We can now turn with some sense of relief from the intricate maze of the genealogy of the Caithness earls to the more open ground of Scottish history, which we left at the date of the death of William the Lion in December 1214, when he was succeeded on the throne of Scotland by his son, Alexander II, a youth who had then just entered his seventeenth year. We can then work the results of our genealogical conjectures into the general history of the northern counties.
Alexander II, like his predecessors, was in the year after his accession immediately confronted with a revolt headed by Donald Ban MacWilliam the younger, another of the descendants of Ingibjorg of Orkney, widow of Earl Thorfinn and first wife of Malcolm Canmore. The scene of the rising was, as usual, Moray; and Donald was aided not only by the inhabitants of that province, but also by a large force of Irish mercenaries. This rebellion, however, was speedily crushed by Ferchar Mac-in-tagart of the family of the Lay Abbots of Applecross in the west of Ross, a county to which Henry, the eldest son of Harold Maddadson had in vain laid claim.
Differences which threatened to break out between Scotland and England were speedily settled, and the young king, as we have seen, married Joanna, sister of King Henry III of England, in 1221. Alexander next conquered the district of Argyll in 1222, and in the same year reduced Caithness to subjection on the occasion of Bishop Adam's murder, and he shortly afterwards put down two rebellions, the one in Moray, as above stated, and the other in Galloway, a district which, however, he did not finally conquer till 1235, although Mac-in-tagart was knighted for a victory there in 1215, and soon after, by 1226, became Earl of Ross.1 In 1236, as a punishment for burning to death the Earl of Atholl, in revenge for the defeat of a member of their family at a tournament, the Bissets were deprived of their estates near Beauly, and fled to England, where they endeavoured to embroil that country again with Scotland. In this they failed, and a treaty was signed between the two nations that neither should make war on the other unless it were first attacked itself.2
Argyll, Galloway, and Moray being subdued and settled, and the old Earldom of Caithness broken up, and divided among trustworthy feudal tenants holding their lands by military service from the Scottish king, the whole of the mainland of Scotland may now be said to have been effectively incorporated into one kingdom under the Scottish Crown. Ecclesiastically, also, the whole realm was divided into dioceses, whose bishops were appointed by consent of the king.
The dream of Malcolm II at last was realised.
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. The marriage was followed by a nine years' struggle between the rival factions of Alan Durward, Justiciar of Scotland, and of Walter Comyn, Earl of Menteith, in which England constantly interfered, till the Comyn, or Scottish, faction finally gained the upper hand. In 1261, Alexander III's only child Margaret, who afterwards became Queen of Norway, was born.
Between 1242 and 1245 two Scottish bishops had been sent to Norway by Alexander II to induce King Hakon to give up the Hebrides to Scotland, and now his son Alexander III sent another embassy of an Archdeacon and a Scot, called in the Saga Misel, but more probably Frisel or Fraser, who, being found to be spies, tried to escape, but were caught and made to witness the young King Magnus' coronation in his father's lifetime.3 These embassies, though backed by offers of money compensation, were wholly unsuccessful.
Meantime affairs in Sutherland and Caithness had been pursuing an orderly course for nearly forty years. William, eldest son of Hugo Freskyn, had succeeded his father in Sutherland before 1214, the year of Earl David's death, and had in or after 1237 become its first Earl, and three years afterwards, according to tradition, though probably this event happened later, with the aid of Richard of Moray, Bishop Gilbert's brother, a Norse landing at Unes or Little Ferry is said to have been repulsed in a battle at Embo, near Dornoch in Sutherland. In this battle Richard fell, and the Norse Prince was also killed, the Ri-Crois at Embo, which has disappeared long ago, being erected in memory of the latter.4 Earl William had died in 1248, and had been buried in the Cathedral at Dornoch, which Bishop Gilbert had founded close to and west of the site of the older Church of St. Bar, and which he had dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary in or after 1222.
