the earlier portion of this period no addition had been made to the territories of the reigning family, the lords of the southern capital of Dunfothir contenting themselves with the vague dignity of “Ardrigh of Alban,” and with excluding from the privileges of “a royal race” the rival chieftains of Dundurn. The incursions of the Northmen, above all the conquests of Thorstein Olaveson, weakened the power of the southern kingdom, and by exhibiting the almost forgotten spectacle of a prince of Dundurn sharing the throne of Scotland with a scion of the royal race, resuscitated the hopes of the northern tribes; the deaths of three kings of the MacAlpin dynasty in the province of Moray testifying to the obstinacy with which the people of that district continued to resist the pretensions of the southern family to the right of Can and Cuairt throughout the north. But the rise of the Jarls of the Orkneys again turned the scale in favour of the south, and from the time when the second Kenneth favoured the claims of Thorfin’s family upon the mainland earldom of their maternal ancestor, Forres ceased to be fatal to his race, and he was at leisure to carry out his projects against the heir of Finella, and to make the first actual addition to the territories of the Scottish kings by bringing the eastern coasts into a more direct dependancy upon the crown. The “Bishopric of the Scots,” co-extensive in jurisdiction with the royal power, henceforth reached to the Dee, and the fatality to the royal race was transferred to the eastern provinces; for the struggle was no longer in the north until the old rivalry again broke out on the rupture of the alliance with the Orkney Jarl.

The fatality attending the northern districts never seems to have extended to the junior branch of the reigning dynasty, whose alliances and expeditions were essentially connected with the south and west. It was over Strath Clyde that Constantine endeavoured to extend his influence; Northumbria was the province from which Indulf wrested Edinburgh; whilst Lothian, or the British frontiers, were fatal to Colin and his brother Eocha. Hence it may be gathered that they were the southern branch of the ruling family, the possessions of the kindred race of Constantine the First probably bringing the latter into more immediate contact with the northern division of the nation. Upon the extinction of the line of Aodh in the person of Constantine the Third, Malcolm the Second appears as the leader of the southern interest, and whilst the children of Kenneth MacDuff eventually became connected with the hereditary enemies of their race, Malcolm, in pursuance of the traditional policy of the south, allied himself with the House of Atholl, annexed Strath Clyde to the crown, and followed up the conquests of Indulf, and the attempts of his own father, Kenneth, upon the neighbouring possessions of the Northumbrian Ealdormen. The preponderance of the south was greatly increased during his reign, and as the conquests of Angus and his successors centred the royal authority in one ruling family, so the great additions made to the territory of the crown during the reign of Kenneth and his son Malcolm fixed that authority in the House of Atholl. The northern policy of these kings was reversed by their descendant Duncan, the result costing him his crown and his life; but a period was now approaching when the lengthened reign of an abler prince was to redeem the incapacity or misfortunes of the first of his House, to extend the power of the crown still further over the hostile provinces of the north, and to bequeath to his descendants a more compact and powerful kingdom, which they were destined gradually to knit together in the iron bonds of feudalism.

The early years of the reign of Malcolm have escaped the notice of the chroniclers of his age, and there is nothing to be recorded beyond the death of Thorfin Sigurdson, A. D. 1064. when the dominions of the Jarl reverted to his two sons, whilst Ingebiorge, his widow, became the wife of the youthful king.[150] Ever since the days of Ethelred and Edwin, when the princes of Deira and the race of Ida contended for the dominion of Northumbria, the territories of the Picts and Scots had afforded a frequent asylum to all whom the chances of war or of political intrigue banished from the land of the Saxon; but in the troubled and distracted period then impending over England, the neighbouring kingdom beyond the Tweed was destined to receive a band of more than usually illustrious exiles. The first amongst the fugitives who sought the protection of the Scottish king was Tosti, Earl of Yorkshire and Northumberland. A. D. 1061. A friendship had long existed between the king and the earl, who were united in the bonds of “sworn brotherhood,” a tie which seems to have been no obstacle to the attacks of Malcolm upon the earldom of his sworn brother when the latter was absent upon a pilgrimage to Rome; though it may have softened the resentment of the earl, who passed over unnoticed this foray on the people of his earldom, whom he plundered and oppressed, on his own part, with scarcely less hostility, under a show of rightful authority. At length in the autumn of 1065 the whole of the north of England rose against their earl, put to death the ministers of his tyranny—descendants of the Anglo-Danes—and chose Morkar, the brother of Edwin, Earl of Mercia, in his place; whilst Tosti, escaping with difficulty from the first outbreak of their fury, took refuge with his wife at the Court of Flanders. Here he organized a plan for winning back his earldom, and sailing along the English coasts in the following March, he swept some booty from the Isle of Wight, but failing in an attempt to plunder Lindesey, where he was met and defeated by his rival Morkar, he was obliged to seek the protection of his old ally Malcolm. The Scottish king, however, does not appear to have shared in the intrigues of Tosti, nor did he take any part in the memorable expedition of the Earl and Harald Hardrade against England, resulting, A. D. 1066. as is well known, in the defeat and death of both invaders in the battle of Stamford Bridge.[151]

Some years elapsed after his victory at Hastings before the power of the conqueror was thoroughly established throughout the northern provinces of England, and even then it is doubtful whether it ever extended, except in a qualified degree, over the modern county of Cumberland, or over Northumbria beyond the Tyne.[152] He was well aware of the secret disaffection existing amongst the magnates of his new people, but it formed no part of his policy to drive them in a body into open rebellion, and they were retained in a species of honourable captivity at his court, or accompanied him in his expeditions into Normandy—nominally indeed as dignified retainers, but in reality as hostages for the peace of their respective districts—whilst year after year saw one or more of the nobles of English birth incarcerated or put to death on one pretext or another. The vengeance of William might be postponed, but it was never forgotten, nor did he ever pass over an opportunity of crushing the man whom his sagacious but unsparing policy had once marked as dangerous.

A. D. 1068.

It was to avoid some such ebullition of William’s wrath, that, in the summer of 1068, Edgar the Atheling, with his mother and two sisters, and many of the northern lords who had supported his claims after the death of Harold, deemed it expedient to cross the borders into Scotland. There appears to have been an abortive attempt at a rising in that year in which the fugitives may have been implicated, and, to curb the disaffection of the men of Morkar’s earldom, William built two castles at York, garrisoning them with a strong detachment of Norman soldiery. A. D. 1069. In the ensuing winter he dispatched Robert Comyn, the first of a name destined to become celebrated in the annals of the neighbouring kingdom, to preserve order amongst the turbulent Northumbrians beyond the Tyne; 28th Jan. but the Norman baron was surprised and slain at Durham, before he reached his earldom, out of seven hundred of his followers but one escaping with life. The perpetrators of this outrage then marched upon York, taking with them Edgar, who had joined them from Scotland, and were entering into a negotiation with the citizens of that place, when they were discomfited by the sudden arrival of William from the south, who gave up the city to be plundered, as a punishment for the disaffection of its inhabitants.[153]

Sept.

The arrival of two hundred and forty ships in the Humber, under the command of Jarl Osbern, the Danish king’s brother, summoned Edgar and his partizans in the following autumn to make one more effort to free their native land from the Norman yoke, even at the cost of delivering it to the Danes; and the united armies, marching upon York, stormed the two Norman castles, putting more than three thousand soldiers to the sword, when the Danes, satisfied with the amount of their success, returned at once to their ships, whilst Edgar and his adherents lost no time in again retiring beyond the Tyne. On receiving the intelligence of the destruction of his castles, and the lamentable slaughter of his men, William swore to exact a fearful vengeance, and with unflinching rigour he fulfilled his oath. He soon discovered the proper weapons for combating Jarl Osbern, who was ready to sacrifice the interest of his brother for his own personal emolument; and it was secretly arranged that the hostilities of the Danish admiral should be limited during the winter to pillaging the coast, and that in the following spring he should return to Denmark without offering any serious opposition to the movements of the Norman king. Secure against attack from Jarl Osbern, William marched to the north, giving over the whole country between the Humber and the Tyne throughout the ensuing winter to the unbridled license of his soldiery.[154]

A. D. 1070.

With the approach of spring he returned to the south, to institute a searching and rigorous scrutiny into the coffers of the English monasteries; but scarcely were the inhabitants of the devastated provinces relieved from the presence of the Norman army, than they were destined to experience a repetition of their sufferings from a sudden invasion of the Scots. In the confusion of the period Malcolm had seized upon Cumberland, retaining it hitherto by open force, and its possession enabling him to penetrate into England without crossing the territories of his Northumbrian allies, he poured his followers down the Vale of Teesdale into the North Riding of Yorkshire. At a spot known as “the Hundred Springs,” long since covered by the luxuriant woods of Castle Howard, he reached the limits of his incursion, and dispatching homewards a portion of the army laden with the plunder of the expedition, he sought to entice the population of the districts which had hitherto been spared, from the caves and forests to which they had hurriedly fled on the first tidings of his inroad. The stratagem of the Scottish leader was only too successful, and the miserable inhabitants of Cleveland, Hartness, and the eastern coasts of Durham, were soon startled from their fancied security by the unexpected approach of the very army which they had vainly imagined to have quitted the country, and to have been already far advanced on its homeward march towards the north.[155]

By this time, however, the confederates, in whose behalf Malcolm had taken up arms, had ceased to be formidable to the English king. The Danish fleet, after plundering Peterborough, quitted the English coasts in June; and Osbern, meeting with his just reward, was banished from the court of his indignant brother Sweyne. Not a few of the insurgents had already made their peace with William—a similar transaction to that which had corrupted Osbern, purchasing for Cospatric the Earldom of Northumberland, on which he had claims through the descent of his mother from Earl Uchtred. The rest of the Northumbrian leaders were preparing to leave a country in which they could now no longer hope to dwell in safety; and Malcolm, upon his arrival at Wearmouth, found a vessel in the harbour with the Atheling on board, who, with his mother and his sisters, Siward Beorn, Merlesweyne, and others of his most faithful adherents, was only awaiting a favourable wind to quit for ever his native land. The Scottish king hastened to assure the illustrious exiles of a welcome reception at his own court, and his offer of an asylum was readily accepted, though the courtesy of Malcolm towards the representatives of Anglo-Saxon royalty tended very little to alleviate the sufferings of their subjects. The work of destruction proceeded as before, and the king was contemplating the burning ruins of St. Peter’s Church, fired by his own retainers, when intelligence arrived that Earl Cospatric was signalizing his newly-born fidelity to the English king at the expense of the Scottish possessions in Cumberland. The fury of Malcolm knew no bounds; but a few months had elapsed since Scotland had sheltered Cospatric from William’s vengeance; and her king, during his recent inroad, had purposely abstained from any outrage upon the territory of Northumberland. Hitherto plunder had been the object of the Scottish army, but henceforth their aim was revenge; and though the walls of Bamborough sheltered Cospatric with the spoils of wasted Cumberland, his earldom was open to fire and sword, and dearly did its devoted inhabitants rue the untoward zeal with which their earl had repaid his recent appointment. No mercy was shown to either age, sex, or infancy; all who escaped the massacre were driven in crowds along the homeward path of the invaders; and though multitudes of the captives perished miserably by the way, enough survived to satisfy the cupidity of their captors, and to supply every hovel beyond the Borders with slaves of English race.[156]

An incalculable amount of misery and loss of human life resulted from these northern wars; for not a village was left standing between York and Durham, nor for nine years was any attempt made at cultivation over a space of sixty miles and upwards. Waste is the term ominously affixed in Domesday to all the possessions of Edwin, Morkar, and the northern prelates, as well as to the lands of Waltheof and Cospatric, of Siward Beorn, and Merlesweyne; and a province, once flourishing and prosperous, became the haunt of beasts of prey, wild cattle, and outlaws. To add still more to the wretchedness of the period, a partial dearth, which had arisen from the ravages of William, was increased by the events of the two succeeding years, until it became a famine of the most intense description. Many sold themselves to slavery to escape starvation; others were reduced to support life by the most revolting substitutes for their accustomed food, such as carrion and human flesh; houses and streets were filled with the unburied bodies of the dead, none stopping to perform the last offices of interment; and the roadsides were covered with dying wretches, perishing in a vain attempt to seek a refuge in exile. Multitudes of every class abandoned their native land during this frightful period of misery and despair; Scotland became their asylum and adopted home, and in the veins of many of the bravest and noblest of her sons, there flowed, in after times, the best and purest blood of ancient Northumbria.[157]

An additional stimulus must have been afforded to this emigration by the union of Malcolm, after his return from the south, with Margaret, one of the sisters of the Atheling. History has left no record of the fate of Ingebiorge, and possibly she was no longer living, though her death is by no means necessarily to be implied from the second marriage of Malcolm, as a laxity in the dissolution of the marriage tie was not confined to the Gaelic people alone at that period.[158] Margaret is said to have been at first averse to the marriage, not for any personal dislike to her future husband, but because the misfortunes of her country and of her family had sunk deeply into her heart, inclining her to seek a refuge in the cloister, to which her sister Christina subsequently retired. But the advantages of the connection with the Scottish king were too obvious to be overlooked; her scruples were at length overcome by her brother and his followers, and her gentle disposition and sincere piety were destined to exercise a mild and beneficent influence over the characters of her husband and her youthful family.[159]

The English king was occupied during the following year in repressing the rebellion of Edwin and Morkar, A. D. 1071.and in crushing the attempt made by the latter earl to maintain a stand in conjunction with Hereward, Siward Beorn, and Aylwyn bishop of Durham, amid the fens and marshes surrounding Ely; but the invasion of Malcolm was neither forgotten nor forgiven, and towards the close of the next summer A. D. 1072. August. William marched to the north with a formidable array of mounted chivalry, supported by a numerous fleet, in the full determination of exacting vengeance, both for the open hostility of the Scottish king, and for the support invariably afforded in the same quarter to his disaffected subjects beyond the Humber. If he had expected to find any of the insurgents in Scotland, he was doomed, on this occasion, to disappointment, as they had undoubtedly escaped elsewhere on the first rumours of the magnitude of the expedition.[160] Edgar was apparently in Flanders,[161] a country which, ever since the accession of Robert the Frison, had become the asylum of all who fled from the wrath of the Conqueror; as the connection of the count, by marriage, with the Danish and French kings, both at enmity with the king of England, as well as the assistance rendered by William to the nephew of Robert in his attempts upon the appanage of his uncle, caused a ready welcome to be accorded in Flanders to all who were disposed to assist the count in his attacks upon the duchy of Normandy.

