CHAPTER I.

SCOTLAND IN THE REIGN OF ALEXANDER THE THIRD.

[Sidenote: Consolidation of the provinces of Scotland into one feudal monarchy completed in this reign.]

The brightest and most prosperous period in the annals of Scotland was undoubtedly that during which she was under the rule of the dynasty of kings which sprang from the union of the Celtic king Malcolm Ceannmor with the Saxon princess Margaret. It was during this period of upwards of a century and a half that the different provinces of Scotland were welded into one feudal monarchy, and the various races which inhabited them, and upon the allegiance of each of whom the kings of this race had hereditary claims, were fused into one mixed population combining the peculiar qualities of each.

The reign of Alexander the Third, the last king of this old Celtic dynasty of Scottish kings, saw the concentration of the various provinces of Scotland into one compact kingdom finally completed by the cession of the Isles in the year 1266. Scotland now presented the same geographical platform which it ever after possessed. The various races which composed its population occupied in the main the same relative position. The kingdom of Scotland could now be no longer viewed as a limited Gaelic kingdom, possessing dependencies peopled by British, Anglic, or Scandinavian communities, but had become a feudal monarchy, the dominant element of which was Teutonic, while the Celtic population was either restricted to the wilder and more mountain regions, or formed the under class of serfs and tillers of the soil.

It would seem as if the task of amalgamating the discordant elements of the population, and of concentrating the semi-independent provinces which they peopled, had no sooner been completed than the dynasty which effected it was to pass away, and a war of succession was to follow, which was still further to root up her ancient institutions, and to throw the kingdom still more into the hands of kings and nobility of an alien race.

By the death of his only daughter, who had been married to the king of Norway, and of his only son in the same year, Alexander the Third found that unless he had a male heir by a second marriage the succession to the throne would devolve upon a little grand-daughter, the Princess of Norway, then only two years old, and on her the succession was settled in a Parliament held at Scone on the 5th February 1283-4, failing such male issue. In the instrument by which the succession was so settled the magnates of Scotland bound themselves to receive Margaret, daughter of Eric, king of Norway, and of Margaret, daughter of King Alexander, as their lady and heir of the kingdom of Scotia; and to acknowledge her and her heirs as their liege lady, and the true heir of their sovereign in the whole kingdom, and in the island of Man, and all the other islands pertaining to the kingdom of Scotia, as well as in Tynedale and Penrith, and other dependencies of the kingdom.[1]

Such were the enlarged limits to which the name of Scotia, once confined to the districts between the Firth of Forth and the river Spey, had now extended; and the dependencies of the kingdom, which had then embraced large semi-independent provinces on the south and west of these boundaries, were now reduced to the recently-acquired Western Isles, and to the small districts of Tynedale and Penrith lying beyond her southern frontier.

If this process of consolidation, however, may be said to have been completed in the reign of Alexander the Third, it can only be held to have properly commenced with that of David the First. Prior to his accession, although the rule of the Scottish monarchs had extended itself by degrees over the districts south of the Forth and Clyde, and then west of the Drumalban range and the river Spey, yet the name of Scotia was still confined to the eastern districts between these limits. These districts formed the real nucleus and heart of the kingdom, and were more directly associated with her monarchs as kings of the Scots.

[Sidenote: Southern frontier of Scotland.]

The extension of their power over the southern districts commenced about a century after the establishment of the Scottish dynasty on the Pictish throne, when, in the year 946, the districts forming the kingdom of Cumbria were ceded by Edward the elder to Malcolm king of the Scots. This kingdom extended, at that time, from the river Clyde to the river Derwent in Cumberland, and to the cross at Stanmore on the borders of Westmoreland and Yorkshire, which separated it from the Northumbrian territories. It embraced the western districts of Scotland from the Clyde to the Solway, the present county of Cumberland, with the exception of that part of it which lies on the south of the river Derwent and formed the barony of Copeland, and the whole of Westmoreland exclusive of the barony of Kendal, which, with Copeland and the western districts as far as the borders of Wales, belonged to the Northumbrian kingdom.

Within eighty years afterwards, the districts on the east coast extending from the Forth to the Tweed, and consisting of Lothian and Teviotdale, were ceded to his grandson, another Malcolm. These southern territories were, however, in the position of dependencies on the kingdom of Scotland, lying beyond her proper southern frontier and within that of England, and were on three different occasions entirely separated from the Scottish kingdom:—First during the usurpation of Macbeth and the possession of the greater part of Scotland by the Norwegian Earl of Orkney, whose joint rule certainly did not extend beyond the Forth, while the southern districts remained faithful to the family of Duncan; again during the short reign of Donald Ban; and for a third time after the death of Eadgar, when the territories over which he had ruled as king were divided between his brothers Alexander and David, the former reigning as king over the kingdom north of the Forth and Clyde, while the latter ruled with the title of Earl over these southern dependencies. The southern frontier of the Cumbrian kingdom did not, at this time, extend beyond the Solway, for the Norman king, William Rufus, had, in the year 1092, wrested that part of it which lay between the Solway and the Derwent from Malcolm Ceannmor, and given it to the Norman baron Ranulph de Meschines, while Henry I. erected it, with Westmoreland, in 1132, into the bishopric of Carlisle. The southern boundary of Earl David’s possessions had thus become coincident with the southern frontier of the later kingdom of Scotland. It was only on the accession of David to the throne of Scotland that they became permanently united to the kingdom, and the name of Cumbria, or Cumberland, was restricted to that part of the ancient kingdom of Cumbria which now belonged to England. The connection of the royal family with the ancient line of the Saxon kings, the training and Norman tendencies of David himself, and his marriage with the daughter of an Earl of Northumbria, and widow of an Earl of Northampton, whose mother was a niece of the Conqueror, created a tie between them and the Anglic population of the southern districts which was closer than that which now connected him with the Celtic population of the other portions of the kingdom; and Lothian assumed that prominent position as the most valuable and cherished centre of the interests of the monarchy, which had hitherto belonged to the region between the Forth and the Spey.

[Sidenote: English possessions of the Scottish kings.]

But while David the First may be held to have established the Solway, the range of the Cheviots, and the Tweed, as the proper southern boundary of the kingdom of Scotland, his marriage gave him claims to territories beyond it, which he was disposed to assert when opportunity offered. During the life of Matilda, his queen, he had enjoyed in her right the earldoms of Northampton and Huntingdon; but on her death, seven years after he had succeeded to the throne of Scotland, the earldom of Northampton passed to her son by her first marriage, Simon de Senlis, while Henry, her son by King David, succeeded to the earldom of Huntingdon. The death of Henry, king of England, in 1135, and the disputed succession between his daughter the empress of Germany and his sister’s son Stephen, Earl of Mortaigne, presented the opportunity King David longed for. He embraced the cause of the empress, who was his niece, and in her name took possession of Northumberland, with the exception of the castle of Bamborough, which he soon after surrendered to Stephen, who confirmed the Honor of Huntingdon to Prince Henry, with Doncaster and the castle of Carlisle in addition to it. In the following year King David again claimed the northern provinces in name of his son Prince Henry, and both Northumberland and Cumberland were yielded to him; but on peace being made between him and Stephen he surrendered Northumberland, retaining, however, Cumberland in England. An attempt, two years afterwards, to regain Northumberland led to the battle of the Standard, in which David was defeated; but a peace was concluded in 1139, when Northumberland was made over to Prince Henry, except the fortresses of Newcastle and Bamborough, which he retained to his death in 1152, when King David had Malcolm, the eldest son of Prince Henry, proclaimed heir to the crown, and presented his second son, William, to the Northumbrian barons as their ruler. Malcolm had not been four years on the throne when he surrendered Northumberland and Cumberland to the king of England, which were annexed to the English crown, while the king restored to him the Honor of Huntingdon. An attempt on the part of his brother and successor, William the Lion, to regain these provinces, led to the war in which he was defeated and taken prisoner in 1173, and Huntingdon was taken from him and given to Simon de Senlis; but on the death of the latter in 1184 it was restored to King William, who bestowed it upon his youngest brother David, afterwards known as David, Earl of Huntingdon, in whose family it remained.[2] The claims of the Scottish kings upon the northern provinces of England were renewed by Alexander the Second, but through the mediation of Cardinal Otho, the Pope’s legate, all questions in dispute between England and Scotland were finally settled by an agreement concluded at York in September 1237. In lieu of the claims made by Alexander upon the earldoms of Northumberland, Cumberland, and Westmoreland, as his hereditary right, and for the dowry he ought to have received with Johanna, the sister of the king of England, whom he had married, King Henry undertook to convey to the King of Scotland in property, lands in the earldoms of Northumberland and Cumberland to the yearly value of two hundred pounds.[3] The lands so settled upon him were Tynedale, also called the barony of Werk, in Northumberland, and the crown demesne in Cumberland, consisting of Penrith and other lands, with the exception of the castle of Carlisle.