The Bishop had given to his diocese of Caithness5 the Constitution which is still extant at Dunrobin. This Constitution, like that of Elgin, was in the main based on that of Lincoln. But the Bishop was to be Primus and above all other dignitaries of the Cathedral. For it was ordained that instead of the one priest who had previously officiated, there should be ten Canons with the Bishop as their head, five of them holding the dignities of Dean, Precentor, Chancellor, Treasurer, and Archdeacon, each of them during residence to minister there daily, as well as the Abbot of Scone, who was a Canon, but had a Vicar to perform his duties in his absence. The teinds (or tithes) of certain parishes were allocated to each member of the Chapter; and lands, residences, and prebends were assigned to them, provision also being made from the teinds of other parishes for the lighting and services of the Church. Bishop Gilbert built and completed the Cathedral, making, it is said, the glass for its windows at Sidera, from sand taken from near the howe of the first Jarl Sigurd, a worshipper of Odin.6
Bishop Gilbert had also translated the Psalms into Gaelic; and, having set his diocese of Caithness, comprising the modern counties of Sutherland and Caithness, in good working order, and having re-buried his predecessor Adam, with a stately funeral, at Dornoch in 1239, had made his will in 1242, and died in the episcopal palace at Scrabster, near Thurso, in 1245. It was probably during his episcopate that King Alexander II gave his open letter,7 directed to the sheriffs, bailies, and other good men of Moray and Caithness, and enjoining them to protect the ship of the Abbot and Convent of Scone and their men and goods from injury, molestation or damage in their journeys to the north. Bishop Gilbert was buried at Dornoch, and was succeeded by Bishop William,8 and he in his turn, in 1261, by Bishop Walter de Baltroddi, who doubtless suffered from King Hakon's fines levied in Caithness in 1263, and whose daughter the Chief of the Mackays is said to have married after that date.
In 1261 the Hebrides had been harried by William, MacFerchar, Earl of Ross and uncle of Freskin de Moravia the younger, with great cruelty and barbarity, and King Hakon in 1263 began to collect and equip a fleet with a view to revenging the injury done to his subjects in the west.9 In the preparation for this in the spring of 1263, we find Jon Langlifson, whose mother Langlif was Harold Maddadson's youngest daughter, and who was thus himself a nephew of Earl John, sent over with Henry Skot to Shetland to obtain pilots for King Hakon,10 while Dougal of the Isles met them in Orkney, and was let into the secret of Hakon's intended expedition.
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. Gillebride had then succeeded to both the reduced Scottish earldom of Caithness and the whole of the Orkney jarldom as successor in the Angus line of Magnus II; and Gillebride had died in 1256 leaving a son Magnus III. Like his predecessors, Magnus III seems to have found himself in the awkward position of being bound to serve two masters who were rapidly approaching a state of war with each other. Freskin de Moravia, dominus de Duffus by 1248, who about that date had married the Lady Johanna, had with her obtained not only her lands in Strathnaver and Caithness, but also the bulk of the Erlend share of the earldom lands of Caithness, while Magnus held the rest of Caithness, and William, second Earl of Sutherland, then a mere boy, had succeeded to that earldom on his father's death in 1248.11
As already stated, Alexander II's attempt on the Sudreys had proved abortive through his death in 1249, and the further attacks on them in Alexander III's reign by William, son of Ferchar Mac-in-tagart, and Earl of Ross, had been made in 1261; and by 1262 or 1263, Freskin had died, leaving two daughters Mary and Christian, both minors and unmarried, to inherit his share of Caithness, as co-parceners, each entitled to one quarter of that county.
Early in 1263 Magnus III of Orkney and Caithness, was in Bergen with King Hakon. For the Saga says,12 "with him from Bergen came Magnus, Jarl of Orkney, and the king gave him a good long-ship."