When William had penetrated as far as Abernethy in the county of Fife[162] he was met by the army of his adversary; but as neither king was really anxious to proceed to extremities, before long they mutually agreed to the following arrangement. Malcolm received a grant of certain manors in England, with the promise of a yearly payment of twelve marks of gold, performing the usual homage in return for the grant of English fiefs, and giving up Duncan, his son by his former marriage, as a hostage for the fulfilment of his obligations.[163] The Conqueror then retraced his steps to the south. His predominance in the north at length established, Cospatric could be safely taxed, both with his alleged connivance in the death of Robert Comyn, and with his actual presence at the storm of the castles of York. Neither of these charges had interfered with his advancement to the earldom of Northumberland when it had been the aim of William to detach a formidable opponent from the ranks of his enemies; nor did his innocence of the first crime avail him now, and his fief was given to Waltheof, whose feats at York upon the same occasion, where he long defended the gate with his single arm, cutting down the Normans one after another as they entered, were for the present either pardoned or overlooked. Cospatric escaped by a timely flight, and after a brief residence in Flanders, rejoined his countrymen in Scotland, where he received from Malcolm, who seems to have forgotten his former resentment against the Earl, the important fortress of Dunbar with an ample portion of the surrounding territory, and he became the ancestor of the noble family of Dunbar, long prominent amongst the barons of southern Scotland as Earls of Lothian or the March.[164]

A. D. 1073.

Not long after the treaty of Abernethy, Edgar returned from the continent to Scotland, where, though he was received with every mark of honour and respect by his sister and her husband, Malcolm earnestly pressed upon him the advantage of accepting the castle of Montreuil, offered by the king of France for the purpose of establishing a troublesome neighbour in the vicinity of the Norman possessions of their mutual foe. Edgar accordingly once more left Scotland laden with the costly presents of his relatives, but like most men of his character the Atheling was doomed to misfortune, and ere long Scotland again received him, a shipwrecked and homeless wanderer. It was no part of the policy of Malcolm to risk the vengeance of the Conqueror in fruitless attempts at assisting his feeble brother-in-law, and he now strongly advised him to tender his submission to the English king. It was accepted most willingly; and with much empty ceremony and parade, Edgar was conducted to the English frontier, and from thence to Normandy, where he resigned his pretensions to the English crown, and passed the remainder of his life, for the most part, in indolent and peaceful insignificance.[165]

Every cause for hostility between the English and Scottish kings was removed for a time by the relinquishment of Edgar’s claims upon the English crown, and Malcolm was at liberty to turn his attention to internal policy, and to establish his authority, and secure it more firmly, over the northern provinces of his dominions. The deaths of Macbeth, and of his successor Lulach, had crushed without extinguishing the hopes of the rival family; but though their pretensions were again revived by Lulach’s son Malsnechtan, fortune continued adverse to the men of Moray, and a sanguinary and decisive victory, A. D. 1077. in which Malcolm is said to have “won the mother of Malsnechtan, all his best men, his treasures and his cattle,” confirmed the superiority of the king. This solitary passage in the Saxon chronicle is the only indication of the occurrence of any contest in the north of Scotland during the course of Malcolm’s reign; though probably the battle thus recorded by the chronicler of a different people, who adds that, “God’s justice was done upon Malsnechtan, for he was all forsworn,” effectually established the royal authority over the dominions of the hostile Mormaors. Malsnechtan, indeed, survived his overthrow to “die in peace,” a few years afterwards, A. D. 1085. when the title of “king of Moray,” conferred upon him by the Irish annalist, implies (if correct) a partial independence; but as there can be no doubt about the foundation of Mortlach before the date of his death, the surrounding territory must have been by this time annexed to the crown, and the influence of the Moray family must henceforth have been confined to the westward of the Spey.[166]

A. D. 1079.

Two years after his successes in the north Malcolm again crossed his southern frontiers with a hostile army; and, as at the time of this inroad William was contending in Normandy against his eldest son, it is doubtful whether the incursion was intended to effect a diversion in favour of Robert, always a warm friend of the Scottish monarch, or whether it was simply dictated, in the absence of the English king, by a wish to sweep the country to the Tyne. William was very shortly reconciled with his son, whom he dispatched with an army in the following autumn A. D. 1080. to make reprisals for the invasion of the Scots; but either from a want of ability, or from a secret feeling in favour of Malcolm, Robert retreated without effecting anything beyond a fruitless march to Falkirk; on his return southwards laying the foundations of a new castle on the Tyne—the first link in the chain of border fortresses destined to defend the English frontier from the ever ready attacks of the Scots—around which the future capital of Northumberland eventually grew into existence.[167]

A. D. 1087.

The two king’s were never destined to meet again. The stern soul of the Conqueror was touched upon his deathbed with some feelings of remorse for the numerous captives whom he had so long retained in hopeless confinement, and he left directions to his sons to release, after his death, all prisoners of state, and others whom motives of policy had hitherto kept under restraint. Amongst the hostages set at liberty were Malcolm’s son Duncan, and Ulf the son of Harold, whose good fortune made Robert the arbiter of their fate; and the Duke of Normandy, with an honourable regard for the wishes of the dead, not only carried out the intentions of his deceased father, but conferred upon them both the dignity of knighthood, dismissing them with presents and marks of honour from his court; whilst the other prisoners, less fortunate, were retained in close custody by Rufus.[168]

A. D. 1091.

Four years after the death of the Conqueror, when the contest between his sons was brought to a temporary conclusion upon the pacification between William and Robert, Edgar the Atheling was expelled from the lands assigned to him in Normandy by the late king, and was once more driven to seek a refuge in Scotland. Malcolm again espoused his cause, and partly, perhaps, in the hope of enforcing by a hostile demonstration the restoration of the Conqueror’s grant of manors, which appears to have been withheld by his successor, he marched a numerous army across the frontier in early spring, advancing as far as Chester le Street on his route to Durham; but upon learning that the whole country was in arms to oppose his progress, he lost no time, as his purpose was anticipated, in returning at once to Scotland.[169]

Intelligence of this fruitless inroad reaching William in Normandy, determined his return to England, and crossing the Channel with his brother Robert, he dispatched a powerful fleet along the coast, and prepared to follow in his father’s footsteps, and to march with his Norman chivalry to the north. But the English king had miscalculated the difficulties he would have to encounter, and though the summer was already far advanced before he returned to England, unlike his politic predecessor, who was always capable of postponing his vengeance to the proper season, he pushed forward his preparations for an immediate attack upon his enemy. Michaelmas passed away before he commenced his march, and when he reached the north, towards the close of autumn, his fleet was dispersed by a violent storm, and many of his horses had perished from cold and hunger in traversing the wastes yet stamped with the traces of his father’s vengeance. Instead of declining a contest as before, Malcolm, who was aware of his adversary’s situation, advanced into Lothian to meet the invaders; but a collision was prevented by the intervention of Robert, who, sending for the Atheling from the Scottish camp, arranged, with his assistance, a renewal of the treaty of Abernethy. Edgar was reconciled to William on the same occasion, accompanying him to England on his return to the south; but before Christmas both Robert and the Atheling retired in disgust from the English court, as the promises of the king remained in every case unfulfilled.[170]

A. D. 1092.

Another bulwark against the inroads of the Scots was erected in the following year, when William, marching into Cumberland, or Northumbria as it is called by the northern chroniclers, drove out Dolfin, who then possessed the land, and rebuilt and fortified Carlisle, which had lain in ruins since the days of Halfdan, peopling the neighbourhood with a body of peasantry collected from other parts of the country.[171] In spite of the non-fulfilment of William’s promises, Malcolm had as yet proceeded to no open act of hostility, and many of the leading men in England were anxious to carry out the intentions of Robert, and to secure a firm and lasting peace on terms honourable to both kings, and beneficial to their respective subjects. The illness of William in the year after his expedition into Cumberland, appeared a favourable opportunity for effecting an arrangement, as the fear of approaching death had softened the harshness of his character, and inclined him to listen to the entreaties of his advisers, who urgently implored him to repair his previous injustice; and accordingly, when Malcolm sent to demand the completion of their treaty, William named Gloucester as the place of meeting, delivered hostages for the safety of the Scottish king during his absence from his own country, and deputed Edgar Atheling to conduct his relative with all befitting honour to the English court.[172]

A. D. 1093. 11th Aug.

In his progress towards the south Malcolm assisted at the foundation of a new church at Durham, and his presence at the ceremony marks the connection which appears to have grown up since the annexation of Lothian—and still more since the marriage of Margaret—between the inhabitants of the northern counties and their Scottish neighbours, before the frontier line of fortresses springing up along the borders effectually severed the last links connecting the divisions of the ancient Bernician kingdom. 24th Aug. Towards the close of August he arrived at Gloucester, but William was no longer on a bed of sickness, and his transient penitence, with the apparent amelioration in his character, having passed away on the return of health, Malcolm found the English king more haughty and exacting than ever. Admission to the royal presence was contemptuously denied him, and he was commanded to “do right” in the English court, and according to the judgment of the English barons alone. To have yielded to this demand would have at once placed the king of Scotland on a footing with the English barons as “his Peers,” and would have been tantamount to an admission of his absolute and unconditional dependence upon the English crown. Exasperated at the affront, Malcolm indignantly refused compliance, promptly asserting “that the kings of Scotland were wont to do right to the kings of England upon the frontiers of the two kingdoms, and according to the united judgment of the Peers of both realms;” and having thus maintained his entire independence of the English king, he departed in open hostility from his court.[173]

Hastily collecting an army on his return to his own country, Malcolm again crossed the frontier before the close of autumn, and in spite of the warnings of his anxious queen, November. headed his followers in person to revenge upon the soil of England the insult of her haughty sovereign. The forebodings of Margaret were destined to be too fatally fulfilled, Malcolm perishing on the 13th of November on the banks of the river Alne; and although the manner of his death is involved in some obscurity, there is little doubt that it was effected by treachery. His ostensible opponent was Robert de Mowbray, at that time Earl of Northumberland, but the death-blow was dealt by Morel of Bamborough, to whom he had once been bound by the ties of the closest and most familiar friendship.[174] Edward, the eldest of the sons of Margaret, and acknowledged as his father’s heir, fell mortally wounded on the same fatal occasion, dying a few days afterwards at a place in Jedwood forest long known as “Edward’s Isle;” whilst the Scottish host, dismayed at their double loss, returned in confusion to their own country, many perishing by the sword in their disorderly flight, but more losing their lives in attempting to cross the rivers swollen into torrents at that late season of the year. The body of the king, abandoned by his followers, was found upon the field of battle by two peasants, who cast it carelessly on a cart and brought it into Tynemouth, where the royal corpse was consigned to an obscure tomb—a judgment, in the eyes of the historian of Durham, for the injuries inflicted by the living king on that very place—until about twenty years afterwards, when it was removed by the filial piety of the first Alexander to his native land, and the ashes of the warlike Malcolm at length reposed in peace by the side of his sainted queen in Dunfermline.[175]

Thus died Malcolm Ceanmore in the six-and-thirtieth year of a long and prosperous reign. An able king, and a bold and fearless warrior, the traits that have been preserved of his private character evince the kindliness of disposition, and the frank generosity, which not unfrequently adorn so gracefully the character of a brave man. Though as ignorant of letters as most of his contemporaries, he loved to choose the books which were the favourite study of his queen, and to cause them to be emblazoned with gold and jewels as a testimony of his affection and esteem; and when in the exercise of the lavish almsgiving for which the royal Margaret was renowned, she would unhesitatingly resort to the personal property of the king, after exhausting her own resources, Malcolm, on discovering his loss, would merely tax her laughingly with the theft.[176] According to an anecdote related by his son David, he once received an intimation that a nobleman, whose arrival at court was daily expected, had agreed with his enemies to attempt his assassination. Strict secrecy was enjoined upon the informant, and on the appearance of the visitor a royal hunt was proclaimed; the king contriving, in assigning his position to each sportsman, to separate himself from all the party with the exception of the suspected noble, whom he then taxed with his intended crime, bidding him on the spot, where there was none to see or to interfere, enact the part of a brave foe rather than of a base and cowardly assassin. Overwhelmed with shame and remorse, the nobleman threw himself at the feet of his intended victim, entreating forgiveness for his treachery; and the pardon was as freely bestowed by the generous king as the combat on equal terms had been frankly proffered.[177]

The history of Malcolm’s career would be incomplete without an allusion to one who exercised so great an influence over his court and people as Queen Margaret. Firmly convinced of the infallibility of his queen, whom he appears to have regarded as the incarnation of all that was pure and holy upon earth, the king submitted to her guidance implicitly in all matters connected with religion; and Margaret, conscious of her own learning and eloquence, and perhaps not unwilling to display her undoubted talents, frequently summoned the clergy to meet in council, and laid before them her opinions on the state of the Scottish church; Malcolm on such occasions acting as interpreter, and supporting her views on ecclesiastical subjects with all the weight of his own temporal authority.[178] Her piety was fervent and sincere, though imbued with much of the formalism of the age. Every morning a certain number of poor were ranged in front of the palace, and it was the first daily duty of the king and queen to wash their feet, and to supply them with food and clothing. Every night Margaret arose for midnight prayer, and the severity of the discipline to which she chose to subject herself, laid the foundation of a painful and lingering disease which eventually shortened her life. But her influence was not confined to matters of religion alone, and it was through Margaret that pomp and ceremonial were first introduced at the Scottish court, the king no longer riding out without a royal escort, nor regaling his nobility in the rude fashion of his ancestors, but astonishing them with a display of gold and silver plate.[179] A corresponding degree of magnificence was encouraged amongst the courtiers, foreign traders were invited to bring their rich and varied wares to Scottish ports, whilst it was signified that all who wished to earn the royal favour must become purchasers of the costly novelties.[180] In short, to the influence of Margaret may be attributed the foundation of that change, which gradually converted the king of Scotland from a rude and simple chieftain, surrounded by congenial and semi-barbarous followers, into a feudal monarch in the midst of a knightly and chivalrous court. The impress of her character is very visible in the dispositions and qualities of her children; and if from her they inherited the love of ostentation and display, which seems to have been the foible of their amiable mother, it must not be forgotten that from her also they derived the purity of life for which they were all alike distinguished, and which was so eminent a feature in the character of a queen, in whose presence not even a word that could give offence was ever known to have been uttered.

The disastrous intelligence of the battle reached Margaret after her health had been long impaired, less by age, for she was scarcely past the prime of life, than by a painful disorder brought on by the austerities of the fasts, and penances, dictated by her fervent though mistaken piety. The departure of the king with her elder sons, upon their last unfortunate expedition, had already oppressed her mind with a gloomy foreshadowing of the future; and when, on the third day after the catastrophe, her son Edgar stood by her couch, in his expressive silence she divined her loss, and bowed in submission to the blow. But the shock was too great for her enfeebled frame, and sinking at once under the intelligence, upon the same day on which the fatal tidings arrived, she calmly and peacefully breathed her last, and death released her from her sorrows.[181]

Six sons and two daughters were the offspring of the marriage between Malcolm and Margaret. Edward, the eldest, perished with his father, and Ethelred, created Abbot of Dunkeld and Earl of Fife, appears to have survived his parents for a very short time: Edmund died in an English cloister, a penitent and mysterious recluse; Edgar, Alexander, and David, lived to wear, in succession, the crown of Scotland. Of the two daughters, Editha was destined by Malcolm to be the wife of Alan, Count of Bretagne, but she eventually became the queen of Henry of England, who had long been attached to the Scottish princess, and claimed her as his bride immediately upon his accession to the throne. Many blamed Archbishop Anselm for countenancing the marriage, as they believed that Editha had taken the vows of a nun; but she convinced the archbishop of their mistake, and her words throw a curious light on the severe discipline to which she was subjected under the rule of her mother’s sister, the stern abbess of Romsey, as well as on the perils to which even a lady of her exalted rank was exposed, in these stormy times, from the licence of the Norman conquerors.[182] “I never took the veil,” said the princess, “but when I was quite a young girl, trembling under the rod of my aunt Christina, whom you must recollect, she used to place a little black hood on my head, to protect me from the lawless insolence of the Normans; and when I tore it off she would beat me cruelly, scolding me during the punishment in the harshest language. So in her presence I wore the black hood in tears and trembling; but when my father saw it he would pluck it from my head in a rage, imprecating the wrath of Heaven on the hand that placed it there, and adding that he intended me for Count Alan’s bride, and not for a sisterhood of nuns.”[183] She changed her name to Matilda in compliment to her husband’s mother, and her memory was long venerated amongst the English people, who fondly remembered her as “good Queen Maud.”[184] Mary, the younger daughter, after the marriage of her sister with Henry, was united to Eustace, Count of Boulogne, by whom she left an only child, also named Matilda, the heiress of her father’s earldom, which she brought as her dowry to Stephen of Blois, afterwards king of England.

CHAPTER VII.

The lamentable occurrence on the banks of the Alne threw all Scotland into confusion, retarding the progress of the country for the next quarter of a century. Edward had been chosen by his father for his Tanist, or successor, in preference to his elder half-brother Duncan, probably because, as the eldest of the sons of Margaret, he united her claims upon the allegiance of the Anglo-Saxons to his own right to the fealty of the native Scots; but the illegitimacy of Duncan is not necessarily to be inferred from the course pursued by Malcolm, for the ideas of that period about inheritance were not of the fixed and unvarying character which the custom of centuries has established in the present and preceding ages. The race of Alfred occupied the English throne to the exclusion of the children of his elder brother, nor did the descendants of the great king succeed in the lineal order of after-times. The claims of the Atheling were disregarded by the Saxon Harold, as well as by the Norman William; Robert was equally set aside by both his brothers; whilst Henry’s daughter, Matilda, was obliged to support her right to the crown by force of arms against the pretensions of her cousin the heir-male, himself a younger son. This uncertainty about the rightful heir will explain the care with which the kings of that age thought it necessary to secure the recognition of their successors during their own lifetime. The elder Henry assembled the magnates of his dominions to acknowledge the claims of his son William, and at a subsequent period those of his daughter Matilda; whilst his grandson, the first Plantagenet, celebrated in his own lifetime the coronation of his eldest son, a proceeding of which he lived most bitterly to repent. The name of David was associated, as the successor of the reigning monarch, with that of his brother Alexander in the grant to St. Andrews of the Cursus apri; that of the Scottish prince, Henry, is to be found in many charters as the heir-elect of his father; whilst the names of William the Lion, and of David of Huntingdon, are of frequent occurrence, under the same circumstances, as late as the commencement of the thirteenth century. In Scotland such a custom was peculiarly desirable, where the early usage, extending the right of election to the crown to every member of the royal family, rendered the nomination of a Tanist during the lifetime of the reigning sovereign a matter of absolute necessity, to prevent anarchy and confusion after his decease.