Such is a short sketch of the attempts made by the kings of Scotland to extend their frontiers to the south; and the result was that in the reign of Alexander the Third the southern boundary of Scotland was the same as it is at present, but Alexander was left in possession of the lands of Tynedale and Penrith beyond it, as a dependency of the kingdom, and they remained with his successor John Baliol, when they were finally lost to Scotland in the war of independence which followed his short and disastrous reign.

[Sidenote: Northern boundary of Scotland.]

But if the kings of this dynasty struggled vainly to enlarge their boundaries on the south, they were more successful in gradually extending the power of the crown over the northern and western provinces. David I. by successfully defeating and crushing the rebellion of Angus, Earl of Moray, in 1130, terminated the semi-independent state of that province, and no earl of this province was permitted to exist till King Robert Bruce bestowed it upon his nephew Randolph, but its guardianship was committed to different Scottish nobles, under the title of _Custos Moraviæ_.[4] The son of Malcolm MacHeth, who called himself the son of Earl Angus, attempted on the accession of Malcolm IV. to regain the province with the aid of the powerful Regulus of Argyll, but unsuccessfully, and their failure was followed by the northern seaboard, between Inverness and the Spey, where David I. had already planted the royal castle, being to a great extent taken from the native chiefs and given to strangers—a policy still further followed out by his successor William the Lion, who added the district of Ross, in which he built two castles; and the crown continued to maintain its control over these provinces, notwithstanding occasional attempts on the part of the Celtic inhabitants to regain their independence by supporting the pretensions of the families of MacWilliam and MacHeth. The province of Caithness too, which at this time included Sutherland, and had for generations belonged to the Norwegian earls of Orkney, who held it nominally under the king of Scotland with the title of Earl, was at length brought by the same monarch more directly under the power of the crown, and placed in the same position as the other Scottish provinces. By his son Alexander the Second the still more extensive province of Argathelia or Argyll, forming the western seaboard of Scotland, and extending from Loch Long, opening off the Firth of Clyde, to the borders of Caithness, was brought under subjection, so that in the reign of this king the power of the crown was firmly established over the whole mainland of Scotland north of the Firths of Forth and Clyde. The islands, however, which surrounded it still belonged to the kingdom of Norway. The Orkney and Shetland Islands had been colonised by the Norwegians as early as the ninth century. They had been ruled by a line of Norwegian Jarls, who owed submission to the king of Norway alone, and though the succession to these Jarls opened in the reign of William the Lion to two families of Scottish descent, they were still considered as Jarls under the Norwegian crown, and the islands did not become connected with the Scottish kingdom till long after the period we are dealing with. The Western Isles, however, stood in a different position. Although the Norwegian Vikings had to a great extent taken possession of them at the same time that they colonised Orkney, and they had been the subject of frequent contest between the Norwegian Jarl and the Danish kings of Dublin, who had acquired possession of the island of Man, they were still claimed by the Scottish kings as belonging to their kingdom, till the reign of Edgar, when they were formally ceded to the king of Norway. They were at this time along with the Isle of Man under the rule of petty kings of Norwegian descent, and this line of Norwegian kings of the Isles retained the whole till the year 1154, when the kingdom of the Isles was divided, and the islands south of the Point of Ardnamurchan passed under the rule of the Celtic ruler of Argyll, whose claim was derived through a descent in the female line from one of the Norwegian kings of the Isles, but who still held them nominally under the king of Norway. The tie to Norway, however, was becoming weaker and the connection with Scotland stronger, when the unsuccessful attempt of Hakon, king of Norway, to firmly re-establish his power over the whole of the islands in the reign of Alexander the Third, and his defeat and death, led to the cession of Man and the Isles in the year 1266 to the Scottish monarch. And in 1284 we find them settled upon the Maid of Norway as a dependency of the Scottish kingdom. The Western Islands became from this time firmly united to the rest of Scotland, while the island of Man, after being in the following century alternately in the possession of the Scots and the English, finally passed over to the English crown.

[Sidenote: Physical aspect of Scotland in the reign of Alexander the Third.]

Such then was, in extent, the Scotland of Alexander the Third, and of its physical aspect at this time we can also form a very fair conception. As early as the third century we are told that the Barbarian tribes beyond the bounds of the Roman province in Britain ‘inhabit mountains wild and waterless, and plains desert and marshy, having neither walls nor cities, nor tillage, but living by pasturage, the chase, and certain berries;’ and that ‘many parts being constantly flooded by the tides of the ocean become marshy.’[5] Had the writer of this description ever seen the Scotch mountains, probably ‘waterless’ is the very last epithet he would have thought of applying to them; and though the inhabitants are said to have had neither walls nor cities, yet no doubt every rock and height showed the rude fortification or hill fort, the remains of so many of which are still seen, and every rising ground, with its rude collection of huts, would be surrounded with its rampart of earth and stones. Adamnan, writing in the seventh century, tells us of the fortified residence of the king of the Picts on the banks of the river Ness, with its royal house and gates, of a village on the banks of a lake, and of the houses of the country people. Of the leading physical features of the country he tells us too, of the large inland lakes, Loch Ness and Loch Awe, and of the range of mountains forming the backbone of Britain, or great watershed dividing the eastern and western waters, and separating the Scots from the Picts;[6] and Bede, in the succeeding century, talks of the mountains which separated the southern from the northern Picts, and within which the former had seats.[7]

To some extent these features must have still characterised the Scotland of Alexander the Third. The aspect of the country became gradually altered by the hand of man as he advanced in civilisation. The introduction of Christianity, and its rapid spread over the country, would fill it with those rude Celtic monasteries which were everywhere established, and with small Christian colonies, who practised a rude agriculture; forests would be cut down and mosses drained; and in place of ‘those marshy parts of the country, constantly flooded by the tides of ocean,’ would appear those rich carses which border the estuaries of her great rivers. The climate would become ameliorated, towns and villages would spring up, and a more settled mode of life become established among the Celtic tribes which formed her population. An old description of Scotland north of the Firths, written in the first year of the reign of William the Lion, exhibits of course the same great physical landmarks, which do not alter, as still forming the leading territorial boundaries. ‘This region is said to exhibit the form and figure of a man. The chief part of the figure, that is, the head, is in Arregaithel, or Argyll, in the west part of Scotland, on the Irish Sea. His feet are upon the German Ocean. The mountains and deserts of Arregaithel form his head and neck, and his body is the range of mountains called Mound, or the Mounth, which extends from the western to the eastern sea. His arms are the mountains which separate Scotia from Arregaithel. His right side is formed from Moray, Ross, Marr, and Buchan. His legs are these two great and principal rivers the Tay and the Spey. Between the legs are Angus and Mearns, on this side of the Mounth, and other districts on the other side,’ that is, Marr and Buchan, ‘between the Spey and the Mounth.’[8] This description, which is fanciful enough, would place the head of the supposed figure at Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in Scotland. The body is formed by the great range of hills which separated Inverness-shire and Aberdeenshire from the counties of Perth, Forfar, and Kincardine, and which forms, as it were, the backbone of the Grampians, and these are the mountains obviously alluded to by Bede as separating the northern from the southern Picts. The arms are formed by the range of hills which run at right angles, and are the great watershed dividing the eastern and western waters. The southern part forming the left arm now separates Argyllshire from Perthshire, and the northern part, or right arm, divides the western seaboard of Inverness-shire and Ross-shire, which then formed part of Argyllshire, from the eastern districts of these counties, and these are equally plainly the Drumalban range, which in Adamnan’s time divided the Scots from the Picts.