Sailing from Norway in the end of July 1263, King Hakon found a fair wind, and crossed in two days to Shetland, where he lay for a fortnight assembling his fleet in Bressay Sound off Lerwick. 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. While it was here, King Hakon conceived the idea of sending a squadron of his ships to raid the shores of the Moray Firth, and there is little doubt that this project was aimed at the lands of the families of De Moravia in Sutherland and Moray. The question, however, was submitted to a council of the freemen of the fleet, who proved to be unwilling that any of them should leave their king and decided that the fleet should not be divided, but that the original object of the expedition, the reconquest of the Western Isles and West of Scotland, should be adhered to instead. What Earl Magnus' feelings on the subject were is not recorded, but it can hardly have been pleasing to him to find that his people in Caithness were to be subjected to a fine by his suzerain in Orkney, though, probably by his advice, the Caithness folk paid the fine exacted from them,13 and had hostages taken from them, in consequence, by the Scottish king.
Hakon's fleet then sailed round the Mull of Deerness into the roadstead of Ragnvaldsvoe, in the north of South Ronaldsay, which is now known either as St. Margaret's Hope or possibly as Widewall Bay in Scapa Flow, and it was while it was there that the annular eclipse of the sun, ascertained by astronomical calculation14 to have taken place on the 5th August 1263, was reported by the writer of the Saga to have been seen by him. While the fleet was here, it appeared that the Orkney contingent of ships which Hakon had commanded to join him, were not "boun" or ready for sea, and Jarl Magnus accordingly "stayed behind" with his people in Orkney under orders to follow the main fleet.
On St. Lawrence's day, the 10th of August 1263, Hakon weighed anchor without the jarl, or his men, and the fleet, the largest then ever seen in these waters, sailed from Ragnvaldsvoe into the Pentland Firth, and, rounding Cape Wrath on the same day, anchored in Asleifarvik, now corruptly called Aulsher-beg or Old-shore, on the west coast of the parish of Durness15 in Sutherland. Thence the fleet ran across to the Lewis, whence it proceeded on a southerly course by Rona, into the Sound of Skye, and brought up at the Carline, now the Cailleach, Stone, in Kyleakin or the Kyle of Hakon. The Norse King was soon joined by King Magnus of Man, and Erling Ivar's son, and Andres Nicholas' son, and Halvard and Nicholas Tart, the last having made no land since he left Norway till he sighted the Lewis. Dougal, king of the Sudreys also joined King Hakon, and the fleet shortly afterwards reached Kerrera, near Oban in the Sound of Mull. The events which followed are recounted, in considerable detail and with much exaggeration on both sides, by Scottish and Norse chroniclers, but it is impossible to reconcile their different versions of the story of the battle of Largs. Nor does such detail, save in the result, affect Sutherland or Caithness. Suffice it to say, then, that after much fruitless negotiation between the two kings, purposely prolonged by the Scottish monarch, a severe and protracted October storm drove many of the Norse ships ashore near Largs, where the Scots attacked their crews; and five days later King Hakon withdrew, and sailed with the remnants of his starving and shattered fleet northwards by the Sound of Mull and Rum and Loch Snizort in Skye, and thence round Cape Wrath, to the Goa-fiord or Hoanfiord, which we know as Loch Erriboll, reaching it on Sunday, October 28th, 1263, in a profound calm.
On their way south, Erling Ivar's son, Andrew Nicolas' son, and Harvard the Red had16 "sailed into Scotland under Dyrnes, from which they went up country, and destroyed a castle and more than twenty hamlets." But on the return voyage the children of Heth were waiting for the invaders, and on the day17 "of St. Simon and St. Jude, when Mass had been sung, some Scottish men, whom the Northmen had taken, came. King Hakon gave them peace and sent them up into the country; and they promised to come down with cattle to18 him; but one of them stayed behind as a hostage. It happened that day that eleven men of the ship of Andrew Kuzi landed in a boat to fetch water. A little after, it was heard that they called out. Then men rowed to them from the ships, and there two of them were taken up, swimming much wounded, but nine were found on land all slain. The Scots had come down on them, but they all ran to the boat, and it was high and dry, and they were all weaponless, and there was no defence. But as soon as the Scots saw the boats were rowing up, they ran to the woods, but the Northmen took the bodies with them.
