James Gray

“ Worshipping, as the Vikings did, amongst others, the "fair white god Baldr of golden beauty," and accounting as base-born "hellskins" those of darker hue, it seems strange that they should so soon have taken to themselves Celtic wives. But we have seen that they came by sea and that no Norse women were allowed in Viking ships,4 and thus it was Celtic mothers alone that perpetuated the race. They also taught the children the Gaelic tongue, and, on the mainland in all Sutherland and Caithness save the north-eastern portions of the latter, Gaelic soon became again the only spoken language. ”

“ If in his outward and visible man the Norseman has all but faded away in Sutherland, he remains more in evidence in Caithness, in spite of Celtic mothers and successive waves of Scottish immigration. The high Norse skull, the tall frame with broad shoulders and narrow hips,15 the fair hair and skin, the sea-blue eyes and sound teeth are still to be seen; and from time to time, amid greatly preponderating Celtic types, we are startled by coming across some perfect living specimen of the pure Viking type almost always on or near the coast. ”

“ Each year a cow is the reward of Barth's work, and each year he is asked for the cow, and gives her up, until he has given three cows. Then St. Peter (for the beggar was no other than he) passes his hands over Barth, and gives him good luck, and sets a book upon his shoulders; and he saw far and wide over many lands, and over all Ireland, and he was baptized, and became a holy hermit and a bishop in Ireland. Such is the Norse story of Barth, to whom the first Cathedral in Dornoch was said to have been dedicated. It is far more prettily told in the Saga. ”

“ The true Viking would be no other man's man, and to secure Harald's feudal power he was driven forth from Norway by an organised navy manned by those of his countrymen who had agreed to accept King Harald as [pg 130] feudal overlord and to pay him tribute. Defeated, as we have seen, at the naval battle of Hafrsfjord in 872, the rebel remnant of the Vikings found their return to Norway barred; and those of them who became pirates in Orkney and Shetland and raided Norway as such, were, in their turn, assailed in these islands by King Harald, and destroyed. ”

“ Having arrived, under the guidance of the Orkneyinga, at the closing years of the 12th century, so far as the affairs of Orkney and Shetland and Sutherland and Caithness are concerned, it remains for us to turn and observe the tide of civilisation and order which under our Scottish kings was now setting strongly northwards and ever further north in each successive reign, the Catholic Church and the feudal baron being the chosen instruments of national organisation and discipline, and the charter being the method of establishing them in the land. ”

“ Once settled, the Norse exerted such steady pressure on their southern Pictish neighbours in Ross and Moray, and kept them so fully occupied in war or by the constant menace of it from the north, that successive Scottish kings were in their turn left comparatively free, on their own northern frontier, from Pictish attacks, and were therefore enabled to consolidate their own kingdom in the south of Scotland and to beat the English back to the line of the Tweed. ”

“ Clairs, who, by inter-marriage with the descendants in the female line of a branch of the Freskyns, possessed themselves not only of the lands of the family of Moddan but of most of the mainland [pg 138] territories of the Erlend line, through Johanna of Strathnaver's daughters and great-grand-daughters.
At a time and in an age when liberty meant licence, the order which the Norman introduced into the north made more truly for real liberty and the supremacy of law, than the individual independence which the Norseman had left his native land to preserve ”

“ The probability is that the half of Caithness which belonged to the Angus family was that half usually possessed by the earls of the line of Erlend,15 and was given by King Alexander with the title of Earl to Magnus, as the son of one of Earl Harald Ungi's sisters, while Johanna, through whom the Moray family inherited the other half, was, as indicated by her name, the daughter of John, Earl of Caithness of the line of Paul, who had been kept by the king as a hostage, and given in marriage to Freskin de Moravia. ”