Upon this scene, during the period when Scotland was under the rule of this dynasty, two great additional features were introduced. The first consisted of those Norman castles or strongholds, either built by the Norman barons to whom grants of land had been made, and which contributed so greatly to their power in the country, or by the kings of this race upon the crown lands; and around the latter would cluster those groups of dwellings, inhabited by traders and artisans, which, on the banks or at the mouths of navigable rivers, formed the burghs and seaport towns in which the trade and commerce of the country was carried on. The second great feature consisted of those monasteries founded by these kings for communities of regular canons or other monastic orders of the Roman Catholic Church, which, with their stone-and-lime buildings, the extensive tracts of land attached to them, and the industrial habits they fostered, would tend greatly to extend the cultivation of the soil, and to promote the social condition of the people under their influence.

We have a somewhat imperfect description of Scotland as it was in the time of Alexander the Third, compiled not long after his death. It commences at the eastern border between England and Scotland, and first names Tyvidale, that is, Teviotdale, with its two royal castles of Rokesborow or Roxburgh, and Geddeworth or Jedburgh, the latter a favourite residence of Alexander the Third. Then follows Lothian, with its castles of Berwick, Edinburgh, Dunbar, and Strivelyn or Stirling. These two provinces extend, it tells us, from the border to Erlesferie and Queneferie, that is, to the Firth of Forth. In the districts which extend in the west from the Clyde to the Solway it names only the new castle built upon the Ayr water, and in Galewey, Anandale the land of the Lord Robert de Brus, the royal castle of Dounfres or Dumfries, that of Kirkcudbright, belonging to William de Ferrers, and the castle of Baleswynton, belonging to John de Cumyn. The central districts are not named, but here was the extensive forest of Ettrick and Traquair separating the eastern from the western districts. Beyond Lothian, it tells us, lay the land of Fif or Fife, in which were the burgh of St. Andrews and the castle of Locres or Leuchars. Beyond the Firth of Tay was the land of Anegos or Angus, in which were the castles of Dundee and Forfar; and then follows ‘a certain waste called the Mounth, upwards of sixty miles long and sixteen broad, across which a most wretched passage can be taken to the north, without food’ (ubi est pessimum passagium sine cibo). Then follows Mar, and Bouwan or Buchan, in which is the burgh of Aberdene with its royal castle. Followed by the land of Morref or Moray, with the castles of Elgyn and Spiny, and then Ross and Cateneys or Caithness.[9]

This description seems to follow the coast, as the central districts of Gowry, Atholl, Stratherne, and Menteath are omitted, as well as the district of Arregaithel or Argyll, and the enumeration of the castles is very imperfect. Fordun, however, gives a view of Scotland in his day which is probably equally applicable to the time of Alexander the Third, and in which he seems to break out into enthusiastic admiration of his native country. ‘It is a country,’ he says, ‘strong by nature, and difficult and toilsome of access. In some parts it towers into mountains; in others it sinks down into plains. For lofty mountains stretch through the midst of it from end to end, as do the tall Alps through Europe, and these mountains formerly separated the Scots from the Picts, and their kingdoms from each other,’—a very accurate description of the Drumalban chain, extending through Scotland from south to north. ‘Impassable as they are on horseback, save in very few places,’ he proceeds, alluding here to the passes into Argyll, ‘they can hardly be crossed even on foot, both on account of the snow always lying on them, except in summer-time only, and by reason of the boulders torn off the beetling crags, and the deep hollows in their midst. Along the foot of these mountains are vast woods, full of stags, roe-deer, and other wild animals and beasts of various kinds.... Numberless springs also well up, and burst forth from the hills and the sloping ridges of the mountains, and trickling down with sweetest sound in crystal rivulets between flowery banks, flow together through the level vales, and give birth to many streams; and these again to large rivers, in which Scotia marvellously abounds beyond any other country; and at their mouths, where they rejoin the sea, she has noble and secure harbours. Scotia also has tracts of land bordering on the sea, pretty level and rich, with green meadows, and fertile and productive fields of corn and barley, and well adapted for growing beans, peas, and all other produce; destitute, however, of wine and oil though by no means so, of honey and wax. But in the upland districts, and along the highlands, the fields are less productive, except only in oats and barley. The country is there very hideous, interspersed with moors and marshy fields, muddy and dirty. It is, however, full of pasturage grass for cattle, and comely with verdure in the glens along the watercourses. This region abounds in wool-bearing sheep, and in horses; and its soil is grassy, feeds cattle and wild beasts, is rich in milk and wool, and manifold in its wealth of fish in sea, river, and lake.’[10]

We can thus, in some degree, picture to ourselves the Scotland of this period. Instead of the large tracts of cultivated land and the modern mansions of its possessors surrounded by plantations, we should see forests of trees of native growth, from amid which, or on their margin, would rise the towers of the royal castles, or those of the Norman barons. We should see small patches of cultivated land, interspersed with long stretches of barren heath. In sheltered valleys we should find the seats of the early bishoprics of the Celtic Church, and the more imposing monasteries of the regular clergy and monastic orders subsequently introduced, surrounded by a greater extent of cultivated land, and with the huts of the occupiers of the soil clustering round. On the banks of the navigable rivers, or at their mouth, we should find settlements of the trading and industrial population protected by rude walls; and we should find the northern and western districts exhibiting very much the same characteristics as they did during the succeeding centuries:—the two great leading mountain chains of the Mounth and Drumalban forming a succession of hunting-grounds or forests, left to the red-deer and other game; the minor chains leading from them to the south-east and north-east terminating abruptly on the lowland plains, and forming a great mountain barrier, extending on the south in an oblique line from Ben Lomond to the great range of the Mounth near Stonehaven, and on the north from the same range at Ballater to the river Nairn, through which the great rivers rising among the western hills pour their waters, through narrow gorges which form the passes into the mountain region. Within this line the country would be mainly used for pasturage, and its natural defences would render but few artificial fortifications necessary.

[Sidenote: Population of Scotland in the reign of Alexander the Third composed of six races.]