"On Monday King Hakon sailed out of the Goa-fiord and let the Scottish man be put on shore, and gave him peace."19
Such is the story, so far as Sutherland and Caithness are concerned, of Hakon's expedition as told in his Saga, which adds that after losing one ship in the Pentland Firth, while another was all but sunk in the Swelchie near Stroma, he sheltered for the night in the Sound north of Osmundwall, and finally landed again near Ragnvaldsvoe and went to Kirkwall. Retaining twenty of his ships, he let such of the rest of them as had not already gone home sail for Norway.
Deserted by his Jarl, the aged king found a home in the Palace of the faithful bishop, Henry of Orkney, who, alone of all Orkney men, had followed the fortunes of the fleet. Then King Hakon's health gradually failed, and after laying up his ships in Scapa Flow, and seeing to the welfare of his men, he lay down to die of a broken heart, listening as he sank to Masses indeed, but afterwards with greater joy to the Sagas of the Norse kings. "Near midnight" on the 15th of December "Sverri's Saga was read through. But just as midnight was past Almighty God called King Hakon from this world's life."
His body lay in state, first in the Palace and then in the Cathedral of St. Magnus, where after a Solemn Mass it was temporarily buried in the Choir, and it was removed in his flag-ship to Christ Church in Bergen three months afterwards.20
The consequence of King Hakon's failure was the immediate conquest of the Isle of Man and of the Hebrides by Alexander III.
Sutherland and Caithness were saved for Scotland, it would seem, only by the vote of King Hakon's freemen before sailing for Largs, while the defeat of his fleet there led directly to the cession by King Magnus, his successor, under the treaty of Perth in 1266, of all the Western Highlands and Islands, for a payment of 4000 marks down and of 100 marks a year, and the treaty also secured their permanent political union with Scotland.
Orkney and Shetland, however, remained part of Norway for two hundred years more, and have since 1468 been held by Scotland and afterwards by the United Kingdom only under a wadset or mortgage securing 58,000 crowns, the unpaid balance of the dower of Margaret, wife of James III of Scotland and daughter of King Christian of Norway. The right to redeem them was frequently though fruitlessly claimed by Norway and Denmark in succession until the reign of Charles II and even later; and possibly this right remains, to the legal mind, open until the present day.
On the 20th February 1471 the Earldom of Orkney and Lordship of Shetland were, by an Act of the Scottish Parliament, finally annexed to the Scottish Crown. But Norse law and usages and the Norse language long lived on in Orkney and longer still in Shetland.
Restless energy, and a religion that taught its followers that death in combat alone conferred on the happy warrior a title to immortal glory and a perpetual right to the unbroken joy of battle daily renewed in Valhalla drove the Viking to war.
Headed off on the south by the vast army and feudal system of Charlemagne, this energy in war could be exercised, and its religious aims achieved, solely on the sea, which skill in shipbuilding and in navigation as well had converted from a barrier into a highway to the west.
As already stated, over-population in the sterile lands of Norway, and famine probably increased by immigration from the east and south, drove its people "at times in piracy and at times in commerce"1 forth from the western fjords and The Vik across the North Sea to the opposite coasts of Scotland, and so to its western lochs and to Ireland, where they found cattle to slaughter on the nesses, stores of grain, and other booty.
War, in fact, paid; and, after generations of harrying, many of the raiders concluded that the western lands in Britain were fairer and more fertile than their native shores, and desired to settle in the west.
Finally the feudalism of Charlemagne was imitated by Harald Harfagr in Norway; and, against that, Norse independence revolted and rebelled. 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 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. Others of them colonised Ireland, the Hebrides, and the Faroes; and from all these islands as well as from Scotland and Norway issued the swarms that settled in Iceland, and afterwards gave us a code of law, our system of trial by jury, much of our legal procedure, and, when crossed with Gaelic blood, produced the glorious literature of the Sagas. But in their exodus, whencesoever they started, what all alike sought was liberty; which, for them, meant the right to do exactly as they pleased to others, and freedom from paying "scat" or dues to a superior lord.