Three parties may be said to have divided Scotland at the period of Malcolm’s death. In the north, the partizans of the house of Moray, crushed by the decisive victory gained by the late king over Lulach’s son Malsnechtan, were in no condition to sustain the pretensions of any member of his family to the vacant throne. Along the eastern coast, and in the south, the supporters of the reigning family were divided between the national and foreign factions; the former composed of the hereditary adherents of the house of Atholl, mostly of pure Gaelic or of Scoto-British descent; the latter of the refugees from England, and probably of the descendants of the ancient Northumbrians of the Lothians. The influence of Margaret at her husband’s court, as well as motives of policy, had induced Malcolm to show especial favour to the countrymen of his queen, thus implanting the seeds of a bitter feeling of hostility in the breasts of many of the Scottish nobles at a line of conduct exhibiting, as they thought, an undue partiality for the Saxons and their innovations. The smothered enmity of the Scots blazed forth after the death of the king, and the haste and secrecy with which the body of the royal Margaret was removed by Ethelred to its last resting-place, discloses the existence amongst many of her contemporaries of a feeling of antipathy against the Saxon Queen, widely different from the enthusiastic veneration paid by their descendants to the memory of the Royal Saint.[185] The election of Donald Bane to his brother’s throne was the natural consequence of this wide-spread jealousy, A. D. 1093. as well as of a reactionary feeling in favour of the ancient national usage, according to which he was undoubtedly the rightful heir; and the immediate expulsion of the detested Saxons followed upon the triumph of the national party.[186]

The state of Scotland had not been unnoticed at the court of the English king, where Duncan appears to have resided, ever since the death of the Conqueror, in an equivocal position between a guest and a hostage. Brought from his native country at a very early age, he had imbibed the ideas of a feudal baron, and when Robert conferred upon him the honour of knighthood, after his liberation from his former captivity, the youthful knight preferred remaining at a court to which he was accustomed from his infancy, to returning to a country of which he knew but little, and where he may have feared a doubtful reception. Presenting himself before William, on learning the accession of his uncle, he requested the grant of his fathers kingdom, promising to hold it in fealty and allegiance in return for the king’s assistance. This was readily accorded on the terms of the petitioner; A.D. 1094. and when the return of spring favoured the march of an army, Duncan, placing himself at the head of a band of English and Norman auxiliaries, drove out his uncle Donald and took possession of the kingdom. The Scots appear to have been taken by surprise, for upon recovering from their first astonishment, they at once returned in sufficient force to overwhelm the followers of Duncan, putting most of them to the sword; but as their hostility was confined to the foreign soldiery, and they entertained no personal antipathy to a member of Malcolm’s family, they readily permitted Duncan to retain the crown on condition of introducing no more aliens into the country.[187]

The temporary success of Duncan appears to have thrown Donald Bane upon the support of a partizan of the northern faction, and he enlisted in his behalf the assistance of Malpeter MacLoen, the Mormaor of Mærne; whilst another party to his conspiracy for regaining the crown was Edmund, one of the surviving sons of Malcolm and Margaret, who was to be rewarded for his connivance in the death of his half-brother by sharing the royal power with his uncle Donald. Their intrigues were only too successful, and the treacherous slaughter of Duncan at Monachedin on the banks of the Bervie, where a rude stone still marks the supposed locality of his death, reinstated Donald, after an interval of six months, whilst the surviving followers of his murdered nephew were slain or driven from the kingdom.[188]

The second reign of Donald lasted without opposition for three years, but it would be impossible to say whether Edmund shared the throne, for a veil of mystery has been thrown over all his actions. During this period the remaining children of Malcolm were exiles from their native land, whilst William was occupied in fruitless wars with the Welsh, in reducing the too powerful de Mowbray of Northumberland, and in negotiating with his brother Robert the purchase of the duchy of Normandy. A. D. 1097. At length towards the close of the year in which the Saxon chronicler laments over “the grievous oppression of the people who were driven up from the country districts to London, to work at the wall they were building about the Tower, and the Bridge, and the King’s Hall at Westminster, whereby many perished,”[189] Edgar Atheling was dispatched to Scotland, and, after a severe struggle, he succeeded in placing his eldest nephew Edgar upon the throne, under similar conditions to the terms imposed upon Duncan.[190] Donald, falling into the victor’s power, was treated with the severity of a cruel age, and was sentenced to pass the remainder of his days, in blindness and in chains, at Roscolpie or Rescobie in Forfarshire; whilst his confederate Edmund, the only degenerate son of Malcolm and Margaret, seems to have adopted a course which saved his own life, and preserved the honour of the family. He expiated his crime by assuming the cowl at Montague, a Cluniac Priory in Somersetshire; and the honourable imprisonment of the princely monk in the retirement of a distant cloister, so effectually obliterated the recollection of his treason amongst the people of his native land, that a halo of peculiar sanctity gradually encircled his memory, and he was handed down to posterity as a man of more than ordinary holiness. Such a reputation must, for obvious reasons, have been favoured by the members of his family, and the saintly character attributed to Edmund may have been partly owing to the austerities of a repentance, which prompted his dying wish to be buried in chains.[191]

Edgar  1097–1107.

Hardly were the sons of Malcolm reinstated in their ancestral dominions,—for the autumn must have been far advanced before the army of the Atheling reached its destination,—when the western coasts of Scotland were threatened with a repetition of the early invasions of the Northmen.

From a very early period the whole of the islands along the western coasts of Scotland were favourite resorts of the Scandinavian Vikings, who established themselves amongst the scanty population of the Hebrides with far greater ease than upon the mainland. From the intermixture of the natives with the northern invaders, sprung the race to which the Irish annalists, and occasionally the Sagas, give the name of Gallgael, a horde of pirates plundering on their own account, and under their own leaders, when they were not following the banner of any of the greater sea-kings, whose fleets were powerful enough to sweep the western seas, and exact tribute from the lesser island chieftains. Man was from an early period the seat of the sovereignty of the Isles, which was long centred in the family of the Hy Ivar, lords of Dublin, and often kings or Jarls of Danish Northumbria. In the middle of the tenth century the Islands fell under the dominion of Eric Blodæxe, whose rivalry with Olave Sitricson weakened and divided the power of the Anglo Northmen; and after the death of Eric they were ruled by Magnus Haraldson and his family, the representatives of the elder Sitric, who appear to have been driven from Limerick, the early seat of that branch of the Hy Ivar. The exploits of this line of princes upon the coasts of Wales are continually to be met with in the Welsh and Irish chronicles of the period, but their title of Oirrigh is a proof that they were not independent, and they probably paid tribute to the head of their family at Dublin.

The united power of the Orkneys, the Islands, and the western coasts of Scotland, in addition to the Irish Norsemen, failed to avert the catastrophe of Clontarf, A. D. 1014. and the eleventh century opened upon the decline of the Hy Ivar. The personal energy of Thorfin, the great accession of territory resulting from his connection with Malcolm the Second, and the union of all the northern islands with his wide possessions on the mainland, enabled him to take advantage of their weakness; and if the Sagas are correct, in attributing to him a large Riki in Ireland, and in extending his dominion from Thurso Skerrey to Dublin, the Jarl of the Orkneys may have assumed the prerogatives of the earlier kings of Dublin, exacted tribute from their dependants, and become the acknowledged leader of the Scottish and Irish Northmen. During the ascendancy of Thorfin the Islands were for some time under the rule of a certain Gille, and of Suibne MacKenneth, A. D. 1034. names pointing to the Gaelic element amongst the Gallgael; and it is not unlikely that they owed their rise to the Jarl, and were amongst the earliest of the mainland chiefs of the Oirir-Gael who disputed the possessions of the Hebrides with the kings of Man.[192]

Towards the middle of the eleventh century Dermot MacMalnembo, lord of Hy Kinselagh and king of Leinster, was occupied in establishing the supremacy of his family throughout his native province; and entering the territory of the Dublin Norsemen, A. D. 1052. which was known as Fingal, in the year 1052, he ravaged the country up to the walls of their capital, driving out Eachmarcach, the son of Reginald, then the head of the race of Olave Sitricson, and establishing his dominion over the whole district and its inhabitants, whilst Eachmarcach fled from his enemy to Man. A. D. 1061. Nine years later, Murchad, the son of Dermot, following up the successes of his father, pursued Eachmarcach to his island retreat, wrested the sovereignty of the Islands from the race of Ivar, and rendered them tributary to the line of Leinster. Thorfin, whose ascendancy appears to have declined before this period, A. D. 1064. died soon after the transfer of the Islands to Dermot; and his two sons, escaping from the slaughter at Stamford Bridge, whither they had followed in the train of the king of Norway, returned to their northern home, A. D. 1066. and without dividing the possessions of their warlike father, passed a peaceful and inglorious existence as joint Jarls during the remaining thirty years of the century.[193]

Amongst the fugitives from Stamford Bridge was a son of Harald the Black of Iceland, Godfrey, surnamed Crovan or “the White Hand,” who found a hospitable reception in Man from another Godfrey who, at the time of his arrival, was king, or Oirrigh, of the island.[194] A. D. 1072. Six years after the arrival of the fugitive, Dermot of Leinster fell in battle, after raising the power of his province to the highest pitch, and uniting the supremacy over the whole of southern Ireland, with the dominion of the Isles and of “the Britons”—the inhabitants, apparently, of the Isle of Anglesey;[195] and three years later, upon the death of Godfrey of Dublin, the son of Eachmarcach and head of the race of Hy Ivar, Godfrey Crovan attempted to seize upon the Islands.[196] A. D. 1075. Twice was he defeated in his attacks upon Man; but refusing to be foiled, he determined upon risking a final effort, and with a fleet collected from the other islands, sailed up the river Selby by night, landed his forces, and concealed a body of three hundred men amongst the wooded sides of a neighbouring hill called Skeafell. As soon as it was light, the Manxmen, perceiving the enemy whom they had already twice defeated, assembled to give him battle, and attacked with headlong confidence, heedless of the ambuscade, which fell upon them in the heat of the engagement with decisive and fatal effect. They turned and fled precipitately; but finding on arriving at the river that the stream was unfordable, for the tide was then at its height, throwing down their arms they begged for mercy from the conqueror; and as his object was attained by their submission, he put an immediate stop to the slaughter. His next step was to reward his confederates the Islesmen, to whom he offered the choice of remaining and appropriating the island, or of plundering it and returning to their homes; and as the latter course was most congenial to his allies, the property of the Manxmen was delivered over to their mercy. Many of the Islesmen, however, consented subsequently to remain behind, and they were settled by Godfrey in the south of the island, around his own immediate residence, whilst the earlier Norse population was confined to the north, a division which can long be traced in the little kingdom; and the conqueror assuming to himself, as usual, the sole right of property in his dominions, the Manxmen lost their Odal privileges in the same manner as the Orkneymen had been deprived of theirs, from the time of the first Einar, to the days of Sigurd Lodverson.[197]

Godfrey Crovan was of a character to afford his new subjects frequent opportunities of repairing the losses incurred through the pillage of the Islesmen; and he soon extended his conquests over the Irish Norsemen, capturing Dublin, A. D. 1078. and retaining his supremacy for sixteen years, until he was driven out by Murketagh O’Brien, whose family appear to have made more than one attempt subsequently upon Man.[198] His pre-eminence in the same quarter was also disputed by the surviving sons of Eachmarcach; but they perished in a fruitless effort to vindicate their rights, A. D. 1087. and from the date of this failure the descendants of Ragnar Lodbroc never again rose above the rank of subordinate Oirrighs of Dublin.[199] In the year after he was expelled from his Irish conquests, Godfrey died of a pestilence in the Isle of Isla, A. D. 1095 leaving three sons to inherit his dominions. His great power was based upon his fleet, and to prevent any rivalry upon the seas he is said to have forbidden the Scots—the inhabitants apparently of the western coasts and the Galwegians—to build any vessel requiring more than “three bolts” in its construction.[200]

Such was the condition of the Islands when Magnus Olaveson sailed with a powerful fleet from Norway, A. D. 1098. purposing to re-enact the part of Harald Harfager, and establish the rights of the Norwegian crown over the western conquests of his predecessor. First touching at the Orkneys, he seized upon the two Jarls, and dispatching them in safe custody to Norway, carried off their sons as hostages, placing his own son Sigurd over the Jarldom; though, as the new Jarl was a mere child, the real authority was vested in his council. The king then steered for the Hebrides, rapine and slaughter marking his course, and the flames of the crops and houses which he burnt lighting up his onward career. Some of the Islesmen escaped to the mainland of Scotland; others fled further and sought a refuge in Ireland—for the Norwegian fleet was far too powerful to be resisted with any hope of success by the scattered population of the islands—whilst the least scrupulous, or the most insignificant, escaping with life by submitting to Magnus, swelled the number of his followers, and repaired their own losses by relentlessly pillaging their neighbours. Among the unsuccessful fugitives was Godfrey’s eldest son Lagman, who, before he could escape to Ireland, was surprised amongst the northern Hebrides, and captured off Skye, after a vain attempt to baffle his pursuers amongst the islands. In one feature alone was the expedition of Magnus distinguished from the incursions of his heathen ancestors—the sanctity of Iona was respected. The king is reported to have landed on the sacred island, and opening the door of St. Columba’s Church, to have hastily drawn back, forbidding any of his attendants to enter, and departing immediately after granting peace and immunity to the inhabitants. None ever knew whether a vision had appeared to the king, but his clemency was limited to the hallowed island of Columba, nor was the sword of the destroyer stayed in any other quarter.

At length Magnus arrived at Man, where the inhabitants were in no condition to resist his attack, as they had already wasted their strength in a sanguinary contest between the northern and southern clans near Sandwith—Ottir and MacMaras, the rival leaders, both falling in the course of the battle. At once recognising the importance of the island for retaining his western conquests, he ordered the immediate construction of several wooden forts, built in the usual manner of the age; procuring timber for this purpose from the opposite shores of Galloway, and forcing the Galwegians to convey supplies to Man, and to join in labouring at the entrenchments. From Man he crossed to Anglesey, ravaging the country, exacting tribute from the people, and killing Hugh, Earl of Shrewsbury, who attempted to oppose his descent; whilst he could now boast at the extreme limits of his expedition of having extended his conquests further to the southward than any of his predecessors upon the throne of Norway.