“ While he was here Jon Langlifson, son of Langlif, the youngest daughter of Earl Harold Maddadson, brought the disappointing news that King John of the Sudreys had gone over to the side of the Scottish king, but the news was disbelieved, and Hakon, at the time, had every reason to think that, while he was sure of the support of the Orkneymen and their earl, the western islanders would support him to a man. Quitting Shetland, therefore, he sailed to Orkney, and his fleet lay first at Ellidarvik or Ellwick in The String off the south of Shapinsay, a few miles from Kirkwall. ”

“ In the reign of the great king Constantine III, between the years 900 and 942, the Danes again gave trouble. In 903 the Irish Danes ravaged Alban,11 as Scotland north of the Forth was then called, for a whole year; in 918 Constantine and his ally, Eldred of Lothian, were defeated by another expedition of these invaders; and in 934 Athelstan and his Saxons burst into Strathclyde and Forfar, the heart of Constantine's kingdom, and the Saxon fleet was sent up even to the shores of Caithness, as a naval demonstration intended to brave the Norse, who had joined Constantine, on their own element. ”

“ In 1223, Earl John was again at Bergen, with Bishop Bjarni of Orkney and others, to consider the rival claims of King Hakon and Jarl Skuli to the Norse crown,15 and in 1224 he went thither again to leave his only son, Harald, as a hostage for his own loyalty.16 In 1226, Harald was drowned at sea, probably on his return voyage, thus leaving John without any male heir, and save for his nameless hostage daughter or her children, if any, without any direct lineal heirs for the jarldom and earldom of Orkney and of Caithness respectively. ”

“ In 1148, Ragnvald decided to visit King Ingi in Norway, taking Harold Maddadson, then a boy of fifteen, with him.23 There he meets Eindridi, who had been long in Micklegarth, as Constantinople was then called by the Norse, probably in the Emperor's service as one of the Varangian Guard; and ships are built for a voyage to the East. But both he and Harold are wrecked in "The Help" and "The Arrow," at Gulberwick, south of Lerwick, on the Shetland coast, all on board, however, being saved, and Ragnvald, as usual, making verses and fun of it all, and of many other things. ”

“ Eric's children, who were mainly Norse in blood, were the only heirs left in Caithness not only for Jarl Ragnvald's lands, but also for the upper parts of the river valleys of Strathnavern and Ness, which the Moddan family had held through the whole Norse occupation of Caithness and Sutherland, along with the hill country in Halkirk and Latheron and Strathnavern and probably also in Sutherland, lands on which few Norse place-names are found, and which came to Eric through Audhild his mother on the deaths of Earls Ottar and Erlend Haraldson without issue. ”

“ The western islands of the Hebrides, however, still owed allegiance to the king of Norway, who was till 1240 engaged in civil war with Duke Skuli in his own kingdom. Alexander II therefore equipped a naval expedition to reduce the islands, but, soon after he had embarked, he sickened and died on the island of Kerrera, near Oban, in 1249, leaving as his successor, his son Alexander III, then only in his eighth year, who was married in 1251, before his eleventh year, to Margaret, daughter of Henry III of England, then a child of about the same age as himself. ”

“ For the modern County of Sutherland is outwardly much the same now as it was in Pictish times, save for road and rail, two castles, and a sprinkling of shooting lodges, inns, and good cottages, which, however, in so vast a territory are, as the Irishman put it, "mere fleabites on the ocean." Much of the west of the land of Cat was scarcely inhabited at all in Pictish or Viking days, because as is clearly the case in the Kerrow-Garrow or Rough Quarter of Eddrachilles, it would not carry one sheep or feed one human being per hundred acres in many parts. ”

“ Shortly after Hakon's death in 1123, King Alexander I and his brother, David I, began to organise the Catholic Church in Scotland, and also to introduce feudalism. Even in the north of Scotland, between the years 1107 and 1153 they founded monasteries and bishoprics, and introduced Norman knights and barons holding land by feudal service from the Crown. Long thwarted in their policy by Moray and its Pictish maormors, who claimed even the throne itself, these two kings pushed their authority, by organisation and conquest, more and more towards the north. ”