During the period when the boundaries of Scotland had been thus extended by the kings of this dynasty, its population was composed of several distinct races, partly of Teutonic and partly of Celtic origin, forming a people of very mixed descent, in which the Teutonic element was gradually predominating more and more over the Celtic, and either absorbing the latter or confining it to the more barren and mountain regions of the country. The constituent elements of this population bore six different names. These were the Picts and the Cumbrians or Britons, the Scots and Angles, the Norwegians, and the Franks or Normans, and we find them distinguished by these names under the rule of the Scoto-Saxon monarchs, till they gradually become merged in the general name of Scots. Thus the charters of Eadgar and Alexander the First are addressed to their subjects, both Scots and Angles. Those by David the First and Malcolm the Fourth sometimes to Scots and Angles, at other times to Franks or Normans and Angles, and frequently to Franks and Angles, Scots and Galwegians or Picts, while in the charters of the subsequent kings these distinctions disappear. When the whole force of the kingdom was called out by David the First at the invasion of England which terminated in the disastrous battle of the Standard, we find that his army, according to Richard of Hexham, was composed of Normans, Germans, Angles, Northumbrians and Cumbrians of Teviotdale, of Lothian, of Picts commonly called Galwegians, and of Scots,[11] while, according to Ailred, the army was arranged in the following battalions. The first was composed of the Galuenses or Galwegian Picts; the second of the Cumberenses and Teviotdalenses or Britons of Strathclyde and Teviotdale; the third of the Laodonenses, Insulani, and Lauernani, that is, a mixed battalion of Angles of Lothian, Norwegians of the Isles, and the Gaelic people of the Lennox; and the king had in his own battalion the Scotti and Muravenses, that is, the people of Scotland between the Forth and the Spey and of the great province of Moray, which he had recently subjected, beyond it, and along with them ‘Milites Angli et Franci,’[12] or Saxon and Norman barons.

[Sidenote: Indigenous races of the Britons and Picts.]

Of these races two only were indigenous, and the rest were intruders. To the indigenous races belonged the Cumbrians or Britons south of the Firths of Forth and Clyde, and the Picts, who originally inhabited the whole country north of these estuaries, as well as Galloway and a considerable part of Ireland. Both belonged to the Celtic race, the former to that branch of it, the dialect of which is represented by the Welsh, Cornish, and Breton, and perhaps in the main most nearly approached the Cornish in the form of their speech. But whether the Picts were altogether a homogeneous people may perhaps be a question. From the time when they first became known to the Romans, they appear throughout as divided into two branches; but whether the expression of the Roman historian, when he terms these two divisions of the Pictish people two nations, indicates any diversity of race, or whether, as the language of Bede rather implies, the distinction was simply geographical, certainly in one important respect they for a time showed a material difference, for the southern Picts adopted Christianity at a much earlier period than the northern Picts, and they were so far disunited that the conversion of the former did not imply that of the whole nation, and for a century and a half, while the southern portion were nominally Christian, the northern half remained Pagan. Every circumstance, however, connected with them, tends to show that the Picts who inhabited the northern and western regions of Scotland, as well as Galloway and the districts in Ireland, belonged to the Gaelic race and spoke a Gaelic dialect, while the southern Picts, placed between them and a British people, present features which appear to assimilate them to both; and the conclusion we came to was that they were probably originally of the same Gaelic race, while a British element had entered into their language, either from mixture with that people, or from some other influence arising from their contact.

[Sidenote: Colonising races of Scots and Angles.]

The sixth century brought in both an additional Gaelic and a Teutonic element into the population of this part of Britain, for in the beginning of that century a colony of Scots from Ireland, who were undoubtedly a Gaelic people, settled on the barren coasts on the north side of the Firth of Clyde, and the same century saw the eastern seaboard, extending from the Tweed to the Firth of Forth, in possession of the Angles of Northumberland; while there is reason to believe that some parts of the country between these limits had been previously partially settled by Frisian tribes belonging to the great Saxon confederation.

[Sidenote: Intruding races of Danes, Norwegians, and Normans.]

In the ninth century the great outburst of piratical adventurers from the Scandinavian shores brought first the Danes and afterwards the Norwegians to Scotland, and the latter not only colonised the Orkney and Shetland Islands but became masters of the Western Isles, and from time to time of considerable districts on the mainland of Scotland. During the reigns of the earlier kings of this dynasty the Saxon influence was largely increased by those who either took refuge in Scotland from the power of the Norman Conqueror or were attracted by the connection of these kings through their mother with the Saxon royal family; while David the First introduced the Norman barons, who obtained large tracts of land on both sides of the Firths of Forth and Clyde under his auspices and that of his immediate successors.

[Sidenote: Influence of foreign races on native population.]

In estimating the extent to which these foreign elements influenced the original inhabitants, and how far they formed a permanent ingredient in the mixed population, it is necessary to keep in view the circumstances under which they obtained a footing in the country, and the peculiar features which characterised the intruders. Did they enter the country as colonists or as conquerors? If the former, did they come as military colonists? or did they bring their wives and families with them? Or, if the latter, did they amalgamate with the conquered population so as to form one people, the language and institutions of one or other obtaining the mastery over the whole? or did they exterminate or drive them out? or were the remains of the conquered people retained as a servile class under the conquerors? The first recorded settlements which have a historical basis were those of the Scots on the west coast and of the Angles on the east. Of these the Scots appear to have come more as colonists than as invaders. They were a tribe of Scots who came from the district of Dalriada in Ireland in the beginning of the sixth century, and brought that name with them which was applied to the southern part of the great western district of Argyll. They belonged to the same Gaelic race as the Pictish tribes among whom they were settled, and the oldest tradition as reported by Bede cannot tell whether ‘they secured to themselves these settlements by fair means or by force of arms.’[13] The conversion of the northern Picts to Christianity by the Irish missionary St. Columba, and the establishment of a Christian church among them under Scottish clergy, now formed a bond of union between them; and it is recorded by Bede that up to the time when he wrote his History their mutual boundaries had remained unaltered. In the same century the Angles of Bernicia, under the sons of Ida, who had founded that kingdom, obtained possession of the districts extending along the east coast as far as the Firth of Forth. They were a Pagan people, conquering a Christian population of a different race and language from themselves; and there seems little reason to question that this settlement was only effected after a fierce and prolonged struggle between the Angles and the native population, by which, after varied fortunes on either side, the latter were eventually either exterminated or driven into the more hilly and barren regions on the west. There were thus formed four distinct kingdoms, which remained independent of each other during the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries, viz. those of the Picts and of the Cumbrian Britons consisting of the two indigenous races, and those of the Scots of Dalriada and Angles of Bernicia established by two of the intruding peoples; and their mutual boundaries had remained unaltered down to the period when Bede wrote in the eighth century.

[Sidenote: Foreign elements introduced into population of Pictish and Cumbrian territories.]

It was not till the ninth century that those changes in their relative position commenced which ultimately led to their fusion into one mixed population. A revolution in that century led to a dynasty of kings of Scottish descent being permanently placed on the Pictish throne, and to a Scottish element being largely and to an increasing extent introduced into the Pictish population. The capital of the Pictish kingdom had at this time been Scone, and around this central point the new Scottish monarchy had its chief influence, and in the neighbouring districts the new Scottish population would be most numerous. The province of Fife seems to have been considered as their main seat, and they appear to have spread over the central districts of the region extending from the Forth to the great barrier of the Mounth, while the more independent portion of its Pictish population appear at its two extremities in the _firu Fortren_ or men of Fortren, who had their chief stronghold in Dundurn at the eastern end of Lochearn, and in the _viri de Moerne_ or men of Mearns, whose principal fortress was _Dunfother_ or Dunnottar at Stonehaven. These Scots and Picts, belonging to the same Gaelic race and speaking kindred dialects, would amalgamate readily enough, and they would probably be found at this time established alongside of each other in homesteads some of which would be Scottish and others Pictish,—a state of matters of which we find examples in northern Russia, where the earlier Finnish population and the intruding Slavs occupy respective villages, and in parts of Greece, where the distribution of the Albanian and the Greek population presents the same features. This view of the distribution of the Scottish and Pictish communities in the new kingdom of Alban, to which the name of Scotia was soon applied, will to some extent account for the strange interlacing in this part of the country of the three earliest dioceses of Dunkeld, of Abernethy, afterwards represented by the dioceses of Dunblane and Brechin, and of St. Andrews,—the two former being traditionally connected with the Pictish name, and the latter closely identified with the Scottish people. Diocesan boundaries are usually found to reflect more ancient ethnic divisions.