Magnus was occupied during the ensuing winter amongst the Sudreys, or Southern Hebrides, in securing the conquests of the preceding summer and in arranging a treaty with the Scottish king, who is said by some authorities to have admitted the pretensions of the Norwegian monarch to the whole of the islands in the western seas. To such an arrangement (if it were ever made) Edgar could have offered no valid objection, as the majority of the islands could hardly be said, at this time, to have ever been included amongst the dependencies of the Scottish crown. It is further stated that the king of Norway established his claim to his new possessions by sailing round each of them separately; and he is even said to have been dragged across the isthmus at Loch Tarbert in a boat, with his hand upon the tiller, in order to include Cantyre amongst the islands—a story probably invented at a later period to account for the severance of that district from the mainland possessions of the Oirir Gael, and its lengthened occupation by the Gallgael in dependence on the Norsemen and their kings.[201]

A.D. 1099

Magnus returned to Norway in the following summer, leaving Sigurd in his new Iarldom; and he was occupied during the next three years in warring against the Swedes, until peace was concluded, and cemented by his marriage with a daughter of the Swedish king Inge. But his former successes amongst the Hebrides had inflamed him with the desire of further conquests in the same quarter, and hardly had he ratified his alliance with Sweden before he again fitted out a fleet, to be directed on this occasion against the Irish coasts. A. D. 1102. Murketagh O’Brien, collecting the men of Munster and Leth-Mogh, prepared to oppose the invasion; but an arrangement was soon effected between the kings, by which the daughter of Murketagh was given to Sigurd Magnusson, whilst the claims of that prince upon the allegiance of the Dublin Norsemen were probably supported by the Irish king.[202]

A. D. 1103.

Magnus passed the ensuing winter in Ireland, assisting his new allies the Munstermen against their rivals, the northern Hy Nial, and remaining until the following August, when he prepared to return to Norway, and lay off the coast of Ulster awaiting a supply of cattle for victualling his ships, promised by Murketagh O’Brien. The disastrous defeat of the latter prince by the northern Hy Nial, early in the same month, may have prevented or delayed the dispatch of the cattle; and Magnus disembarked with a body of his men, both to ascertain the fate of the scouts whom he had already sent out, and to victual his fleet with the necessary supplies at the expense of the men of Uladh. Whilst thus employed he gradually became entangled amongst the neighbouring morasses; and his retreat to the ships being intercepted by the Ulstermen, who flocked in numbers towards the spot, he fell, with many of his followers,—through the cowardice or treachery of one of his principal officers,—in a fruitless attempt to open a path through the increasing numbers of the foe. On hearing the tidings of his death, the fleet, weighing anchor, sailed immediately for Norway, touching at the Orkneys, and taking on board Sigurd, who relinquished his Irish princess and his island kingdom to claim a share of his father’s dominions, when all the conquests of Magnus reverted to their original possessors; though the Jarls of the Orkneys, and the lords of the Western Islands long continued, whenever it suited their purpose, to rank themselves amongst the feudatories of the Norwegian crown.[203]

With the exception of the expedition of Magnus Olaveson, the nine years of Edgar’s reign seem to have been absolutely devoid of interest, the total absence of event which distinguishes this period arising probably from the personal character of the king. Of a gentle and inoffensive nature, much resembling the Confessor, in his faults perhaps as well as in his virtues, he provoked neither external hostility from his ambition, nor internal revolt from his oppression; whilst the marriage of his sister Matilda with the English Henry, must have tended materially to strengthen his authority, by overawing the turbulent spirits who otherwise might have presumed upon his indolent disposition. He appears to have cultivated the alliance of the Irish king Murketagh, who, from Edgar’s present of a camel, may have aimed at resembling Henry of England in his partiality for rare animals.[204] In imitation of the pious liberality of both his parents, he founded the priory of Coldingham, granting it to the monks of Durham; thus exhibiting his partiality for his mother’s country, and perhaps, also, his attachment to her ancient confessor Turgot, the friend of his own early youth, A. D. 1107. who at this time was prior of the monastery of Durham.[205] Upon the 8th of January 1107, Edgar sunk into an early grave, with his latest breath bequeathing the appanage of Scottish Cumbria to his youngest brother David; not only as a testimony of personal regard for his favourite brother, but as an acknowledgment of the valuable assistance which he had derived, during his contest for the crown, from the intelligence and sagacity of that able and politic prince.[206]

Alexander the First  1107–1124.

Widely different in character from his peaceful and indolent predecessor was the next king who filled the throne of Scotland. To a purity of life, a fondness for the devotional exercises and austerities of the age, and a reverential demeanour towards the clergy—qualities which he inherited from his mother—Alexander united the high courage and warlike bearing of his father; whilst his own restless ambition and indomitable will involved him in continual contests throughout his reign, and earned for him the appellation of the Fierce. In many points he resembled his sister the queen of England; and the same lavish generosity towards strangers, with the same somewhat ostentatious display of charity in feeding, clothing, and washing the feet of the poor, to which “the Scottish Esther” (as she is sometimes called) in vain endeavoured to incite her youthful brother David, formed in Alexander a striking contrast to his haughty and imperious bearing towards the great body of his subjects. Naturally viewing with a jealous eye the dismemberment of his kingdom for the advantage of his younger brother, he refused at first to carry out the bequest of Edgar until David threatened to support his rights by the sword; when the fear of the mail-clad auxiliaries, whom the long residence and popularity of the Earl at his sister’s court would have enabled him to call to his aid, at length extorted from Alexander a tardy and reluctant recognition of his brother’s claims upon Scottish Cumbria.[207]

The effects of the new king’s determination to enforce submission to his will, soon became apparent in a simultaneous rising of the ancient enemies of his family, who must have recovered much of their former power during the anarchy and confusion resulting upon the death of Malcolm the Third. Donald Bane was perhaps indebted to the crown for their support, and his immediate successor was not of a disposition to curb the increasing independence of his powerful and refractory Mormaors; but Alexander, accustomed to the ideas of feudalism with which he had become acquainted at the English court, was deterred by no fear of consequences from exacting a very different species of obedience from that which had satisfied the peaceful Edgar; and his measures for controlling the disaffection of his subjects resulted, before long, in a rebellion in the north.

The conspirators laid their plans with secrecy, and the men of Moray and Mærne marched in haste to the south, in the hope of surprising Alexander, and repeating the catastrophe of his brother Duncan. The king was holding his court at Invergowrie—a residence to which he always exhibited a marked partiality, as he had enjoyed the earldom of the district from a very early period—when he received intelligence of the near approach of his enemies, and with the prompt vigour of his character, hesitated not an instant in confronting the danger, his bold advance so daunting the conspirators that they turned and fled for the mountains. Thither he followed without delay, so closely pressing the pursuit that he swept through the northern earldoms without opposition, until he reached the boundaries of Ross, where his opponents were occupied in gathering their whole strength upon the opposite shores of the Moray Firth. It was evidently their intention to dispute the passage of the Firth, and to attack the army of the king whilst engaged in crossing; but again anticipating their purpose, he reached the point of passage, known as the Stockford, when it was high tide, plunged at once into the stream, and crossing with his mounted followers in safety, advanced upon the enemy before they could escape to mountain or morass, and inflicted such a slaughter upon their surprised and bewildered masses, that all disposition to revolt against his rule was stifled in the blood of his opponents—his stern and sanguinary vengeance upon this occasion earning for him the title of the Fierce. The Monastery of Scone is supposed to have owed its erection to the pious gratitude of Alexander for his speedy and triumphant success; and in the foundation-charter of that ancient Abbey, the name of Heth, Earl of Moray, stands prominently forward amongst the other Gaelic Mormaors, who were assembled in dutiful attendance at the court of their lord the Scottish king.[208]

This reign was destined to become the era of the first collision between the ecclesiastical and secular powers in Scotland. The last known Gaelic or Culdee bishop of St. Andrews was Fothadh, who died in the same year as Malcolm Ceanmore,[209] the see remaining vacant during the three succeeding reigns; but when Alexander ascended the throne, he immediately determined upon appointing a bishop, who would be ready to carry out the views upon religious subjects in which all the family of Malcolm Ceanmore had been educated by their Anglo-Saxon mother. Accordingly, in the first year of his reign he selected Turgot to fill the vacant see of St. Andrews; but a difficulty, upon which he had scarcely calculated, awaited him at the very outset of his undertaking.

Ever since the time when Bruno, Bishop of Toul, yielding (according to the general opinion) to the advice of Hildebrand, Prior of Clugny, relinquished the Papal insignia with which he had been invested by the Emperor, and entered Italy in the garb of a pilgrim to abide by the election of the Roman clergy, it had been the aim of the ambitious churchman, whose master-mind is supposed to have directed the Papal policy for a quarter of a century before he occupied the Pontifical Chair, not only to emancipate the church from all dependence upon royal authority, but to establish her dominion, as a temporal power, over the whole extent of Christendom. The name of the Emperor disappeared from Papal bulls; the titles of Apostolic Bishop and of Pope were declared to belong to the occupant of St. Peter’s Chair alone; Archbishops were appointed Metropolitans over other primates in spite of all opposition; and Metropolitans were instituted without consulting their clergy, solely by the force of Papal bulls;[210] measures calculated to extinguish the remnants of independence in national churches, and to place the whole Christian hierarchy at the disposal of the sole and absolute will of the Pope. Whilst the clergy were thus to be reduced to a dependent body, animated by the soul of one man, and carrying out his vast schemes for temporal authority throughout the kingdoms of the world, the secular power was attacked in more ways than one. The right of granting kingdoms, and of releasing subjects from their allegiance, was both claimed and exercised; Sicily was conferred upon the Norman Guiscard; fealty was demanded from the conqueror of England;[211] Spain and Hungary were claimed as Papal fiefs, and even the distant Russian received his dukedom from the hands of the Bishop of Rome. It was then also that the notorious Donation of Constantine first saw the light, and the Papal claims to universal dominion were supported by apocryphal documents, supposed to exist amongst the archives of Rome.[212] But the great struggle was about the right of Investiture, or of granting the Ring and Pastoral staff to a newly made bishop, in token of his appointment.[213]

From the period when Christianity became the recognised religion of the Roman empire, the head of the state participated in the nomination of bishops, who were supposed to be chosen by their flock, approved of and consecrated by their fellow clergy, and confirmed in their appointment by their temporal ruler. The voice of the people had long been silenced, on account of the disgraceful tumults and outrages so frequently occurring at the election of bishops, when instead of a little band of devout believers purified by the test of persecution, the flock was composed of the licentious rabble of a city. The voice of the clergy was intended by the policy of Hildebrand to become a mere echo of the Lateran; and the voice of the ruler of the state to be no more heard except in liege acquiescence. The conduct of the princes of that era afforded ample scope to Hildebrand for appearing in the character of a reformer of the abuses of the age, for as the elections of bishops by the popular voice had too often degenerated into scenes of tumult and factious violence, so in the hands of princes they had become but too frequently mere mercantile transactions. Bishoprics and abbacies were either openly bestowed upon the highest bidder, or were suffered to remain vacant for years that their revenues might be appropriated to purposes of private emolument; and too many of the superior clergy were very ready to profit by an abuse which opened an easy access to the high places of the church, to those whose profligacy would otherwise have barred their advance to preferment of which they were utterly unworthy. Had the policy of Hildebrand been directed simply to the correction of such abuses, and to the establishment or restoration of a discipline which he deemed essential, its motives would have been high and holy; but it is only too evident that earthly ambition was the ruling principle of a mind elevated above the meaner vices of the age, and that the reforms which he advocated served as a cloak for promoting with unscrupulous energy that temporal aggrandizement of the Papal See, which attained its culminating point when Innocent the Third proclaimed himself “less than God, but more than man, God’s Christ, and Pharoah’s God.”[214]

With the influx of foreign clergy after the Conquest, the system of Hildebrand penetrated into England, and its effects soon became apparent, nearly every bishop rushing into a contest with the neighbouring prelates about the rights, privileges, or possessions of his see. Canterbury claimed jurisdiction over all the British Isles in virtue of the Bull of Gregory the Great to Augustine; and York asserted ecclesiastical supremacy over Scotland on account of the signature of Wilfrith at the council of Rome, and the short episcopate of Trumwin over the Picts. When, therefore, Alexander requested the Archbishop of York to consecrate Turgot, he was met by a claim to the canonical obedience of the Scottish bishops, to which he was by no means inclined to submit. The difficulty was set aside for the time by Henry of England, who desired the Archbishop of York to perform the necessary ceremonies, reserving the rights of both churches for future discussion;[215] when Anselm of Canterbury wrote to forbid the proceeding, as he had not yet consecrated Thomas of York, who had hitherto evaded all profession of canonical obedience.[216] But this second difficulty was shortly removed by the death of Anselm; and soon afterwards, the Archbishop of York, and the Bishop of St. Andrews, A. D. 1109. were both consecrated on the same day by the Bishop of London.[217]

Differences quickly arose between the king and Turgot, and though it is impossible to state their nature with precision, they were probably connected with the opposite views entertained by Alexander, and the bishop, upon the necessity of immediately remodelling the state of the Scottish church. At length the latter requested permission to proceed to Rome for the purpose of laying his case before the Pope; but Alexander steadily refused his sanction to a journey of which he was far too sagacious not to foresee the consequences; A. D. 1115. and Turgot only obtained license to retire to his former residence in the monastery of Durham, where he fell ill and died in 1115.[218]

Alexander determined that the next bishop should be chosen from the province of Canterbury, in the hope of evading the claims of York through the opposing pretensions of the rival see; but although he wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury to this effect soon after the death of Turgot, several years elapsed before he finally requested that a monk of the name of Eadmer, A. D. 1120. who had been much in the confidence of Anselm, should be sent to undertake the office of Bishop of St. Andrews. Released from his allegiance to the English king, and from his canonical obedience to the see of Canterbury, the new bishop was duly installed in his diocese;[219] but Alexander soon found that “he had gained nothing in seeking for a bishop out of Canterbury,” for it would appear to have been the especial object of Eadmer to exalt the See of Canterbury by reducing the Bishop of St. Andrews to the subordinate situation of a suffragan of the English Metropolitan, in which he was steadily opposed by Alexander,[220] who showed the same determination in refusing permission to Eadmer to retire to Canterbury in the capacity of Bishop of St. Andrews, as he had previously evinced in opposing the departure of Turgot to Rome. The English prelate was warned by the Bishop of Glasgow that he had to deal with a prince of inflexible resolution, and that unless he yielded the points in dispute, or relinquished the ring and crozier, thereby surrendering up the bishopric, he would neither be able to live in peace within the limits of the kingdom, nor would he be permitted to cross its boundaries. Eadmer, at length giving way, resigned his bishopric and retired to Canterbury; consoling himself with the thought that the investiture of the ring, which he had received from Alexander, had lost its spiritual efficacy by passing through the hands of a layman.[221]

A. D. 1122.

Eighteen months of retirement and the advice of his friends, who reminded him, with justice, that it was his duty to maintain the rights and liberties of the church and kingdom in which he had accepted the office of bishop, rather than to find suffragans for York, or promote the claims of Canterbury,[222] wrought an alteration in the opinions of Eadmer; and he wrote submissively to Alexander, urging his claims to be reinstated in the see of St. Andrews, and adding these remarkable words, which at once place in view the real objects of the dispute—“I entreat you not to believe that I wish to derogate in any way from the liberty or dignity of the Scottish kingdom; since if you still persist in retaining your opinion about your former demands in respect of the King of England, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the sacerdotal Benediction (an opinion with which I would not then concur, from entertaining ideas which, I have since learnt, were erroneous), you shall find that I will no longer differ from your views, nor will I let these questions separate me from God’s service, and from your love, that in all things I may follow out your will.”[223] But it was now too late; A. D. 1123. Alexander was inexorable; and at the close of the following year he appointed Robert Prior of Scone to fill the see, which he persisted in looking upon as vacant by the voluntary resignation of Eadmer.[224]

The contest thus maintained by Alexander against the pretensions of the English Metropolitans extended to the diocese of Glasgow, in which a bishopric had been re-established by Earl David shortly after the death of Turgot. The earl had appointed his own tutor John to the see; but the bishop-elect, terrified at his unruly flock, and shrinking from the laborious, and perhaps dangerous, undertaking of introducing amongst them the remodelled Roman discipline, fairly fled from the country; though he was subsequently consecrated by Pope Paschal, and sent back to his diocese, where he remained till the return of Thorstein, Archbishop of York, to England.[225] By a judicious line of policy towards the Papal court, and by the essential services which he contrived to render to the cause of Henry in Normandy, Thorstein had been enabled to triumph over the opposition of Canterbury, and he now summoned the Bishop of Glasgow to acknowledge his canonical dependance upon the see of York, A. D. 1122. suspending him from his sacred office on his refusal.[226] John appealed to Rome, but as the archbishop was then in high favour, his cause does not appear to have prospered, and he removed to Jerusalem, where he remained some months with the Patriarch, occasionally exercising his episcopal functions until he was recalled by the Pope and sent back to his diocese; A. D. 1123. the dispute between the two churches remaining undecided until many years afterwards, when Glasgow was liberated from the claims of York, and declared to be in direct dependance upon the see of Rome.[227]