When the Vikings came, they came as worshippers of Thor and Odin and the old Teutonic gods. To them the Christianity of the Pict was "a weak effeminate creed." They, therefore, slew its followers, plundered its shrines, and drove its clergy south from Orkney, from north-east Caithness and the coasts of Sutherland, and from the seaboard of Ross and Moray, and for a century and a half Christianity was uprooted and almost wholly expelled. No jarl before Sigurd Hlodverson was a Christian, and he was baptized by force, and died fighting for Odin at Clontarf. With all "the fury of an expiring faith, its last lambent flickering flame, against a creed that seemed to contradict every article of the old belief,"2 wherever they came, they destroyed the cult and culture of Columba, which it had taken several centuries to establish in the north and west of Alban.
When the conquerors settled in the land, they enslaved such of its inhabitants as remained among them for a time, and gave to the best coastal lands and lower valley farms the Norse names which they still bear, but they left the heads of the river valleys and the hills mainly to the Moddan family and their Pictish followers and clansmen, who held them tenaciously and extended their holdings, as the Norse became less hostile through inter-marriage, or less strong. 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. Afterwards they were able to turn their attention to the consolidation of the mainland north of the Grampians,3 by first overcoming the Picts in Moray, and then the Norse in Cat, and establishing the feudal system and the Catholic Church.
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.
But the language was Gaelic with a difference. As already stated, it contained, especially in connection with the sea, and ships, gear, and tackle, many old Norse words,5 and, in the Gaelic of Sutherland, as in the English of Orkney and Shetland and of Caithness and Moray the Old Norse roots remain. Nor need we believe that every Magnus or Sweyn, or Ragnvald was a pure Norseman. For their Celtic mothers often preferred to give their children Old Norse names.
The Norse place-names,6 too, have been faithfully preserved by Gaelic inhabitants, and are still with us; and despite their varying spellings in documents of title and maps of different dates, these names generally yield up the secret of their original meanings when they can be traced back to the earliest charters, especially if they can be compared with the corresponding Gaelic versions of them in use at the present time. 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.
Of outward and visible monuments, save here and there a howe or grave-mound, the Vikings, unlike their Pictish predecessors, have left us little or nothing on the mainland. In Iceland the skali7 or farm-house of the Norseman was built with some stone and turf below, and a superstructure of wood which has long ago perished,8 and but slight traces of foundations are visible on the surface there. From the frequent burnings in the Saga we know that such houses were of highly inflammable materials which would soon perish. The place-name, "Skaill," remains both in Sutherland and Caithness. But no skilled antiquary, has as yet laid bare by excavation the secrets of likely sites of Norse dwellings in these counties, as Mr. A.W. Johnston has done at The Jarls' Bu at Orphir, in Orkney.9 And yet, if Drumrabyn or Dunrabyn, Rafn's Ridge or Broch, be the true derivation of Dunrobin (and the name is found at a time when as yet no Robin had inhabited the place) possibly the Norse Lawman Rafn had a house of consequence there like his Pictish predecessors, if, indeed, he did not inhabit the Pictish broch whose foundations were found on or under the present castle's site. There was also a castle of note on the northern shore of the modern port of Helmsdale, which is probably the castle of Sorlinc of Mr. Collingwood's William the Wanderer, also called Surclin, both words being a corrupt form, it is suggested, of Scir-Illigh, the old name of the parish of Kildonan.
In Caithness especially, we have many a Norse castle site, such as Earl Harold's borg at Thurso, and Lambaborg, the modern Freswick, which we know to have been inhabited by noted Norsemen, while, in Sutherland, Borve near Farr, and Seanachaistel on the Farrid Head near Durness seem to be ideal Viking sites. Breithivellir10 or Brawl Castle was a known residence of Earl John and later earls, and search for foundations might well be made on the coasts of Caithness, and round Tongue and at the mouths of the Naver and of the Borgie and other rivers, and at or near Unes or Little Ferry, possibly at Skelbo, (Skail-bo) and in Kildonan at Helmsdale. That the Norsemen used many of the Pictish brochs as dwelling-places is more than probable, and is proved by the Sagas in certain instances.11 At the same time few articles used distinctively by Norsemen have been found in them.