The Scottish dynasty of kings had not occupied the Pictish throne for more than sixty or seventy years when the failure of the line of British kings of the Strathclyde Britons, and the election of a brother of the Scottish king to be their successor, placed a similar dynasty of Scottish kings on the throne of the Cumbrian kingdom, and made its eventual cession to the Scottish monarch a more natural and easy arrangement; and the cession of Lothian in the following century completed the territorial formation of the later Scottish kingdom.

[Sidenote: Spread of Teutonic people over them.]

Such being the state of matters when the dynasty of kings sprung from the union of Malcolm Ceannmor with the Saxon Princess Margaret ruled over this kingdom, we find when we reach the reign of Alexander the Third that a great change has taken place. The British speech has entirely disappeared from the district forming the ancient Strathclyde kingdom, and their population now speak the same Northumbrian or northern dialect of English with the people of Lothian; while this Teutonic language has likewise spread over the eastern districts extending from the Forth to the Moray Firth, where in the reign of Malcolm Ceannmor that Celtic king had had to interpret the Saxon speech of his queen to its inhabitants, and the indigenous Gaelic vernacular was now confined to the mountain regions of the North and West north of the Firths of Forth and Clyde, while the people of Lennox and Galloway, within the limits of the ancient Cumbrian kingdom, likewise retained their Gaelic speech. There had, therefore, taken place in these districts a silent revolution, of which history has taken little note.

Besides the violent or organic changes produced in a population by the invasion or colonisation of a foreign people which history marks, and the effects of which we can trace in the events recorded in the annals of the country, there is another silent and inorganic spread of one race over the territory of another, the eventual results of which are apparent enough, and the causes which led to it may be divined, but the steps of its progress are less easily marked. In the one, whole nations or tribes take possession of part or the whole of new districts; in the other, they spread not collectively but in families or groups. In the one, the inroad is effected by force or by direct convention. In the other, it is the result of natural causes arising from the contact of two races possessing different qualities and states of civilisation, and from the influence which the force of character of one people may exercise over another. Their influence, too, upon the spoken language and the place-names of the people presents itself in different aspects. In the one, the language of the invading people is established as the language of the country when the subject population has been exterminated or driven out, and the older place-names are either adopted into the language or changed at once. In the other, the silent and gradual inorganic colonisation changes by degrees the spoken language, but not the bulk of the place-names. The great natural features of the country usually retain the names imposed upon them by its original inhabitants, but those of the homesteads occupied by the colonising race assume the forms of their language, and those applicable to the dwellings of man only remain unchanged when the original people have lingered longer, or when the name is expressive of some common natural feature, which has been readily adopted as such by the intruders. Topography thus affords us some help in indicating the presence of the stranger, and marking the extent to which the race to which he belongs has spread over the country.

When Earl David, as Prince of Cumbria, proposed to restore the ancient church of Glasgow, and asked the elders and wise men of Cumbria to inquire into the ancient possessions of that church, they told him that after Kentigern, the founder of the church, and several of his successors, had passed to God, ‘various seditions and insurrections rising all around not only destroyed the church and its possessions, but, laying waste the whole country, delivered its inhabitants into exile. Thus, also, all good being exterminated, after a considerable interval of time different tribes of different nationalities pouring in from different parts inhabited this deserted country, but being of separate race, speaking a dissimilar language, and living after different fashion, not easily agreeing among themselves, they maintained paganism rather than the cultivation of the faith. The Lord, however, who wills that none should perish, was pleased to visit, in his clemency, these unhappy inhabitants of a condemned habitation, irrationally dwelling after the manner of beasts. In the days of Henry, king of England, Alexander reigning as king in Scotia, God sent them David, brother-german of the foresaid king, as prince and leader, who corrected their obscene and wicked contagion, and bridled their contumelious contumacy with nobleness of soul and inflexible severity.’[14] This picture, coloured no doubt to deepen the shade of the past, and to brighten the prospects of the country under David’s rule, still sufficiently indicates the belief that the British inhabitants had to a great extent deserted the country, and that it had been repeatedly laid waste by foreign nations, who had eventually settled in the country. The allusion to the paganism of some refers probably to the Norwegians and Danes, the former of whom in 870 besieged their capital Alclyde, now Dumbarton, and destroyed it after a few months’ siege, and carried a great host of prisoners with them to Ireland into captivity, and five years afterwards the Britons of Strathclyde and Picts of Galloway were ravaged by the Danes of Northumberland. A Welsh chronicle, attributed to Caradoc of Llancarvan, tells us that in ‘891 the men of Strathclyde, who would not unite with the Saxons, were obliged to leave their country, and go to Gwynedd or North Wales.’[15] In 945 it was ravaged by Edmund, king of Wessex, and ceded to the Scots. In 1000, Ethelred, king of Wessex, entered Cumbria, ravaged it nearly all, and it was again laid waste; and in 1070, Gospatric, Earl of Northumbria, having collected a considerable force, made a furious incursion into the Cumbrian kingdom, then under the dominion of the Scottish king Malcolm, spreading slaughter and conflagration on all sides. These notices sufficiently bear out that feature in the dark picture of the past history of the British kingdom, and we may well believe that under these repeated devastations, and under the Scottish dominion, its Welsh population, isolated in the north between Picts, Scots, and Angles, and harassed by incessant invasions, would gradually retreat to their mother country of Wales, and that their neighbours would gradually settle in the partially deserted country.

There are some indications of earlier settlements among them of Frisians, who left their name in Dunfres, the town of the Frisians, as Dunbreatan or Dumbarton is the town of the Britons,[16] and the subjection of the Cumbrian kingdom to the Angles of Northumbria for thirty years prior to 685 must have had an effect on its population; but, be this as it may, the neighbouring Anglic population, attracted by her fertile plains and valleys, appear at a later period to have made their way into the upper valley of the Tweed and Teviot, and along the banks of the great watercourse of the Clyde, and to the plains of Renfrew and Ayr, where they have left evidence of their settlements in the numerous Saxon place-names ending with the generic terms of _ton_ and _hame_, while the northern district, where the limits of the Cumbrian kingdom penetrated into the mountains—the district surrounding the romantic lake of Loch Lomond—seems soon to have acquired a Gaelic population, and became known as the Levenach or Lennox. The Gaelic population of Galloway at the same time appear to have encroached upon the southern limit of Ayrshire and peopled the district of Garrick with a Gaelic race. Extensive territories too were granted by Earl David to his Norman followers. The great district of Annandale was given to De Bruce. The adjacent districts of Eskdale and Ewisdale were filled with Normans. The De Morevilles obtained Cuninghame or the northern district of Ayrshire, and the Norman Fitzallan, who became the Steward of Scotland, acquired Strathgryff, or Renfrew and part of Kyle. These Norman barons settled their Northumbrian followers on their lands, and thus almost the whole of the ancient kingdom of the Cumbrian Britons became soon entirely Saxonised.