Towards the close of his reign Alexander lost his queen Sibylla, a natural daughter of the English king, of whom little is known, and—if the account of a contemporary writer is to be trusted—that little is not to her advantage, for her personal deficiencies were not redeemed by the presence of moral virtues. She died suddenly at Loch Tay, in the course of 1122, and within two years she was followed to the grave by her husband, A. D. 1124 who expired on the 25th of April 1124, whilst still in the vigour of manhood.[228]

It would be unreasonable to estimate the little that Alexander was enabled to accomplish by the standard of his younger brother’s success in following out a similar line of policy. Both brothers endeavoured to assimilate their dominions to the feudal monarchies of the age, and to introduce amongst their clergy the revised system of the Roman Church; but the elder had greater difficulties to contend against, with fewer advantages in his favour. The dismemberment of his kingdom by the separation of Scottish Cumbria must have materially diminished his power; and had not Alexander died without an heir, the impolitic bequest of Edgar might have been fraught with most disastrous consequences to Scotland. The principality of David must inevitably, in course of time, have become dependant upon one of the greater kingdoms by which it was surrounded; it could only have existed by skilfully promoting disunion between its more powerful neighbours; and it is more than probable that it would have eventually been annexed to the greater kingdom, and been held by his descendants as a fief of the English crown. The marked separation existing between the dominions of the two brothers during the lifetime of the elder, is best ascertained by a reference to the charters of the period. The dignitaries at the court of Alexander were exclusively, Gaelic Mormaors—Earls of Moray, Fife, Atholl, and Strathearn, and other native magnates of similar origin—the grandsons of the Northumbrian Cospatric, ancestor of the Earls of March and Dunbar; Edward the Constable, the son of Siward Beorn—in short, the nobility of ancient Alban and the Lothians; whilst around Earl David gathered Moreville and Somerville, Lindsay and Umphraville, Bruce and Fitz-Alan, Norman names destined to surround the throne of his descendants, two of them to become royal, and all to shed a lustre upon the feudal chivalry of Scotland.[229]

Alexander may have attempted to enforce, by resolute will, the changes and alterations which were only carried out by David through an union of consummate tact and policy; and it may have been to this part of the king’s conduct that Ailred alludes when he describes him as “endeavouring to compass things beyond his power;” for he was evidently of a disposition to frame his policy, rather according to the dictates of his own will, than to his ability to carry it out. He achieved enough, however, to entitle him to be remembered as the first king who essayed to place Scotland on a footing with the feudal states of Western Europe; for Edgar left his kingdom much as he found it—his very bequest of Cumbria, as an absolute property, was totally at variance with the policy of either Saxon or Norman—and the innovations of Margaret were confined to the court and the clergy.[230] The laws and customs of the Gaelic people remained undisturbed in her days, and her ideas of ecclesiastical reform were widely different from those of Hildebrand, of whose system the church of her native country, at the time she quitted it, was ignorant.

But the grant of the Cursus Apri made by Alexander to St. Andrews—a grant which must be regarded, not so much in the light of an original donation, as of a restoration to the church of the lands which had been alienated to the royal family in their capacity of Cowarbs, or hereditary abbots of the old monastic establishment—was, unquestionably, the earliest step towards remodelling the Scottish church, though the king’s intentions were frustrated by his dissensions with Turgot and Eadmer, and he died before the consecration of Robert, Prior of Scone, the last bishop whom he appointed. He was the first king also to introduce beyond the Forth the custom of confirming grants by charter, in place of the outward forms and ceremonies by which, in an earlier state of society, such gifts were invariably accompanied; though upon the occasion of his restitution of the Cursus Apri all the ancient formalities were observed. The great feudal office of Constable is also first traceable in this reign, and to the same king may be attributed the earliest introduction of the sheriffdom—for the Vicecomes is to be met with in some of his charters. Alexander may therefore be said to have laid the first stone of the social edifice which David raised from the foundation; though many a year was fated to elapse, and more than one generation was destined to pass away, before the system inaugurated by the sons of Malcolm Ceanmore, was effectually established throughout the whole extent of their dominions.

CHAPTER VIII.

David the First  1124–1153.

The death of Alexander, without heirs, reunited to the Scottish kingdom the appanage of Cumbria, which had been so unwisely severed from it by Edgar; and the last surviving son of Malcolm and Margaret, the rightful heir by ancient Gaelic custom as well as by feudal law, ascended the throne without dispute. An intimate connection with the Court of England for upwards of a quarter of a century, had effectually “rubbed off the Scottish rust” from David,—to use the words of the contemporary Malmesbury,—converting him into a feudal baron; and many years before he was called upon to fill the throne, he had gathered around him in his Cumbrian principality a body of knights and barons, from whom sprung the older Norman chivalry of Scotland. During his residence in the south he married Matilda, the widow of Simon de St. Liz and heiress of Earl Waltheof of Northumberland, a portion of whose vast estates had been conferred upon each of her husbands in succession—St. Liz having been created Earl of Northampton, whilst the Honour of Huntingdon was granted to the Scottish prince; but the great earldom of Northumberland was retained in the Crown, for after the forfeiture of Robert de Mowbray, the English kings were jealous of intrusting that important province out of their own hands.[231] The sole offspring of the second marriage of Matilda was an only son, to whom his parents gave the name of Henry, born about ten years before the accession of his father to the throne of Scotland.

David was the first of his family who united the character of an English baron to that of a Scottish king; and in the former capacity he was soon called upon to exercise the political sagacity through which he had reaped the reward of the appanage of Cumbria, which he held during the lifetime of his brother Alexander. Upon the death of Henry the Fifth of Germany, the English king, despairing of any male heir from his second marriage, determined upon adopting as his successor his daughter Alicia, who fifteen years before had been betrothed, whilst a mere child, to the deceased Emperor. The princess, it is said, was reluctant to leave a country in which she had resided since her infancy, and where she still enjoyed vast possessions with the title of Empress; but she had become a necessary instrument for furthering the views of her father, and he turned a deaf ear to the entreaties of the princes of Lombardy and Lorraine, whose desire to retain their Empress interfered with the tenor of his policy. The assistance of the Scottish king was early sought to join in securing the succession to his sister’s child, and he passed a whole year in England in concerting measures for this purpose. In the great council of London, to which every baron of note was summoned, David was the first to swear fealty to his niece,—who now, like her mother, had assumed the popular name of Matilda—as heiress of the kingdom in which he held the Honour of Huntingdon; and it was by his advice that the unfortunate Robert Curtois was removed from the custody of the bishop of Salisbury, and placed in Bristol Castle under the safer charge of the Earl of Gloucester: A. D. 1226. for the fears of Henry were at this time directed against Robert and his son William, nor did he harbour any suspicion of his frank and jovial nephew, Stephen of Boulogne, upon whom he had heaped honours and dignities in return for his gallant services in war.[232]

The feudal obligations of his English fief, and his anxiety to promote the interests of the future queen, led to the frequent and prolonged absence of David from his own kingdom at this period of his reign, offering many favourable opportunities for the inveterate enemies of his family to enter once more upon a struggle for the superiority. Heth the contemporary, and possibly the opponent of Alexander, was no longer living, but his hereditary animosity survived in his sons Angus and Malcolm, who availed themselves of one occasion when David was detained in England, A. D. 1130. about six years after his accession, to rise in arms and assert those claims upon the crown of Scotland which they inherited through their mother, the daughter of Lulach.[233] In the absence of the king, the leader of the royal forces was the Constable, and the safety of the kingdom now depended upon Edward, the first historical personage upon whom the dignity is known to have been conferred, and the son of that Siward Beorn who accompanied the Atheling into Scotland. Edward in this crisis proved himself to be worthy of the trust, and meeting the Moraymen at the entrance of one of the passes into the Lowlands of Forfarshire, overthrew them with a loss of four thousand men at Stickathrow, not far from the northern Esk—Angus the Earl, or as the Irish annalists call him, the king of Moray, being left amongst the dead, though Malcolm the other brother, escaping from the field, prolonged the struggle amidst the recesses of the remoter Highlands, and the contest was not brought to a conclusion until four years later.[234] A. D. 1134. The prestige of the Moray Mormaors was still very great throughout the northern and north-western Highlands, and as many of the national party, even though partisans of the reigning family, viewed with jealousy the increasing influence of “foreigners,” and the introduction of laws and customs against which they entertained a rooted antipathy, as long as a descendant of Kenneth Mac Duff remained at large, claiming to be the representative of one of their ancient line of kings, his standard became a dangerous rallying point both for open enemies and disaffected friends. David, seriously alarmed, besought the assistance of the barons of Yorkshire and Northumberland, who answering to his call with alacrity, the flower of the northern counties speedily assembled at Carlisle under the banner of Walter Espec. The numbers and equipment of these Anglo-Norman auxiliaries, with the rumour of a vast fleet with which the Scottish king intended to prosecute the war to extremity amongst the island fastnesses of the western chieftains, filled the supporters of Malcolm with such dismay, that, in the hope of atoning for their disaffection towards the king by treachery to his unfortunate rival, Mac Heth was surprised by a body of his own partisans, and delivered into the hands of David. He was at once dispatched as a prisoner to the castle of Roxburgh, and David, in the full determination of eradicating every trace of his enemies from the district in which they had so long ruled supreme, declared the whole earldom of Moray forfeited to the Crown, regranting great portions of it to knights of foreign extraction, or to native Scots upon whose fidelity he could depend. The confiscation of their hereditary patrimony struck a death blow at the power of the great Moray family, and more than one Scottish name of note dates its first rise from the ruin of the senior branch of that ancient and far descended race.[235]

Four more years had barely passed away before David was destined to meet, in hostile array, the very men upon whose assistance he had relied against his formidable adversary Malcolm Mac Heth. Upon the 1st of December 1135, died Henry the First of England, A. D. 1135. bequeathing with his latest breath the whole of his dominions to his daughter the Empress Queen. His spirit had hardly passed away before Stephen, arriving suddenly in England, gained over to his cause Roger, Bishop of Salisbury, the most favoured and confidential friend of Henry, and William du Pont de l’Arche, who was joint keeper, with the Bishop, of the immense wealth accumulated in the coffers of the late king; and as the possession of the royal treasure in those days was the surest means of opening a path to the throne, before the year was ended Stephen was crowned king of England without opposition. The Earl of Gloucester, whose unsuccessful contest for precedency with the new king, when they both swore fealty to Matilda, had strengthened his devotion to the cause of the latter, was still in Normandy with his sister; but of all the other barons and prelates who pledged their faith to support the Empress Queen in her claim upon her father’s throne, none proved mindful of his oath save her uncle the king of Scotland.

No sooner had intelligence of the death of Henry reached Scotland, than aware of the necessity for promptitude, David led an army across the frontier, and at the very moment of Stephen’s coronation in London, the Scottish king was receiving the allegiance of the northern barons in behalf of his royal niece. Carlisle and Norham, Werk, Alnwick, and Newcastle, in short all the border fortresses beyond the Tyne, with the exception of Bamborough, opened their gates at his appearance, and he had advanced far into the territory of St. Cuthbert, upon his route to Durham, when he was anticipated by the approach of a numerous army under Stephen. A.D. 1136. No time could have been lost by that prince in collecting his forces, as upon the 5th of February, little more than six weeks after his coronation, he marched into Durham. David retired upon Newcastle, and the two kings remained in a hostile attitude for another fortnight before a conference was arranged, at which conditions of peace were finally agreed upon. The Scottish king, still true to his oath, refused to hold any fiefs of Stephen; but Carlisle and Doncaster were conferred upon his son Henry, in addition to the Honour of Huntingdon, with a promise that the claims of the prince upon Northumberland, in right of his maternal ancestry, should be taken into consideration if the English king ever regranted that earldom. Peace was concluded upon these terms; all the castles surrendered to David were restored with the exception of Carlisle; and Henry, after performing homage at York for his English fiefs, accompanied Stephen upon his return to the south.[236]

Advancing years, and a disposition naturally pliant and easy, are the reasons assigned by a contemporary historian for the acquiescence of David in the usurpation of Stephen; but however willing he might have been to support the cause of his niece Matilda, he must naturally have shrunk from sustaining the whole weight of a contest, in which he alone was in arms in her behalf. Nor must it be forgotten, that the wife of Stephen was equally a daughter of one of David’s sisters; and however the approach of age may have increased his aversion to war, it had hardly yet diminished his characteristic sagacity, as he was undoubtedly a gainer by the conditions of the peace.[237]

The event, as it proved, frustrated the intentions of both parties. Stephen, when he held his court in London at Easter, assigned the place of honour, upon his right hand, to his guest the Scottish prince; an arrangement which so excited the jealousy of some of the English barons, more especially of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and of Ranulf Earl of Chester—the latter of whom had claims upon Carlisle and Cumberland—that, after openly expressing their discontent in the presence of Henry, they left the court in a body. Incensed at this unprovoked insult to his son, David recalled him from England; and though Henry was repeatedly summoned by Stephen to perform his feudal obligations, he was not permitted by his father to return to the south.[238]

A. D. 1137.

The absence of Stephen in Normandy, in the following year, afforded David a favourable opportunity of avenging the indignity offered to his son, and of forwarding, at the same time, the interests of his niece Matilda. Already an army was collected to cross the Borders, and the barons of the north of England were assembled at Newcastle to repel the invasion, when Thorstein, the aged archbishop of York, by his intercession with both parties, obtained a promise from the Scottish king to abstain from hostilities until Advent, by which time it was expected that Stephen would have returned from the Continent. Shortly before Christmas, therefore, a Scottish embassy arrived at the English court, charged to declare the truce at an end unless Prince Henry was placed in immediate possession of Northumberland; and as this abrupt demand for the earldom was all but tantamount to a declaration of war, Stephen, who had just concluded a peace for two years with Geoffrey of Anjou, and was consequently in a position to concentrate all his energies upon establishing his power at home, at once declined to listen to the proposal; and his refusal to comply with the conditions of David led to an immediate rupture with Scotland.[239]

A. D. 1138.

Upon the 10th of January 1138 the advance guard of the Scottish army, under the command of William Fitz-Duncan the king’s nephew, crossed the Borders, and attempted to surprise Werk Castle before daylight; but, failing in their object, they wasted the surrounding country until the arrival of the main body under David and his son Henry, when a regular siege was commenced with all the engineering appliances of the age. The castle was the property of Walter Espec, and so gallantly was it defended by his nephew, Jordan de Bussy, that, before long, the king, converting the siege into a blockade, marched with the remainder of his army to effect a junction with William Fitz-Duncan, whom he had already dispatched to lay waste the remainder of Northumberland; and once more the northern counties endured a repetition of the scenes of horror enacted, nearly seventy years before, in the early days of the Conqueror. David, who had been long preparing for war, had gathered his army from every quarter of his dominions; and around the royal standard, the ancient Dragon of Wessex, might be seen the representatives of nearly every race contributing to form the varied ancestry of the modern Scottish people. The Norman knight and the Low Country “Reiter,” the sturdy Angle and the fiery Scot, marched side by side with the men of Northumberland and Cumberland, of Lothian and of Teviotdale; whilst the mixed population of the distant islands, Norwegians from the Orkneys, and the wild Picts of Galloway, flocked in crowds to the banner of their king, to revel in the plunder of the south.[240] The Galwegians, an unruly host of tributary allies rather than of subjects, claimed to march in the van, and a piteous account of their ravages, and enormities, has been left on record by the contemporary chroniclers of Hexham. It was only by a great exertion of authority, that William Fitz-Duncan was enabled to save that priory from the destruction with which it was menaced by a body of exasperated clansmen, whose chieftain had fallen in an affray with some retainers of the monastery; and to prevent the possibility of such a sacrilege, David quartered a body of Scots within its walls, whilst he granted to the community his own share of the plunder, in reparation for the injuries they had sustained from his undisciplined and semi-barbarous followers.

The approach of Stephen’s army, early in February, warned the Scottish leaders that it was time to collect their scattered forces either for battle or retreat; but David, who was in secret correspondence with many of Stephen’s barons, entertained the hope of finishing the war by a stratagem, without the hazard of a contest. All of the wretched country-people who had escaped the slaughter—and they were principally women—were either bartered for cattle on the spot, or driven northward with the prospect of a hopeless captivity; whilst the main body of the Scottish army withdrew to a small morass in the neighbourhood of Roxburgh, inaccessible except to the few who possessed an intimate knowledge of the locality. The burghers of the town were instructed to throw open their gates, and admit the English army without resistance; as it was David’s intention to enter with his followers in the dead of night, and surprise Stephen in his fancied security, calculating, that by the capture of the English king and his principal adherents, the war would be brought to a successful conclusion; the accession of the empress secured; and his own claims upon Northumberland readily acknowledged by his grateful niece.