No stately church like the Cathedral of St. Magnus at Kirkwall, itself the finest specimen of Norman architecture in Scotland, survives on the mainland from Viking days; nor, so far as is known, was any such edifice built there by any Norseman; but the original High Church of Halkirk, and also the old church of St. Bar at Dornoch, which preceded and is believed to have occupied a site immediately to the east of St. Gilbert's later Cathedral, may have been used by the later jarls, and a few miles south of Halkirk are the foundations of the Spittal of St. Magnus,12 part of which, and of St. Peter's Church at Thurso may be Norse.
Though the towns of Wick and Thurso13 are frequently mentioned in the Orkneyinga Saga, and earls and jarls stayed at both, no Sutherland village (if any save Dornoch existed) is named in it; but the site of modern Golspie (Gol's-by) appears in ancient charters as Platagall, "the Flat of the Stranger."14
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.
But, if the outward type is rarely seen, its inward qualities remain. What were those qualities?
The late Professor York Powell summed up the character of the Viking emigrant folk in his introduction to Mr. Collingwood's Scandinavian Britain, as follows:—
"A sturdy, thrifty, hardworking, law-loving people, fond of good cheer and strong drink, of shrewd, blunt speech, and a stubborn reticence, when speech would be useless or foolish; a people clean-living, faithful to friend and kinsman, truthful, hospitable, liking to make a fair show, but not vain or boastful; a people with perhaps little play of fancy or great range of thought, but cool-thinking, resolute, determined, able to realise the plainer facts of life clearly, and even deeply."16
Blend these qualities with those of the Gael, and what infinite possibilities appear; for the characteristics of the two races supplement each other. 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.
Turning from eugenics to more practical matters, it was the brain and the manual skill of the Viking that invented and perfected our modern sailing ship. Stripped of its barbaric excrescences at stem and stern, and of its rows of shields and ornaments, the lines of the Viking ship of Gokstad17 found there buried but entire, are the lines of our herring boats of fifty years ago. Sharp and partly decked at stem and stern only, like those boats, the Viking ship could live, head to the waves, even in the roughest sea. It was, too, a living thing, a new type of vessel handy to row or sail, and far in advance not only of the early British ship and Pictish coracle18 but also of the Roman galley with lines like those of a canal barge, and also far in advance of the Saxon ship of war or merchandise. The only points of difference between the older type of herring boat and the Viking ship were the stepping of the mast further forward and the use of the fixed rudder in the modern vessel.
Not only did the Viking brain invent our modern ship, but it was the Viking spirit that impelled us as a nation to use the ocean as a highway. The Norseman had discovered America and West Africa many centuries before Columbus or Vasco di Gama. The Norse colonised19 Greenland, Labrador, and possibly even Massachusetts, and it was on a voyage to Iceland that Jean Cabot heard of America, on whose continent he was the first modern sailor to land, and it is said that it was through him that Columbus, after he had discovered the West Indian Islands, first heard that North America had been proved to be a continent by Cabot's coasting voyage along its shore from Maine to Florida. The Vikings, too, taught us the discipline without which no ship can live through an ocean storm. Their spirit, too, when piracy had died out, led us into trade; for, as we have seen, the Viking was no mere pirate, but ever a trader as well.20 Their sea-fights live in story, though their traders found no skald or bard, and it is thus that we hear less of their trading or of their civic or domestic life.