A similar process seems to have commenced in the eastern districts north of the Forth after the union of the Celtic monarch with the Saxon princess had given the Saxon influence predominance in the country, and stamped his children with the character and feeling of Saxon monarchs, which soon produced a similar result. We find Saxon barons, who fled to Scotland from the power of the Norman Conqueror, acquiring lands in the province of Fife. The burghs founded by the kings of this race on the crown lands were filled with Saxon and Flemish traders, and the latter people obtained grants of land. Thus we find Malcolm the Fourth granting the lands of Innes ‘Beroaldo Flandrensi,’ and David, Earl of Huntingdon, grants lands in Garrioch to Malcolm, son of Bertolf, a Flemish name, and his charter is addressed to ‘all good men of his kingdom, French or Normans, English or Angles, Flemish and Scotch.’[17] The great religious houses established by them brought southern ecclesiastics into the northern parts of the kingdom, who were accompanied by a southern following; and on the extensive church lands we find the sole remains of the Celtic population appearing as serfs, under the Celtic appellations of ‘Cumlawes’ and ‘Cumherbes,’[18] and large territories speedily passed into the possession of Norman barons, who settled them with their own followers.

In the scanty records which throw light upon the history of the land in these districts, we can see the Gaelic name of the land-owners gradually becoming more and more restricted, and retreating before the Teutonic settlers. We can see more and more of the land becoming feudalised, and being held by the followers of the barons in military tenure. The church lands, forming a large proportion of the whole, became in fact agricultural colonies of strangers. In the crown lands alone the older land tenures maintained their position for a time, though there too the increasing importance of the royal burghs, and the gradual advance of their Saxon inmates into the surrounding land, soon carried the Saxon tongue into them; and thus the old Celtic kingdom of Alban or Scotia, extending from the Firth of Forth to the river Spey, had in the reign of Alexander the Third assumed an entirely Teutonic aspect, while what Fordun tells us of Malcolm the Fourth, that ‘having gathered together a large army, the king removed the rebel nation of the Moravienses from the land of their birth, as of old Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, had dealt with the Jews, and scattered them throughout the other districts of Scotland, both beyond the mountains,’ that is, the Mounth,‘and on this side thereof, so that not even one native of that land abode there, and installed therein his own peaceful people,’[19] is probably to some extent true in so far as regards the inhabitants of the plain country extending from the Spey along the southern shore of the Moray Firth to the river Nairn, in which the royal castles of Elgin, Forres, and Nairn were situated, and which formed the three small sheriffdoms of these names. It is not at all unlikely that that king, or his successor William the Lion, should have adopted the policy of interposing between the native population, ‘who,’ Fordun tells us, ‘would, for neither prayers nor bribes, neither treaties nor oaths, leave off their disloyal ways, or their ravages among their fellow-countrymen,’ and the frontier of the province a tract of country, garrisoned, as it were, with the more settled people of the lowlands.

[Sidenote: Norwegian kingdom of the Isles.]

But if this silent and gradual immigration of the Teutonic people thus took place into the southern and eastern districts of the country north of the Forth and Clyde, and either absorbed its Celtic inhabitants or gradually drove them back into the more mountainous regions, the latter were exposed to a more direct assault from another people of Teutonic race on the north and west, which, however, did not produce the same permanent effect upon the population. This was that strange and sudden appearance in the northern and western seas of a piratical horde of sea-robbers, which issued from the Scandinavian countries lying to the north of Germany. The first to make their appearance were the Danes, and though they repeatedly ravaged the Western Isles and destroyed the Christian monasteries, they effected permanent settlements only in Ireland, and in the northern provinces of England forming the ancient kingdom of Northumbria. They were followed by the Norwegians, who appear to have been more attracted by the islands surrounding Scotland, and thus came more immediately in contact with the Gaelic population of Scotland. They entirely occupied the islands of Orkney and Shetland, which they colonised; and took possession of the Western Isles, without, however, driving out or absorbing the previous inhabitants of Gaelic race.

By the Gaelic people these northern ravagers were termed either _Geinnte_ or Gentiles as being pagans, or _Gall_ or Strangers as being foreigners, and the two races of the Danes and Norwegians were distinguished by the terms _Dubhgeinnte_ or _Dubhgall_, that is, black pagans or black strangers, and _Finngeinnte_ or _Finngall_,[20] white pagans or white strangers, and the Western Islands were termed _Innsigall_, or the Islands of the Strangers, while the Norwegians themselves called them the Sudreys or Southern Islands, to distinguish them from the Nordereys or Northern Islands, that is, the Orkney and Shetland Islands.[21]

[Sidenote: The Gallgaidheal.]

That the Norwegians did not so thoroughly colonise the Western Isles and absorb its Gaelic population, as was the case with the Orkney and Shetland Islands, may have arisen from their finding in the former a more dense population, and also that they appear to have used the Sudreys more as a kind of stepping-stone to other settlements, or as temporary strongholds, rather than as places for lasting settlements, and thus their Norwegian population was generally of a more transient and fluctuating character;[22] but this was mainly true of the earlier period of their occupation only, and a more important ground of difference arose from the Gaelic population of the Western Isles more nearly assimilating themselves to the character of the Norwegian sea-robbers. They seem to have submitted easily to their rule, and to have adopted their habits, so that when one of the great Norwegian Vikings, Ketill Flatnose, succeeded in establishing a petty kingdom in the Isles in opposition to the rapidly increasing power of Harald Harfager, the first monarch who acquired the dominion of all Norway, we find the Isles said by the Sagas to be in the possession of Scotch and Irish Vikings, and Ketill appears in the Irish Annals under the name of Caittil Finn as the leader of a people called the Gallgaidheal, a name applied to those Gaidheal who became subject to the Norwegians, and conformed to their mode of life. Harald, however, eventually conquered both the Orkney Islands and the Sudreys or Western Isles. The former came under the rule of a line of Norwegian Jarls, who, by the marriage of one of them with the daughter of ‘Dungadr, Jarl of Katenes,’ that is, of Duncan, the Celtic Mormaer of Caithness, added that province to their dominions; and the Norwegian population seem to have as completely colonised the eastern and level part of Caithness as they did the Orkney Islands.