But though in the multitude of counsellors there may be wisdom, in the multitude of confidants there is little chance of secrecy; and through some unknown channel Stephen became aware of his enemy’s intentions. Avoiding Roxburgh, he retaliated upon other Scottish districts the injuries which had been inflicted on the north of England; but as he began to entertain suspicions of the fidelity of certain barons, and his army was weakened, as well by the want of provisions as by the religious scruples—either real or pretended—of several of his followers who objected to bearing arms in Lent, he soon retraced his steps towards the south, first possessing himself of Bamborough on his passage through Northumberland, and placing in it a garrison on which he could depend. The castle belonged to Eustace Fitz-John, a powerful baron, of whose fidelity the king was so mistrustful, that, contrary to all feudal precedent, he caused his person to be seized whilst in actual attendance at court upon a summons of military service; and Eustace was not restored to liberty until he yielded up to Stephen the key-stone of his power in the north, long famous as the ancient residence of the royal race of Ida, and the strongest fortress in Northumberland.[241]

The conclusion of the Easter festival set at liberty the scrupulous chivalry of the age, to enter with renewed zest upon the pursuits of war; and David was fast approaching Durham, when a mutiny amongst the unruly Galwegians threatened both the life of the king, and the safety of his army. A report, judiciously fabricated for the occasion, that the enemy was approaching, restored order for the moment; the mutineers flew to arms to repel the foe, and David at once leading them to Norham, employed them, with the rest of his army, in besieging the castle. The garrison surrendered after a short resistance, and it affords a curious instance of the impregnability of the fortresses of that age against the limited means of offence available to besieging armies, that it was accounted a disgraceful occurrence when nine men-at-arms, all of whom were inexperienced, and the majority suffering from wounds, hopeless of relief from their lord the Bishop of Durham, yielded a well victualled castle to the whole force of Scotland! An offer was made to restore Norham to the bishop, if he would consent to hold it as a fief from the Scottish king; but as the proposed terms were declined, it was immediately reduced to ashes.

The success at Norham was counterbalanced by a sally from Werk, in which the indefatigable castellan of that fortress overthrew a body of knights and men-at-arms, capturing several of the party, whom he put to ransom, and carrying off a convoy of provisions intended for the army of the Scots, which by this daring feat he once more drew around his walls. Again the siege of Werk was converted into a blockade when David marched to join the force, collected by the exasperated Eustace Fitz-John, in an attempt to recover Bamborough; but though the burghers of that place were driven, with considerable loss, from an outwork in front of the castle, no permanent impression was made upon the fortress itself, and it was useless to attempt a blockade without the assistance, and co-operation, of a fleet.

Whilst the king was engaged before the castles of Norham and Werk, the intractable division under William Fitz-Duncan, of little use in a regular siege, had been dispatched to the more congenial occupation of harrying Craven, and the adjoining districts of the shires of York and Lancaster. The inhabitants assembled to resist the invaders, and upon the 10th of June took post in four divisions at Clitheroe on the Ribble; but their courage failing at the sight of the enemy, they broke and fled at the first onset. As this was the first occasion upon which the hostile parties had met in arms in the open field, the result increased the audacity of the victors, who, spreading over the face of the country, plundered and wasted it on every side, surpassing if possible their former excesses; but laying the foundation of future retribution in the very extent to which they carried their ravages.

Hitherto the barons of Yorkshire had looked upon the distant warfare with lukewarm indifference, each mistrusting his neighbour, and hardly knowing whether to oppose the Scots, as became the trusty partizans of King Stephen, or to support them as loyal subjects of the Empress Queen, whose standard was already raised by Robert of Gloucester, and her other friends, in the south and west. But when the war was now fast approaching their own neighbourhood, when their own lands were about to be plundered and their own vassals to be put to the sword, it was time to shake off their apathy, and out of the very excesses of the foe arose their strongest bond of union. Archbishop Thorstein preached a holy war; and through every parish, priests bore the relics of the saints, with all the imposing paraphernalia of the Roman Catholic religion, proclaiming it to be the duty of every Christian man to rise in defence of the church against barbarians, hateful alike to God and man. Ilbert de Lacy and Robert de Bruce, the youthful William Albemarle and the aged Walter de Ghent, summoned their followers to meet at Thirsk; and even Robert de Mowbray, then a mere child, appeared in armour at the head of his vassals to animate the courage of the numerous retainers of his house. To the same place of meeting hurried William Percy and William Fossard, Richard de Courcy and Robert d’ Estoteville; the knights of Nottinghamshire under William Peveril, and the chivalry of Derbyshire under Robert Ferrers: whilst Stephen, too much occupied to leave the south of England, dispatched a chosen body of knights, under Bernard de Balliol, to join the flower of the midland and northern chivalry in repelling the inroads of the Scottish foe. Walter Espec, a baron of vast possessions, whose age and experience, united to a gigantic stature and a ready eloquence, marked him out as a leader fit to inspire confidence and exact obedience, reminded the confederate nobles of the glories of their ancestry, and pointed out to their retainers that the enemy was little better than an unarmed mob.[242] Ralph, the titular bishop of the Orkneys, was commissioned, in the place of the aged and infirm Thorstein, to grant a general absolution to the army, which, strengthened by the consolations of the ministers of religion, and encouraged by the exhortations of military experience, viewed the impending contest in the light of a holy war, and prepared with alacrity for battle.

After waiting in the neighbourhood of Bamborough until the arrival of some expected reinforcements from Carlisle, Cumberland, and Galloway, David moved southward to effect a junction with William Fitz-Duncan. Their forces, when united, amounted to twenty-six thousand men, and as most of the historians of the period represent this army as “innumerable,” it affords some clue for estimating what was in those days looked upon as a countless host. David was well aware of the character of the army against which he was advancing, and with the concurrence of his most experienced officers, he determined upon opposing his own knights and men-at-arms to the mailed chivalry of England; rightly calculating, that, if he once broke through the rival phalanx, his light armed irregulars, of little real use in the first onset, would easily complete the victory. But the native warriors of Alban, elated with the victory at Clitheroe, and vainly imagining that the flower of England’s knights and men-at-arms would fly before their impetuous charge, like the undisciplined peasantry and townsmen of the district, loudly exclaimed against such tactics. “Of what use were their breastplates and their helmets at Clitheroe?” exclaimed the Scots. “Why trust you to these Normans?” added Malise Earl of Strathearn, when David still remained unmoved; “unprotected as I am, none shall be more forward in the fight.” “A great boast,” retorted Alan Percy, “which for your life you cannot make good.” Alarmed at the probable consequences of dissension at such a moment, David reluctantly yielded the point in dispute, and the post of honour in the approaching conflict was assigned to the men of Galloway.

One course yet held out a fair hope of success—a surprise—and David determined to make the attempt.[243] He ranged his army in four divisions, the Galwegians marching in the van, with all who claimed to share with them the honour of the first attack. The contingent from Cumberland and Teviotdale composed the second division, with the knights, archers, and men-at-arms under Prince Henry and Eustace Fitz-John, by whom the battle ought to have been commenced. Then followed the men of the Lothians, Lennox[244] and the Isles; whilst the king in person brought up the rear with the Scots and Moraymen, and his own body-guard of English and Norman knights.

The morning of Monday the 22d of August favoured the design of the Scots. A dense fog hung over the country, and under cover of the mist the Scottish host rapidly advanced in unwonted order; for the commands of David were rigorous in prohibiting his men from firing the villages along their route, according to their usual practice. They had reached the Tees, and were already crossing, when they were accidentally discovered by an esquire, who galloped back to Thirsk, to warn the confederate barons of the rapid approach of the hostile army.[245] In the hope of yet averting the contest, perhaps also to gain time, Robert de Bruce and Bernard de Balliol,—names singularly associated as the emissaries of an English army to a Scottish king,—rode forward to hazard a last appeal, pledging themselves, in the joint name of the confederates, to obtain for Prince Henry the grant of Northumberland. Bruce, in particular, warned the king of the danger he was about to incur, in entering into a contest with the very men upon whose aid he most relied, for curbing the refractory Galwegians, or for repressing his own disaffected subjects; whilst, with tears in his eyes, he besought him to be mindful of his ancient friendship, and by accepting the conditions of peace, to put a stop to the frightful enormities of his followers. The easy and kindly nature of David was fast yielding to the entreaties of Bruce, who had been his friend from childhood, when William Fitz-Duncan, a man of high spirit and the chief promoter of the war, angrily interposed, and reproaching the latter with a breach of fealty to his lord, prevailed upon his uncle to break off the conference; on which the two barons, formally renouncing their allegiance to the Scottish king, turned their horses heads and rode back to share the fortunes of the confederate army.

The delay was fatal to the attempted surprise; for it gave time to the army of the barons to clear the town of Northallerton, and to take up a favourable position, two miles further to the northward, upon Cutton Moor. A ship’s mast, bearing upon its summit the consecrated host, and surrounded by the banners of St. Peter of York, St. John of Beverley, and St. Wilfred of Ripon, was elevated upon a waggon, and marked the centre of the army, around which were grouped dismounted knights and men-at-arms; whilst from the immediate neighbourhood of the sacred standard, Bishop Ralph and his priests dispensed blessings, and absolution, throughout the host. The front of the position was covered by a line of archers, with a body of men-at-arms in support; all the horses were then removed to the rear under the charge of a mounted guard; and the remainder of the English forces—townsmen, apparently, and the array of the county—were ranged around the real strength of the army in the centre.[246]

Levelling their spears, long the national weapon of the Scottish infantry, and with wild cries of Albanach! Albanach! the ancient slogan of the warriors of the north, the first division of the assailants rushed to the charge; and such was the impetuosity of their onset, that the front ranks of the English reeled beneath the shock, and were borne back in confusion upon the dismounted knights around the standard. But then came to pass all that David had anticipated, and the unprotected lines of Scottish spearmen recoiled, and were dashed back like breakers from off a reef, before the steady discipline of that animated wall of iron. Broken, but not discouraged, they cast aside their fractured and useless lances, and, with drawn swords, once more flung themselves, with reckless valour, upon the foe: but the front ranks of the English had now rallied, and, from behind their dismounted comrades, the archers poured in a storm of arrows, those fatal Norman weapons which won so many a field for England in the days of old. Unsheltered from the shower of missiles by any defensive armour, rank after rank of the assailants went down before the English bowmen, the best and bravest of their leaders falling in fruitless efforts to penetrate the fatal line; and already the attack was slackening, when Prince Henry brought his mounted division into the battle, and the Norman chivalry of Scotland, with the disciplined retainers of Eustace Fitz-John, bore down with levelled lances to the charge. His success was complete. That part of the English army which sustained the shock, was ridden down and swept from the field; and the prince, elated with his easy triumph, and imagining that the whole Scottish army was pressing on in support, wheeled round in the rear of the English position to complete a victory not yet achieved, and charging the mounted guard left to protect the horses, broke and pursued them for many miles. His error was fatal; for the critical moment of the day had arrived, and the English were rapidly giving way, none holding their ground except the veteran phalanx in the centre, when suddenly a gory head was raised aloft, and the voice of one who was never subsequently recognized, loudly proclaimed that the king of Scotland was slain. More than once has such a cry turned the fortune of the day against a brave, but undisciplined, army. Upon the field of Assingdon it won the realm of England for Canute; at Hastings it all but wrested the same prize from the Norman William, though he led the flower of Europe to the field; and it decided the day upon Cutton Moor in favour of the confederate army. No longer pressed by the division of Prince Henry, the English rallied at the cry; and the Galwegians, who for two hours had prolonged their attack with desperate and unflinching courage, until the last of their chieftains fell beneath an English arrow, panic stricken at their loss, turned and fled the field; whilst the confederates, promptly taking advantage of the confusion, advanced at once to the charge. The Saxons of the Lothians broke at the first onset; and though David, leaping from his horse, and placing himself at the head of the reserve, bravely endeavoured to stem the advance of the enemy, the Scots wavered and were carried away in the rout; whilst the king, maddened at the thought of defeat, refused to fly until he was forced off the field by his own body-guard. High above his head still fluttered the ancient Dragon of Wessex, contradicting the report of his death, and numbers who had been swept away in the first confusion of the flight, disengaging themselves from the crowd of fugitives, and rallying around the banner of their king, presented a formidable front to the advancing foe. The foremost of the pursuers were either cut down or captured, and the rest soon gave up following the Scottish army, which, without further molestation, retreated in perfect order to Carlisle.[247]

The losses of the Scots upon this memorable occasion were estimated at ten thousand men, a number probably exaggerated, together with all the plunder they had accumulated, the place where it was captured being long remembered as Baggage Moor. More perished in the flight than in the battle—and such was generally the case—for not only were the fugitives massacred by the exasperated peasantry, but whenever they came into contact with each other, Angles, Scots, and Picts of Galloway fought with all the animosity of mutual hatred. The victors, deprived of their horses by Prince Henry’s charge, could make no attempt at following up their success: so, separating with mutual congratulations, they dispatched intelligence of their victory to Stephen, who, in acknowledgment of their important services, raised two of their number to the dignity of earls; Robert Ferrers obtaining the Earldom of Derbyshire, whilst that of Yorkshire was conferred upon William Albemarle.

The battle of Northallerton, long famous under the name of the battle of the Standard, adds but another to the many bitter proofs, that an army without discipline is simply a disorderly mob. The discordant elements of the Scottish nation were naturally averse to coalesce; whilst the custom of “Scottish service,” which bound every man to attend “the hosting across the frontier,”[248] swelled the ranks of the army with a body of men, fierce and warlike indeed, and endued with that self-willed and reckless courage which has on more than one occasion been their bane, but often indifferently armed, and as undisciplined as they were unruly. David, brought up amongst the Norman chivalry of the court of England, was well aware of the military character both of his own followers and of his opponents, and framed his plan of attack accordingly, the result of Prince Henry’s charge fully justifying his original decision; and when the fear of a mutiny at a most critical moment forced him to yield his better judgment, he rightly determined upon the sole course left open—a surprise. But in allowing Bruce and Balliol to gain time by parlying, thus confirming the character ascribed to him by Malmesbury, he committed a serious and fatal error, sacrificing every advantage he had already obtained, and enabling the confederates to clear the town of Northallerton, and receive the shock of his disorderly host in a favourable and well-chosen position, that ensured victory to the defending army.

Upon the third day after the arrival of the Scottish army at Carlisle, the anxiety of the king about his son was set at rest by the safe arrival of the prince. Henry, upon his return from his second charge, instead of meeting, as he had expected, with a victorious army, beheld the royal standard slowly retiring in the distance, and at once comprehending the catastrophe, arranged with his companions to mingle with the pursuers and endeavour if possible to rejoin the king. In order to prevent recognition, they agreed to disperse in different directions, first divesting themselves of everything that could betray their real character; so that out of two hundred knights originally in attendance upon the prince, only nineteen entered Carlisle in armour. Other fugitives reached the same place by degrees, and the king busied himself in restoring discipline, and in punishing with severity all whom he deemed guilty of misconduct or defection. Heavy fines were levied upon the delinquents, who were also bound by oaths and hostages never again to desert the royal person in battle, and when order was in some measure restored, David once more led his army to the investment of Werk.[249]

He was still prosecuting the siege when he was informed of the approach of the Papal legate Alberic Bishop of Ostia, and hastened to meet him at Carlisle, with the clergy and nobility of his dominions. A. D. 1130. Eight years previously, upon the death of Honorius the Second, sixteen cardinals had declared for Innocent the Second, whilst the majority elected Peter of Leon under the name of Anacletus, who through the wealth of his father, a converted Jew, was enabled successfully to establish himself in Rome. Two princes alone adhered to the antipope, his own brother-in-law Roger Count of Sicily, who by this course converted his coronet into a crown, and David of Scotland, the reasons for whose conduct are not so easily apparent. Upon the death of Anacletus, which occurred in the beginning of this year, an attempt to continue the schism by electing another rival to Innocent, who took the name of Victor the Fourth, was rendered abortive by the speedy resignation of the ephemeral pope; Innocent returned without opposition to Rome, and it was principally to notify the extinction of the schism, that Alberic was dispatched as legate to the kings of England and Scotland.