This spirit of theirs, like their blood, is ever with us still. It has gone into our race, and it keeps coming out in unexpected quarters. Hidden under Celtic colouring and Highland dress, the Viking warrior is there in spirit, glorying in battle, though often apparently no more of a real "Barelegs" by race than was kilted King Magnus. The Berserk fury and stubborn tenacity of our Highland regiments derive their origin from the Viking as well as from the Celtic strain.21 Our sailors too, had they been Celts, would not readily have left smooth water. It was Viking not Celtic blood that drove them to the open sea. It was Viking skill that built the ships, managed them in storms through Viking discipline, navigated them across the ocean, and gave us the naval and commercial supremacy which founded and preserves our empire overseas.
They came to us not only from Norway direct, westwards across the sea. They came to us also from Normandy northwards through England. The first swarms of Norsemen had brought with them rapine and disorder. Later on the Norman came to the north to curb such evils, and to organise, administer, and rule the land. The Normans succeeded in this as signally as the Saxon barons, introduced under Saint Margaret, Malcolm Canmore's Saxon queen, had failed. David I was by education a Norman knight. At heart he was an ecclesiastic. As Scotland's king, he was, in theory, owner of Scotland's soil from the Tweed to the Pentland Firth, and he disposed of it to his feudal barons, mainly Norman, and to religious foundations on Norman lines, as the Norman kings of England had done there before him, in order to organise and consolidate his kingdom; and his successors did the same.
Thus, as Professor Hume Brown puts it—22
"Directly and indirectly the Norman conquest influenced Scotland only less profoundly than England itself. In the case of Scotland it was less immediate and obtrusive, but in its totality it is a fact of the first importance in the national history."
It affected Scotland in the latter part of the times which we have considered right up to John o' Groats. Moray was divided among Normans and "trustworthy natives," and the scattering of its Pictish population gave the Mackays to Sutherland, and, largely blended with the Norse, they still occupy the greater part of it. The Freskyns, as "trustworthy natives," were introduced into Sutherland, after many a fight for it, by charter doubtless in Norman form; and Normans won Caithness in the persons of the earlier Cheynes and Oliphants and St. 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 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; and though both feudalism and the blind obedience to authority then enjoined by the Catholic Church are no longer approved or required, and have long been rightly discarded, yet they served their purpose in their day, by evolving from the wild blend of Gaels and Norsemen, which held the land, a civilised people free from many of the worse, and endowed with many of the better qualities of either race.
The following abbreviations are used:
H.B. for Hume Brown's History of Scotland.
O.S. for Orkneyinga Saga.
O.P. for Origines Parochiales.
F.B. for Flatey Book.
O. and S. for Tudor's Orkney and Shetland.
B.N. Burnt Njal.
And see List of Authorities (ante) for full titles of Books referred to. Save where otherwise stated the references to the Sagas are to the chapters not pages.
Footnote 2: (return)Royal Commission 2nd Report, 1911, and 3rd Report, 1911; see also Laing and Huxley's Prehistoric Remains of Caithness, 1866.
Footnote 7: (return)Anderson, Scotland in Pagan Times, p. 222. Two plates of brass found in Craig Carrill Broch. Copper 84%, tin 16%.
Footnote 8: (return)See Laing and Huxley's Prehistoric Remains in Caithness, Laing ascribes a much greater antiquity to the Burgs, pp. 60-61. See Skene, Chron. Picts and Scots, pp. 157-160 as to a legend of their Scythian origin, and p. xcvi and p. 58.
Footnote 9: (return)See Reeves' Life, and see H.B., vol. i, pp. 12-15; also Dr. Joseph Anderson's Scotland in Early Christian Times, 1879, p. 139.
Footnote 2: (return)For the boundaries of Sutherland, see Sir R. Gordon's Genealogie of the Earles, pp. i and 2, and map hereto.
Footnote 3: (return)In Ness the subjacent stone is too near the surface to have ever admitted of the growth of large trees.
Footnote 5: (return)Curie's Inventories of Monuments, &c., 1911 (Caithness) 1911 (Sutherland), and see his maps. Why are there no brochs in Moray, Aberdeenshire and the Mearns? Did the Picts come there from the west and south-west coast after the age of broch-building, driven before the Scots, first eastward, then north into the Grampians?