Harald appears to have governed the Western Isles by Norwegian Jarls, but his hold upon them was slight, and apparently ceased with his death, and they became merely the haunt of stray Vikings until the middle of the following century, when their possession was contested between the Danes of Dublin and Limerick, who had got a firm hold of the Island of Man, and the Norwegian Jarls of Orkney. One of the principal leaders of the Danes of Dublin, Anlaf Cuaran, had become connected with the Scottish King Constantine, and appears to have exercised some authority over the islands; but at the great battle of Brunanburgh, in which he and his father-in-law Constantine were engaged, we find the death of Geleachan, King of the Isles, recorded, as well as that of Cellach, a prince or Mormaer of Scotland,[23] names which undoubtedly show a Gaelic form. Soon after we find Maccus or Magnus, son of Aralt, a leader of the Danes of Limerick, called King of Many Islands, and a struggle took place between his brother and successor Godfred, son of Aralt, called King of Innsigall, and Sigurd, Norwegian Jarl of Orkney, for the possession of the western Isles, when the former was slain by the Gaelic people of Dalriada or Argyll, and the Isles were acquired by the Orkney Jarl, who soon after added to his territories the western and northern districts of Scotland. His territories are said in the Sagas to have consisted, besides Orkney and the Sudreys, of Katanes, Sudrland, Myrhaevi or Moray, and Dali or the glens of Argyll, on the west, and we find a Jarl Gilli apparently ruling the Isles, whose principal seat was the island of Coll, and whose name has a Gaelic form.[24] He pays scatt or tribute to Sigurd, and obtained his sister in marriage. Under Sigurd’s son Thorfinn, the most powerful of the Orkney Jarls, after the defeat and death of King Duncan in 1040, the whole of the northern districts of Scotland, as far as the river Tay, fell under the power of the Norwegians, who likewise possessed the Sudreys or Western Isles and the Gaelic district of Galloway, while Macbeth, the Mormaer of Moray, ruled as king over the dominions left to him, and the other districts south of the Firths of Forth and Clyde adhered to the family of Duncan; but on the death of Thorfinn, we are told that the additional territories acquired by him fell back to their native lords. Malcolm, the son and heir of Duncan, succeeded in defeating and killing the usurper Macbeth, and his successor Lulach, also of the family of the Mormaers of Moray, and establishing himself as king over the same territories which had been possessed by his father. The Western Isles pass for a time under the power of an Irish king of Leinster, which shows how powerful the Gaelic element in their populations still was, and on his death fell under the authority of the Crown. At this time the Isle of Man was in the possession of the Danish kings of Dublin, but a powerful Norwegian Viking who had joined the expedition of Harald, king of Norway, in 1066, with his followers, and fought at the battle of Stamford Bridge, succeeded after that defeat in driving the Danes out of Man and extending his power over the Western Isles, where he founded a new dynasty of Norwegian kings of the Isles. He is termed in the Chronicle of Man Godred Crovan, and, in the Irish Annals, Goffraig Meranach, king of the Galls of Dublin and the Isles, where his death,[25] which, according to the Chronicle of Man, took place in the island of Isla, is recorded in 1095. The Isles had, however, two years before been invaded by Magnus, king of Norway, and brought under his dominion, and were eventually formally ceded to him by King Eadgar in the beginning of his reign, who thus, for a time, terminated their nominal connection with the Scottish kingdom. After the death of King Magnus, we find the leading men of the Isles applying to the king of Ireland to send them some person of worth of the royal family to act as their king till Olave, the son of Godred, should grow up, and Donald, son of Tadg, was sent, who is said in the Annals of Innisfallen to have acquired the kingdom of Innsigall by force,[26] but was driven out when the king of Norway sent a Norwegian named Ingemund. But on his attempting to have himself appointed king, he was attacked and slain by the chief men of the Isles, and Olave, the son of Godred Crovan, was established as king over all the Isles, and ruled them for forty years. The Norwegians at this time still possessed the western seaboard of Scotland north of the Firth of Clyde, and the district of Galloway. According to the Red Book of Clanranald, ‘All the islands from Manann, or the Isle of Man, to Arca, or the Orkneys, and all the bordering country from Dun Bretan, or Dumbarton, to Cata, or Caithness, in the north, were in the possession of the Lochlannach or Norwegians, and such of the Gaedhal of those lands as remained were protecting themselves in the woods and mountains.’[27]

This is probably a true picture of the relative position of the Norwegian and the Gaelic population at this time, and is no doubt equally applicable to the district of Galloway; but, during the rule of Olave over the Isles, a simultaneous effort seems to have been made by the Gaelic inhabitants of both districts to free this mainland border country from the presence of the Norwegians. The leader of the native Gaelic population of Argyll was Somerled, and of that of Galloway was Fergus. The former bears certainly a Norwegian name, but the names of father and grandfather have been preserved. He was son of Gillebride, son of Gille-adomnan, and these names are of too purely a Gaelic form to indicate anything but a Gaelic descent, and they are said in the Book of Clanranald to have taken refuge from the Norwegians in Ireland, and to have had a hereditary right to the mainland territories possessed by the latter. The name of the father of Fergus of Galloway has not been preserved, but his own name is a purely Gaelic form, and his personal qualities probably raised him to the leadership of the Gaelic population. Macvurich describes Gillebride, the father of Somerled, as being present at a conference held by the Macmahons and Maguires in Fermanagh, and obtaining help from them to regain his inheritance in Scotland. He went over to Scotland with his son Somerled and a band of followers, and when in the mountains and woods of Ardgour and Morvern, they were surprised by a large force of Norwegians, who were, however, eventually defeated by Somerled and his party; and, adds Macvurich, ‘he did not halt in the pursuit until he drove them northward across the river Sheil, and he did not cease from that work until he cleared the western side of Alban from such of the Norwegians as had acquired the dominion of the islands, with the exception of the island called Innsigall, and he gained victory over his enemies in every field of battle.’[28] We have no record of what took place in Galloway, except that the result appears to have been the same, for we find the people of Galloway joining the army of King David at the Battle of the Standard under their Celtic leaders, and Fergus fully established in his reign as Lord of Galloway. The Norwegians, however, were not allowed even to retain quiet possession of the Isles, and Somerled, who now appears as Regulus of Argyll, succeeded in eventually wresting the Southern Isles from them. Macvurich tells us that after he had cleared the mainland of the Norwegians ‘he spent some time in war, and another time in peace,’ and during one of these intervals peace appears to have been concluded between the leaders of the Gaelic population and the Norwegian king Olave, for the latter married Afreca, daughter of Fergus, the Celtic lord of Galloway, by whom he had a son, Godred, and gave one of his own daughters to Somerled, the Celtic Regulus of Argyll, in marriage, who had by her four sons, Dubhgal, Reginald, Angus, and Olave.[29] During the reign of Olave he is said by the Chronicle of Man to have ‘lived upon such terms of union with all the kings of Ireland and Scotland that no one dared to disturb the kingdom of the Isles as long as he was alive;’ but after his death the two populations came again into conflict, which resulted in the Gaelic population of Galloway maintaining their independence, and those of Argyll adding a large portion of the Islands to the dominions of their leader. Olave was slain in the island of Man by the sons of his brother Harold, who had formed a conspiracy against him in the year 1152, upon which, we are told in the Chronicle of Man, the conspirators divided the land among themselves, and a few days afterwards, having collected a fleet, they sailed over to Galloway, intending to conquer it for themselves. The Galloway men, however, formed themselves in a body and assailed them with great impetuosity; whereupon they speedily fled in great confusion, and either slew or expelled from it all the men of Galloway who were resident within the island.’[30] In the following year Godred, the son of Olave, arrived with some ships from Norway, and was elected by the chiefs of the Isles as their king; but he was no sooner secure in his kingdom than he became tyrannical to his chief men, some of whom he dispossessed, and others he degraded from their dignities. One of the most powerful of these, Thorfinn, son of Otter, went to Somerled and asked to have his son Dubhgal, whose mother was King Olave’s daughter, that he might set him on the throne of the Isles, and taking him through the Isles he forced the chiefs to acknowledge him for their sovereign, and to give hostages for their allegiance. Another of these chiefs called Paul fled privately to Godred, who seems to have been in Man, and told him what had taken place, when he immediately collected his followers, got his ships ready, and sailed to meet the enemy. Somerled, too, collected a fleet of eighty vessels, and a sea-battle was fought between Godred and Somerled, during the night of the Epiphany, with great slaughter on both sides, and next morning they came to a compromise, and divided the sovereignty of the Isles, ‘so that from that period they have formed two distinct monarchies till the present time.’[31]

Somerled was slain, as we know, at Renfrew in the year 1164, and on his death his eldest son Dubhgal appears to have succeeded him in his mainland territories, while his possessions in the Isles fell to his second son Reginald with the Norwegian title of king. Godred died in the Isle of Man in the year 1187, and was succeeded by his eldest son Reginald. There thus came to be two Reginalds reigning over the Isles at the same time, the Norwegian Reginald the son of Godred, and the Celtic Reginald the son of Somerled. Both bore the title of King of the Isles, and thus they are often confounded. There is preserved in the Book of Fermoy a curious poem which throws some light on the state of the Isles at this time.[32] It consists mainly of a panegyric on the Norwegian Reginald, but appears to allude likewise to the other Reginald. When the Isles were divided, those which lie south of the Point of Ardnamurchan appear to have fallen to the share of Somerled, and his son Reginald seems to have had his chief seat in the island of Isla. The Isles retained by the Norwegians consisted of Skye, the Long Island, and the islands of Tyree and Coll. The latter island of Coll, which we find was the chief seat of the Jarls who had ruled the Isles under the king of Norway prior to the establishment of the Norwegian kingdom of the Isles, appears to have remained as the chief seat of the Norwegian Reginald, for he is addressed in the poem as king of Coll. The islands of Arran and Bute in the Firth of Clyde appear to have been shared between the two Reginalds, the Norwegian retaining Arran, which forms a prominent feature in the poem under the poetic name of _Eamain Abhlach_ or Eamania of the apple-trees,[33] and Bute passing over to the Celtic Reginald.