A. D. 1138.

He arrived at Carlisle four days before Michaelmas, bringing with him the Scottish chancellor William Comyn, whom he had ransomed from his captors at Northallerton, and everything was satisfactorily arranged during the three following days. Eardulf was admitted to the see of Carlisle, and John was recalled to Glasgow from the monastery of Tiron, in which that determined absentee had taken refuge from the troublesome duties of his diocese;[250] whilst reparation was made by David, even before it was demanded, for the injuries sustained by the Priory of Hexham from an unauthorised foray of a party of the Scottish army,[251] and the wildest tribes promised to set their captives at liberty, and to abstain henceforth from indiscriminate slaughter. Still the benevolent Alberic was oppressed with anxiety, for during his progress through the north he had been an eyewitness of the frightful consequences of the ravages of the hostile armies. All Northumberland was a desert, no attempt was made at cultivation, nor was an inhabitant to be met with along the route which he had traversed. The barons with their retainers were shut up in their castles, the peasantry and their families crowded the monasteries, or lurked in the wildest and most inaccessible retreats. The good bishop, dreading a recurrence of such horrors, and feeling that his sacred office imposed more than the mere formal duties of his legateship, besought the king to accept of his mediation with Stephen, and thus to put an end to the miseries of the war. Long was David inexorable, until the representative of the haughtiest prelate of Christendom, kneeling before the king of Scotland as a humble suppliant for “peace upon earth,” prevailed so far that a truce was arranged to last until St. Martin’s day, from the benefit of which the garrison of Werk was alone to be excepted; and Alberic, departing from Carlisle upon Michaelmas day, retraced his steps towards the court of Stephen, in the true character of a Christian bishop, as the bearer of a message of peace.[252]

The castle of Werk still held out, though David, having ascertained that its defenders were short of provisions, continued to press the siege with unabated rigour. But Jordan de Bussy was indomitable. The horses of the garrison yet survived, and he was determined that they should be sacrificed one by one to enable their masters to continue their stubborn resistance, proposing, when this last resource failed, to make a desperate sally in the all but hopeless attempt to cut his way through the besieging army. From this last alternative he was saved, for when his stock of provisions was reduced to two horses, one alive and the other in salt, the abbot of Rievaulx arrived, with the commands of Walter Espec to surrender the castle; and David, in a spirit of knightly courtesy that does him credit, provided this gallant little garrison, twenty-four in number, with fresh horses, and permitted them to depart with their arms, and all the honours of war.[253]

Much about the same time arrangements were concluded for the settlement of a firm and lasting peace between the two kings. Alberic had not been unmindful of his mission of peace, and, after the conclusion of the council of London, he pressed upon Stephen the necessity of putting a stop to the horrors of the northern war. At first the English king showed as decided an aversion to conclude a peace as his antagonist, and his exasperation was encouraged by a numerous party amongst his barons, who burned to avenge themselves for their losses. But Alberic soon found that he possessed an ally whose influence more than counterbalanced that of the war party, in Matilda the queen of Stephen, who was warmly attached to her uncle and cousin, and most anxious to promote a friendly feeling between her Scottish kinsmen and her husband. She joined her entreaties to those of the legate, who, rightly appreciating the value of such support, hesitated not to return to Rome long before the truce expired, in the full conviction that his benevolent object was attained.[254] A. D. 1139. Nor were his anticipations destined to be falsified, and as Stephen left the whole conduct of the negotiation in the hands of his queen, in the following April she repaired to Durham for the purpose of meeting her cousin Henry. Neither of the kings were present upon this occasion,—indeed they never appear to have met,—but the conditions of the peace had been already settled, and it had been decided that Henry was to receive investiture of Northumberland in addition to his other fiefs, the barons of the shire holding of the Scottish prince, saving their fidelity to Stephen. The English king, however, continued to retain Newcastle and Bamborough in his own possession, for which an equivalent was to be provided in the south of England—Henry on his side guaranteeing to preserve unaltered throughout his new fiefs, “the laws and customs” of the late king Henry, and to respect the rights of the Archbishop of York and of the Bishop of Durham. The barons of Northumberland then swore fealty to their new Earl, who, delivering up the sons of five of the principal nobles of Scotland as hostages for the due performance of his part of the agreement, accompanied the queen upon her return to the south, when the treaty was confirmed by Stephen at Nottingham.[255]

During the whole of the following summer Henry remained in England, sedulously courting popularity by his lavish munificence and gallant bearing—qualities so acceptable to the Norman chivalry of the age. He accompanied Stephen to the siege of Ludlow Castle, narrowly escaping capture on this occasion; for, on approaching too closely to the walls, he was unhorsed by a hook suddenly launched from the battlements, owing his rescue solely to the prompt and daring gallantry of the king. In the course of the same year he was united to Ada de Warenne, the youngest daughter of the great earl of that name; and as the bride’s family were staunch adherents of the cause of Stephen, and the Scottish prince, bound by no ties to the empress, was probably far more attached to the amiable character of Queen Matilda—whose influence seems traceable in the marriage—than to her haughty and imperious cousin, the arrival of the latter in England with the Earl of Gloucester, appears to have produced no interruption of cordiality between Henry and the English king. He was again present with his countess at the English court in the following year, A. D. 1140. in spite of the civil war then raging, barely escaping, on his return to Scotland, the machinations of his ancient enemy the Earl of Chester, the grant of Carlisle being once more the cause of their quarrel. Ranulph, tempted by the prevailing anarchy, had planned the seizure of Henry and the Countess Ada, counting probably upon extorting, as their ransom, a surrender of the coveted fief; but the queen, anticipating his design, warned Stephen of the danger, who, in accordance with her suggestions, escorted his guests in person to the north, thus frustrating the intentions of Ranulph, but, by so doing, drawing upon himself the hatred of that fickle and revengeful baron.[256]

A. D. 1141.

After the defeat and capture of Stephen at Lincoln, David, who had hitherto refrained from espousing the cause of either candidate for the throne of England, hastened to join the empress, leaving his chancellor, William Comyn, at Durham, with instructions to hold that important bishopric in her name. He arrived in time to accompany his niece upon her entry into London, his presence confirming the fidelity of many of the leading barons, but failing to inspire Matilda with any portion of his own sagacity, and her arrogant and imperious behaviour soon alienated the affections of her new subjects. Driven out of London by the hostility of the citizens, her personal antipathy to the imprisoned king next caused a rupture with his brother, the influential Bishop of Winchester, who turned a willing ear to the entreaties of Stephen’s queen, now as eager in urging war in behalf of her captive husband, as in advocating peace, a few years previously, with her Scottish relatives. Participating in the ill success which he could not avert, David was present at the rout of Winchester, only escaping capture through the attachment and devotion of a youthful godson, David Olifard, then serving in the hostile army, who, concealing him from all pursuit, enabled him to return in safety to Scotland. The grateful king was not unmindful of his friendly benefactor; and it was probably in requital for his services upon this occasion that Olifard obtained a grant of lands in Scotland, becoming the founder of a numerous family, whose name is still well known in the country of his adoption.[257]

It has been already mentioned that in passing through Durham on his way to the south, David left his chancellor, William Comyn, in that city, in the hope that he might be elected to the vacant see, and hold the bishopric in the interest of the empress queen. Nothing will convey a clearer idea of the anarchy of the period, and of the extraordinary measures that were occasionally resorted to by the gravest characters, than a narrative of the proceedings of William Comyn. He had passed his early years in the household of the late bishop Geoffrey, and, upon the death of the latter, his relatives, wishing to favour the views of Comyn, kept the catastrophe a profound secret, the body of the dead bishop being submitted to an elaborate course of preparation, including a process of salting, in order that it might be preserved above ground until the arrival of the Scottish chancellor! One important point remained to be gained—the consent of the chapter—and this was resolutely refused. Escaping from Durham, they chose William Dean of York to be their bishop; but their troubles were only commencing, for they had to deal with a most determined character in the chancellor. In vain the Pope deprived him of the Archdeaconry of Worcester which he had hitherto enjoyed, and launched an anathema at his head; in vain the newly-chosen bishop endeavoured to enter his Episcopal city by force of arms. Comyn set at nought the anger of the distant pope, and drove out the monks who attempted to give secret admittance to his rival. Filling their monastery with his own men-at-arms, he converted it into a regular fortress—a not unusual course of proceeding in that turbulent era—and, secretly supported by Prince Henry and the Earl of Richmond, for three years he kept the bishop at bay, until the sudden death of a favourite nephew induced him to make overtures for an arrangement, A. D. 1144. and the bishop was at length permitted to enjoy undisputed possession of his dignity. A grant of the honour of Allerton was conferred upon another of the chancellor’s nephews, Richard Comyn, the founder of that name in Scotland, whose union with Hextilda, the heiress of Bethoc, sole daughter of Donald Bane, may have contributed to the greatness of the family; and, by this arrangement, a scandal by no means of uncommon occurrence amongst the churchmen of that age, was at length compromised, and brought to a satisfactory conclusion.[258]

Many years elapsed before the Scottish king was again induced to enter upon the scene of English politics—internal rather than external policy appearing to have occupied his attention during this period of his reign, and many of the alterations he had previously set on foot were now probably completed and confirmed. He had not lost sight, however, of the interests of the empress and her son; and in his anxiety to further the designs of the latter, A. D. 1149. about eight years after the siege of Winchester, upon the crown of England, he was again brought to the verge of a rupture with Stephen. The youthful Henry Fitz Empress suddenly arrived at Carlisle to receive the honour of knighthood from the hands of his venerable kinsman, Ranulph of Chester, who had purposely repaired to the same city, with Henry of Scotland, assisting in the solemnities of the occasion. Ceremonial and festivity, however, only served to cover the real object of the meeting, and arrangements were set on foot, at the same time, for cementing an alliance which was to place young Henry upon the English throne. The Earl of Chester, consenting to waive all claims upon Carlisle, performed homage to David on receiving in exchange the fief of Lancaster, with a promise that a daughter of Prince Henry should be given in marriage to his son. Henry Fitz Empress bound himself, if ever he regained his grandfather’s throne, to confirm, without let or hindrance, to David and his heirs, Newcastle and Northumberland, from Tyne to Tweed, with all the other English fiefs that belonged to the heir of the Scottish crown, in right of his descent from Earl Waltheof; and, these preliminaries being adjusted, it was agreed that the earl was to concentrate his followers upon Lancaster; and that the Scottish army, strengthened by his retainers and by the barons of the western counties who adhered to Henry, should at once advance against Stephen, who, suspecting the proceedings at Carlisle, had already reached York on his march towards the north. In accordance with this arrangement, David and his young relative lost no time in reaching Lancaster; but Randolph, fickle and treacherous as usual, was as faithless to his new allies as he had been ever false to Stephen. He failed in his appointment at Lancaster, Henry recrossed the sea to Normandy, and the two kings, mutually averse to the hazard of an open rupture, led back their armies without a contest.[259]

Towards the close of David’s reign the peace of Scotland was disturbed for a considerable time by the pretensions of a most extraordinary imposter, who, by a singular chance, has been confounded by the historians of the last five hundred years with the very person whose son, or nephew, he seems to have attempted to personate. In the course of 1134, the same year in which Malcolm MacHeth was committed to Roxburgh castle, Olave Godredson, king of Man, granted certain lands to Ivo, abbot of Furness, for the erection of a priory at Rushen; and amongst the brotherhood who, either at that time or subsequently, were sent into the Isle of Man, was a monk of the name of Wimund, a man of obscure birth but of considerable talents, and still greater and most unscrupulous ambition. His jovial countenance and ready eloquence, his stalwart frame and commanding stature—for he towered a head and shoulders above the height of ordinary men—marked him out as a fit leader for an ignorant and excitable multitude, though scarcely in the capacity of a bishop. Yet the Manxmen thought otherwise, and, in process of time, Wimund was advanced to the see of the Isles; though such peaceful dignity suiting ill with his restless disposition, he only regarded his appointment as a stepping stone to further advancement, soon giving himself out as a son of the Earl of Moray, and inviting the boldest and most reckless of his wild flock to assist in avenging the injuries, and recovering the possessions, of his supposed father, promising unlimited plunder to all who followed him to Scotland. The descendants of the old sea-rovers flocked eagerly to the call of their singular pastor, whose influence over them was unbounded, and the warlike bishop lost no time in leading his followers to the pillage of the western coasts. His proceedings, ere long, proved him to be no mean proficient in the tactics of partizan warfare. The approach of a hostile force was the signal for immediate departure, Wimund and his followers dispersed amongst the islands, and upon the arrival of the royal army the sole tidings of the enemy were the reports of his excesses in another direction. No sooner had his pursuers retraced their steps, than the bishop and his satellites were again on the alert, carrying fire and sword throughout the district just evacuated; and so often and so successfully were these tactics repeated, that David is said to have experienced more trouble and anxiety on account of this turbulent monk, than through any other enemy during the whole course of his reign. Once, only, he sustained a check, which he received from an appropriate quarter—another bishop, who refusing to submit to his demand for tribute on the singular, but strictly ecclesiastical, grounds that “one bishop should not pay tribute to another,” summoned his own flock to resist the unorthodox intrusion, and launched a light battle-axe at the head of Wimund with an aim so accurate that the burly monk reeled beneath the blow, and his followers fled from the field.

At length, in despair of succeeding by force, the king adopted an opposite policy, and bought off the hostility of Wimund by a grant of Furness in Westmoreland, where, for a short time, the bishop played the tyrant with impunity, particularly directing his virulence against the monastery in which he had passed his early days. At length the people of the neighbourhood, whose patience was worn out by his exactions, watching their opportunity, seized upon him at an unguarded moment, and the luckless Wimund, to whom no mercy was shown, was deprived of his see, and passed the remainder of his life, sightless and cruelly maimed, in the monastery of Biland. No sufferings, however, could subdue the reckless spirit of the man, who was wont to boast, with a laugh, that “even Providence could only conquer him by the faith of a foolish bishop;” adding, that if his enemies had only left him as much sight as a “sparrow’s eye,” he would have soon shown them how little cause they had for triumph.[260]

The whole of the north of England beyond the Tees had now for several years been under the influence, if not under the direct authority, of the Scottish king, and the comparative prosperity of this part of the kingdom, contrasting strongly with the anarchy prevailing in every other quarter, naturally inclined the population of the northern counties to look with favour upon a continuance of the Scottish connection. All southward of the Tyne, indeed, was held probably in the name of the Empress Queen, but the influence of David extended far beyond the Tees, and when a claim was raised upon the Honour of Skipton in Craven, it was the Scottish, and not the English king who decided upon its validity. William Fitz Duncan was the claimant, the heir of Duncan the Second and the victor at Clitheroe, whose fiery courage broke off the conference before the battle upon Cutton Moor, and whose prominent position upon this and other occasions during the war, seems to mark him as the Gaelic Toshach. Like his father, however, he was more of a feudal than a Gaelic noble, and several years before this date he married, during the lifetime of Archbishop Thorstein, Alice de Rumeli, the heiress of her Norman name; three daughters and one son, whose fame yet lingers in local tradition as William of Egremont, being the issue of their union. It was in right of his wife that William raised his claim; A. D. 1151. and as it must have suited well with the policy of David to increase the feudal ties incidentally securing the fidelity of his nephew, he lost no time in installing him in the Honour, willingly providing him with the means of enforcing his rights (as some opposition appears to have been meditated), and atoning for the depredations of the more unruly portion of the army by the gift of a silver chalice wherever the property of the church was shown to have suffered from their licence.[261]

One of the most important objects of David’s policy at length appeared to be satisfactorily attained, and the great northern fiefs of his wife’s father added securely to the Scottish crown. They were at present held by his son, and in some sort as a guarantee of neutrality towards Stephen, which, though slight was so far effectual that it restrained David from ill-advised hostilities; whilst the feeble hold of Stephen upon the fiefs in question must have rendered him unwilling, as long as a nominal peace was preserved, to risk the chances of an ineffectual forfeiture which he could have scarcely hoped to carry out. In the event of the Duke of Normandy’s accession, there was the solemn contract ratified at Carlisle, which was to confirm the Scottish princes in the hereditary possession of these fiefs, in which it might well be hoped that a kindred people in language, origin, and laws, would amalgamate in course of time, under the fostering rule of the representatives of the sainted Edward, with the Anglian inhabitants of the Lothians. Even the population of that great Episcopal Palatinate, where the bishop ruled with regal power and privileges over a district scarcely yet included in Norman England at the time of the Domesday survey, was in sympathy and in race far more akin to the Angles of Bernicia than to the descendants of the Scandinavian conquerors of the Danelage; and the tendency of the men of Durham to turn their regards towards the North, was sedulously encouraged ever since the days of Margaret. It was her husband, the Scottish Malcolm, who laid the first stone of the new church in the Episcopal city; her sons and their leading nobles who enriched with their donations her favourite monastery; and now the last and greatest of her immediate family sheltered the sacred territory of St. Cuthbert from the miseries of southern England, and secured for it the advantages of peace. The grant of the English fief of Furness to Wimund, by which a troublesome enemy was converted into a questionable feudatory, and the confirmation of Skipton, also a dependency of the English crown, to William Fitz Duncan, were carried out by the Scottish king without the slightest reference to the prerogatives of the English sovereign; and owing to the distracted state of England during the reign of Stephen, never was Scotland at any period of her history more powerful relatively to her southern neighbour, than during the last ten years of David’s reign.