“ In 1232, we find Magnus, son of Gillebride, Earl of Angus, called Earl of Caithness, and the earldom remained in this family till between 1320 and 1329, when Magnus Earl of Orkney and Caithness, died; but during this time it is clear that these earls only possessed one half of Caithness and the other half appears in the possession of the De Moravia family, for Freskin, Lord of Duffus, who married Johanna, who possessed Strathnaver in her own right, and died before 1269, had two daughters, Mary, married to Sir Reginald Cheyne, and Christian, married to William de Fedrett ”

“ The nine centuries, above referred to, of Roman invasion, intestine war, and ecclesiastical rivalry between the Pictish, Columban and Catholic Churches had now, under Malcolm II, produced a kingdom of Scotland, throughout which the Catholic was in a fair way to become the predominant Church, and in which the authority of the Scottish Crown was for the time being, nominally, but in the north merely nominally, supreme on the mainland from the Tweed to the Pentland Firth. ”

“ Magnus and Hakonar Sagas which relate to the extreme north end of the mainland of Scotland, and, on the other hand, from such scanty English and Scottish records, bearing on its history, as have survived, so as to form a connected account, from the Scottish point of view, of the Norse occupation of most of the more fertile parts of Sutherland and Caithness from its beginning about 870 until its close, when these counties were freed from Norse influence, and Man and the Hebrides were incorporated in the kingdom of Scotland by treaty with Norway in 1266. ”

“ Yet another family, of Norse and Viking lineage, which was settled in Orkney from the earliest Norse times and afterwards in Caithness and Sutherland, was that of the Gunns, who were descended in the male line from Sweyn Asleifarson the great Viking, and on the female side from the line of Paul, and later were by marriage connected with the Moddan clan and with the line of Erlend. ”

“ Meantime Earl Magnus II, being, according to our conjectures, a member of the Angus line, whose mother was an elder sister of Harald Ungi, and being also the husband of Earl John's daughter, had become entitled to the earldom of Orkney soon after Earl John's death in 1231, and probably since 1236 had held part of Caithness as Earl, by heirship, and by charter from the Scottish King. Magnus II, soon after the earldom of Sutherland had been taken away from him, had died in 1239. ”

“ Fuse them together in proper proportions for a few generations, the improvident and dreamy with the thrifty and energetic, the voluble with the reticent, the romantic and humorous with the truthful and blunt of speech, the fiery and impulsive with the sober of thought, and how greatly is the type improved in the new race evolved from the union of both. ”

“ What manner of men the prehistoric races which in early ages successively inhabited the northern end of the Scottish mainland may have been, we can now hardly imagine. Dr. Joseph Anderson's classical volumes1 on Scotland in Pagan Times tell us something, indeed all that can now be known, of some of [pg 2] them, and in the Royal Commission's2 Reports and Inventories of the Early Monuments of Sutherland and of Caithness respectively, Mr. Curle has classified their visible remains, and may, let us hope, with the aid of legislation, save those relics from the roadmaker or dykebuilder. ”

“ For Gaelic was ever a trustworthy vehicle of the original Norse. The Norse place-names too are found in the same spots on which the remains of brochs exist, that is, on the best land at the lowest levels which the Picts had already cultivated, and which the Norse invaders seized. Such names are also found on the eastern coast as far south as Dingwall, both in Ross and Cromarty. They were never imposed on the Moray seaboard, which was not permanently held by the Norse. Freskyn and his descendants saw to that. His fortress at Duffus checked all raids from their fort at Burghead. ”

“ But Swart was killed in holmgang, or duel, by Thorgisl, who cut off his head and married Gudrun, by whom he had a son called Thorlaf. Thorgisl then tired of Gudrun, and gave her to Thorstan the White on the plea that he himself wished to go and look after his estate in Iceland, which he did. Can this Anlaf be the original of the legendary Alane, thane of Sutherland, whom Macbeth, according to Sir Robert Gordon in his Genealogie of the Earles of Southerland,32 put to death, and whose son, Walter, Malcolm Canmore is said to have created first Earl? ”