It is unnecessary for our present purpose to follow the history of the Western Isles further. Suffice it to say that Argyll came under the power of the Crown in 1222, when Alexander the Second firmly established his authority over this extensive western region. In 1196 William the Lion had brought the great northern district of Caithness under subjection, and severed the southern half of it, which he placed under a Scotch lord, and in the same reign of Alexander the Second, the restricted earldom of Caithness passed into the possession of a branch of the Celtic family of the Earl of Angus, and he died in the island of Kerreray while endeavouring to wrest the Isles from Norway. In the following reign the whole kingdom of the Isles passed into the possession of the Scottish monarch, the last Norwegian king of Man having died in 1265, and the Isles being formally ceded to Alexander the Third in 1266; and thus the power of the Norwegians entirely disappeared from the mainland of Scotland and from the Western Isles, the islands of Orkney and Shetland alone remaining as a dependency of the kingdom of Norway.

During the entire duration of this Norwegian kingdom of the Isles, we see the frequent appearance of a subordinate body termed the Princes or Chiefs of the Isles,[34] whose recognition of the authority of the king was necessary to his assumption of that position. We see them electing a king and occasionally deposing a king; and that this body consisted of persons partly of Norwegian and partly of Gaelic descent is evident, from their sometimes deferring to the authority of the king of Norway, and at other times appealing to Ireland for aid. When the Norwegian influence was paramount, they would accept the control of the Norwegian monarch. When the Gaelic influence predominated, they seem invariably to have fallen back upon the kindred Gael of Ireland, and come under their influence. The inferior population of the Isles throughout was probably Gaelic, who formed the actual occupiers of the soil under superior lords, some of Norwegian and some of native descent.

When the partition of the kingdom of the Isles took place between Olave and Somerled, the Southern Isles, which thus passed under the rule of a native lord, would naturally attract to them the Gaelic population, both chiefs and people, while the chiefs of Norwegian descent would as naturally withdraw to the Northern Isles, which remained under Norwegian rule; and thus the Norwegian population would become more restricted to these islands, while that of the Southern Isles would become more purely Gaelic; accordingly we find the Norwegian place-names in Skye and the Long Island are more numerous and more thoroughly spread over the Isles than in the islands south of the Point of Ardnamurchan, a result we might also naturally expect from the Norwegian occupation of the former having lasted a century longer than that of the latter. We should also expect to find that after the partition of the Isles the Northern Islands would become comparatively deserted by the lower class of the population, the actual occupiers of the soil; and the condition of these islands at this time may be gathered from the Chronicle of Man, where it tells us that the Norwegian king Reginald ‘gave his brother Olave the island which is called _Leodhus_ or Lewis, which though larger than any of the other isles is mountainous, rocky, and almost entirely inaccessible. It is of course thinly peopled, and the inhabitants live mostly by hunting and fishing. To this island Olave retired, and lived in the way of poverty. Seeing the island could not support him and his followers, he went confidentially to his brother Reginald, who was at that time resident in the Islands, and thus accosted him: Brother, my lord and sovereign, thou art conscious that the kingdom of the Isles is my birthright, but as the Almighty hath appointed thee to rule over them, I neither envy nor begrudge thee this royal dignity. Let me now only entreat thee to appoint me some portion of land in the Islands, where I may live creditably with my people; for the island of _Leodhus_, which thou hast given me, is insufficient for my maintenance.’[35] Apparently Reginald saw no way of satisfying his demand, and found an easier solution in making him prisoner and sending him to King William the Lion, who imprisoned him during the rest of his reign.

We likewise see from the Chronicle of Man that there was frequent intermarriage between the two races who occupied the islands, and this would not only lead to the introduction of personal names of Norwegian form into families of pure Gaelic descent in the male line, but must to a great extent have altered the physical type of the Gaelic race in the islands; but there is no reason to suppose that, after the entire defeat of the Norwegians in the reign of Alexander the Third, and the cession of the kingdom of the Isles to him, there remained in them many families of pure Norwegian descent, and from the population of Scotland, as we find it in his reign, the Norwegian element, never probably a very permanent and essential ingredient, must now have entirely disappeared.

[Sidenote: The Estate of the Realm in 1283.]

When the ‘Communitas’ or Estates of Scotland met at Scone on the 5th of February 1283, to regulate the succession to the crown, we find that the great holders of the land in Scotland consisted at this time, first, of thirteen of the great hereditary earldoms, one of which was held by a family of Anglic descent, and four by Norman barons who had succeeded by inheritance in the female line to the ancient Celtic earls; and, secondly, of twenty-four barons, of whom eighteen at least represented the Norman baronage of the kingdom, while the Celtic element is represented only by three families descended from Somerled, the great Celtic Lord of Argyll;[36] and when Edward the First placed the whole of Scotland under four justiciaries in 1305, we find the country south of the Firths of Forth and Clyde still divided into the two great districts of Lothian and Galloway, but the lands beyond the Scottish Sea, that is, north of these firths, are now for the first time differently grouped, one division consisting of the country between the river of Forth and the mountains, and the other of the lands beyond the mountains, or that part of the country to which the Gaelic population was now restricted.[37]

[Sidenote: Distinction of population into Teutonic Lowlanders and Gaelic Highlanders.]

The account given by Fordun of the distribution of the population in his day entirely corresponds with this. He says—‘The manners and customs of the Scots vary with the diversity of their speech, for two languages are spoken amongst them, the Scottish and the Teutonic, the latter of which is the language of those who occupy the seaboard and plains, while the race of Scottish speech inhabits the highlands and outlying islands. The people of the coast are of domestic and civilised habits, trusty, patient, and urbane, decent in their attire, affable and peaceful, devout in divine worship, yet always prone to resist a wrong at the hands of their enemies. The highlanders and people of the islands, on the other hand, are a savage and untamed nation, rude and independent, given to rapine, ease-loving, of a docile and warm disposition, comely in person but unsightly in dress, hostile to the English people and language, and, owing to diversity of speech, even to their own nation, and exceedingly cruel. They are, however, faithful and obedient to their king and country, and easily made to submit to law if properly governed.’[38]

This description is no doubt to some extent coloured by the predilections of one who himself belonged to the low-country population, but it is not greatly unlike the prejudiced view taken of the characteristics of the Celtic population by late historians, and the struggle between the prejudices of the old historian against the Highland population and his reluctant admission of their better qualities is apparent enough.

We thus find a Gaelic-speaking people in the Highlands and a Teutonic-speaking people in the Lowlands. The language of the former is at an earlier period termed Albanic, and afterwards Scotch, the language of the latter is by the native writers prior to the sixteenth century usually termed Inglis; but in the sixteenth the progress of a literature in the latter tongue led to those who used it calling it Scotch, while they applied to the Celtic dialect, formerly called Scotch, the epithet of Irish corrupted into Erse. The Celtic part of the population has never given any other name to their language than Gaelic, and term the language of the Lowlanders _Beurla Sassannach_, or the Saxon tongue.

It is the social history and position of this portion of the population with which we have now to do.