A. D. 1152. 12th June.

Bright as were the hopes of the aged king, when he established his nephew in the inheritance of the de Rumelis, in the following summer they were doomed to disappointment, when a sudden gloom was cast over Scotland by the untimely death of Prince Henry. Nor was the sorrow thus felt confined to his native land alone, for his loss was regretted throughout the neighbouring kingdom. His death was indeed a calamity for Scotland, for all the virtues of his family are said to have centred in his character; and handsome in person, and gallant in bearing, he possessed in addition those popular qualities which, had he lived, would have endeared him to his people; though the elaborate praises dictated by the attachment of his early friend, the abbot of Rievaulx, are perhaps less emphatic than the brief description of St. Bernard, “a brave and able soldier, he walked like his father in the paths of justice and of truth.”[262] By his marriage with Ada de Warenne, who survived him, Henry left six children, three sons and three daughters. Of the former, Malcolm and William lived to ascend the throne of Scotland, and David, the youngest, long enjoyed the Honour and title of Huntingdon. Ada, the eldest daughter, became the wife of Florence Count of Holland, carrying with her as a dowry the northern earldom of Ross. Margaret, the second, was twice married; first to Conan Duke of Bretagne, by whom she left an only daughter, Constance, who became the wife of Geoffrey and the mother of Arthur, son and grandson of Henry the Second; and after the death of Conan, to Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford. Matilda, the youngest sister, died unmarried in the same year as her brother Malcolm.[263]

Amidst the deep affliction which he must have felt at the loss of his only son, nothing was left undone by David that could ensure the peaceful succession of his grandchildren. A crisis was even then impending, for six months before the death of the prince of Scotland Henry Fitz Empress had already landed in England, and Stephen, whose good and gentle queen was no longer alive, seizing upon the opportunity of Prince Henry’s death to strengthen his cause by a fresh alliance, had at once made over Huntingdon to the Earl of Northampton. Accordingly, under the charge of Duncan Earl of Fife, upon whom the privileges of his earldom appear to have conferred this office, Malcolm was dispatched throughout the Scottish provinces to be acknowledged in every quarter of the realm as the heir and successor of his grandfather, whilst the king, hurrying in person to Newcastle, assembled the barons of Northumberland and took oaths and hostages for their obedience to William, whom he presented to them as their future feudal lord; and during the few short months he survived his son, he busied himself in completing his arrangements for the regulation of the kingdom in the event of his own decease.[264]

The close of his career, indeed, was not far distant, for though his intellect was still clear and vigorous, his bodily health was failing fast, and though his friends would assure him that he had yet many years to live, he felt in his own mind a presentiment that his end was at hand. It was on a Wednesday towards the close of May that the venerable monarch perceived the approach of death. Calmly reviewing his last instructions, he suggested a few additions, and having concluded his earthly affairs, dedicated his remaining hours to religion. Even at such a moment his kindly nature beamed forth, and when almost speechless he beckoned to his almoner, who, bending over the couch of his dying master, heard him whisper his latest instructions for the distribution of his daily alms. A. D. 1153. Thus he lingered over the remainder of the week, and as the sun rose upon the morning of the 24th, the spirit of the aged king returned to his Maker.[265]

David was a good man as well as an able king. His faith was of the age, but his religion was from the heart, and there are few who will not respect the feeling that prompted his dying wish to be carried to pray before the Black Rood of his mother. The times in which he lived, and the peculiar tone of his mother’s mind, which is easily traceable in all her children, may naturally have influenced the character of his religion, but the formal and saintly colours in which he is occasionally depicted, represent the actual living man about as much, probably, as a mediæval portrait in stained glass resembles the real features of the original. Strict in the conception of his own religious duties, he was exact in requiring from the ecclesiastical body a decorous abstinence from all internal broils and dissensions, in return for the immunities and external peace he was zealous in insuring them, enforcing obedience if necessary; though, it is said, that on one occasion he was obliged to kneel to an obdurate churchman before he could shame him into propriety. A kindly and warm-hearted disposition is traceable in many of his acts, and is especially displayed in his consideration and thoughtfulness for his poorer subjects. In accordance with a regulation often found in other codes, and which was, probably, a well-known and general maxim of law, no one was allowed to bring a lesser cause into the royal court of justice, except as an appeal from a lower court: yet, in spite of this enactment, which he seems to have been the first to introduce into Scotland, he appointed certain days on which, like an eastern king of old, he “sat in the gate” to give audience to the poor and the aged; and he would turn without a murmur from a hunting party to examine the appeal of a suppliant; if his decision was contrary to the expectations of his humble petitioners, kindly endeavouring to convince them of its justice—in too many instances a thankless and hopeless undertaking. The poor and the defenceless, indeed, were the especial objects of his protection, and he passed a law that whenever anything belonging to them was stolen, if only one man of good repute was ready to testify to the thief by an oath sworn on the altar before proper witnesses, “according to Scottish usage,” the stolen property was to be restored, “on the footing of the king,” and an additional fine of “eight cows,” the usual mulct for serious offences, levied on the offender—a privilege of great moment to the unprotected and oppressed in an age when, in ordinary cases, the oaths of six, twelve, or even more men, were necessary to establish an accusation of theft.[266]

Conciliation may be described as the leading principle of David’s policy. Called in the prime of life to reign over a people differing in race, in habits, and in language, and agreeing only in the perpetuation of hereditary feuds, he determined upon introducing, amongst his own subjects, the more orderly and settled system of government with which he and his brother Alexander were familiar during their lengthened residence at the Anglo-Norman court; and so ably were his measures conceived, and so judicious was his admixture of conciliation and authority in carrying out this project,—which seems to have been entertained by both brothers,—that he is said to have succeeded in establishing a more durable state of concord amongst the heterogeneous population of his kingdom, than existed at that period amongst people enjoying far higher advantages. Perhaps the true secret of his popularity lay in the admirable tact with which he seems to have entered warmly into the subject that lay nearest to the hearts of all his people—their own affairs. David had nothing to conceal except his councils, and the royal chamber was accessible at all times; every one in turn was favoured with an audience; the great and the lowly; the churchman and the soldier the burgher and the peasant, each departing with the assurance that his own interests were a matter of attention and care to a watchful and paternal ruler.

Pursuing the policy inaugurated by his mother, Queen Margaret, he encouraged the resort of foreign merchants to the ports of Scotland, insuring to native traders the same advantages which they had enjoyed during the reign of his father; whilst he familiarized his Gaelic nobles, in their attendance upon the royal court, with habits of luxury and magnificence, remitting three years’ rent and tribute—according to the account of his contemporary Malmesbury—to all his people who were willing to improve their dwellings, to dress with greater elegance, and to adopt increased refinement in their general manner of living. Even in the occupations of his leisure moments he seems to have wished to exercise a softening influence over his countrymen, for, like many men of his character, he was fond of gardening, and he delighted in indoctrinating his people in the peaceful arts of horticulture, and in the mysteries of planting and of grafting. For similar reasons he sedulously promoted the improvement of agriculture, or rather, perhaps, directed increased attention to it; for the Scots of that period were still a pastoral, and, in some respects, a migratory people, their magnates not residing, like the great feudal nobles, in their own castles, and in the centre of their own “demesnes,” but moving about from place to place—not always upon their own property—and quartering themselves upon the dependant population. By enforcing tillage and agricultural labour, and by directing laws against the indolent listlessness of a pastoral life—for it was an age when, from the reaction which might be expected after a period of “irregulated” independence, even the common occurrences of every day life were often made the subject of legal statutes—David hoped to convert the lower orders into a more settled and industrious population; whilst he enjoined the higher classes to “live like noblemen” upon their own estates, and not to waste the property of their neighbours, and spare their own, under pretence of continual journeys. In consequence of these measures feudal castles began, ere long, to replace the earlier buildings of wood and wattles rudely fortified by earthworks; and towns rapidly grew up around the royal castles and about the principal localities of commerce. The monasteries of Kelso, Jedburgh, Melrose, and Holyrood, with many another stately pile, also owed their first foundation to the fostering care of David; for, independently of his religious zeal, he appreciated the encouragement afforded by such establishments to the pacific arts it was his aim to introduce amongst his subjects. The prosperity of the country during the last fifteen years of his reign contrasted strongly with the miseries of England under the disastrous rule of Stephen; Scotland became the granary from which her neighbour’s wants were supplied; and to the court of Scotland’s king resorted the knights and nobles of foreign origin, whom the commotions of the Continent had hitherto driven to take refuge in England.[267]

David, for his own purposes, encouraged this immigration by every means in his power; for many of the events of his reign disclose the dilemma in which he was occasionally placed between his nobility of native birth, and the Anglo-Norman feudatories whose allegiance was also due to the English crown. On the former he could count with safety in any of his inroads upon the south, and to the latter he could look for assistance against the rebellions of the north and west; but there were circumstances in which he could place entire dependance upon neither party. If he threw himself into the arms of the native Scots he must have resigned all hope of social improvement; but if he alienated their affections and relied exclusively upon the Anglo-Normans, he must have made up his mind to reconquer northern Scotland by force of arms, or to resign it to some successful competitor. He gave, therefore, a ready welcome to all who arrived unfettered by any tie to the English king, depending on the knights for the creation of a baronage strongly attached to his own interests, and equally to be relied upon against Englishman and native Scot; whilst to the lower orders, whom he settled in the towns, he looked for the promotion of commerce and the formation of a burgherhood, devoted to the king from whom their privileges and immunities were derived.

In furtherance of his contemplated innovations, and not a little also of the views which he never ceased to entertain of still farther aggrandizing his kingdom on her southern frontier, David may be said to have laid the foundation of a radical change in the relative importance of the two great divisions of feudal Scotland. Hitherto, though the royal authority extended practically as far as the Spey, and the king of Scots was obeyed nominally throughout the whole extent of the mainland, the country between the Forth, the Tay, and the central ridge of the Grampian range, was the real heart and centre of Alban. Here were the royal capitals of Scone and Forteviot; here the bishoprics of St. Andrews and Dunkeld, and Abernethy once also a capital and bishopric, still an abbacy, and apparently the seat of the learning of the age.[268] Here also were the religious foundations of David’s parents, and of his brother Alexander; and here the late king was wont to hold his court at his favourite residence of Invergowrie. Southward of the Forth stretched Lothian and the ancient principality of Strath Clyde, provinces still dependant on the kingdom beyond the Scots-water, and never yet regarded as the seat of the central authority. Northern Scotland may be compared to Wessex, the hereditary province of the royal race and the centre of the English government; the southern district between the Forth, the Solway, and the Tweed, resembling the Danelage, secure in its own laws and customs, but secondary in other respects to the remaining portion of the kingdom. Southern Scotland was the creation of David. He embellished it with the monasteries of his religious foundations; he strengthened it with the castles of his feudal baronage; and here he established the nucleus of feudal Scotland, and the foundation of that importance which eventually transferred the preponderance in the kingdom to the south. Strath Clyde and the Lothians were admirably adapted to his purpose, for all the land appears to have been in direct dependance on the crown; he could stud it at will with his favourite Anglo-Norman chivalry, and there are no traces in either quarter of the powerful magnates who were in a position, beyond the Scots-water, to oppose the policy of their king.

But it is not to be imagined that in any portion of the kingdom, except in forfeited districts, David enacted the part of a conqueror, driving out the earlier population and replacing the native proprietary by a baronage of foreign origin. He was beloved by the Scots, and terrible only to the men of Galloway, says his friend and biographer Ailred; and it is impossible that he could have retained the affections of his own people had he carried out a policy so hostile to their very existence. He seems to have confirmed rather than destroyed proprietary right, and though he introduced novel tenures into Scotland, the Thanes holding, according to ancient custom, by Scottish service will be found, long after his reign, side by side with the knights and barons holding by the feudal tenure of military service. But this and other changes which he accomplished, and the general policy he pursued in church and state, will form the subject of the two succeeding chapters.[269]

CHAPTER IX.
The State.

Scotland in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries still retained many of the features of a confederated rather than of a consolidated kingdom, acknowledging indeed, even in the earlier portion of that period, the rule of one reigning family, but scarcely recognising the authority of the same laws and customs, or bound together by the ties of kindred, origin, and language. Between Forth and Tweed lay Lothian, bordering towards the western frontiers upon the Cumbrian principality and Galloway; both the former provinces having been annexed to the Scottish crown by a course of successful aggression, if not by actual conquest, though Galloway was still rather a tributary dependency than an integral portion of the kingdom. Lothian, apparently, preserved the same laws that were in force throughout Saxon Northumbria before the reign of Canute; whilst two centuries of the dominion of a Scottish line of princes over Cumbria must have introduced a Scottish proprietary very generally throughout the province, without effecting any material alteration in laws and customs, which, based upon the Celtic principle of government, differed probably little, if at all, from the code then and long afterwards retained in Galloway.

Northward of the Scots-water two great divisions were recognised, Scotia, or Scotland proper, and Moravia. The former embraced the whole of the Lowland districts from the Spey to the Forth, extending to the summit of the Mounth or Grampian range; thus including the earldoms of Mar, Buchan, and Angus, Fife, Atholl, Strathearn, and Menteith, with Gowrie and Stormont, the Merns and other districts retained more directly in the king’s hands; together with the whole of “Scottish Argyle,” which, before the creation of the shire and bishopric, was connected with Atholl and the Abbacy of Glendochart; whilst Cantyre and Cowal depended upon the earldom of Menteith. Moravia was made up of the earldoms of Moray, forfeited in the earlier portion of David’s reign; Caithness, which still included Sutherland, then extending as far as Dingwall; and Ross, a sort of debatable land between the Gall-Gael, Oirir-Gael, and ancient Mormaors of Moray: with “Northern Argyle,” or that portion of the territories of the Oirir-Gael which reached, at this period, from the northern boundaries of the modern county to the frontiers of the Gall-Gael in Sutherland.[270] Feudal tenure, in the later Anglo-Norman acceptation of the word, was unknown throughout these provinces at the accession of Alexander the First; though the earlier system of government, once existing amongst a number of independent tribes and confederacies, had long given place to the royal authority wherever the rights of the crown—as was certainly the case in Scotia—were thoroughly established. But though the principle of the system was changed, the features remained very much the same; and a nobility, owing their original appointment or confirmation to the crown, exercising as deputies the privileges of the sovereign, and retaining as their prerogative a portion of the dues they exacted in his name, stood in the place of the elective or hereditary magistrates of tribes and confederacies. The Thane, or Tighern, and the official known as the Deempster, represented the Cean-cinneth, or rather perhaps the Toshach, and the Brehon—the chief, or captain, and the judge of the clan; the earl or Mormaor the provincial judge answered to the chosen leader and judge of the confederacy; the kindred of these officials, and the Og-tiernach, or “lesser lords,” formed the Duchasach and Duine-uasal, the gentry or freeholders of the district; whilst none who could not claim to be enrolled amongst one of these kindreds were entitled to the privileges of free or gentle birth.