The line of the kings of Scottish descent had now been for a century and a half in possession of the Pictish throne. During the first half-century they had borne the title of kings of the Picts; but during the remainder of this period their title had passed over into that of kings of Alban, and what formerly had been known as Cruithintuath and Pictavia, or the territory of the Picts, and, from its capital, the kingdom of Scone, had now become Albania or the kingdom of Alban, extending from the Firth of Forth to the river Spey, over which these kings of Alban ruled, while a certain supremacy was acknowledged beyond it. The mixed population of Picts and Scots had now become to a great extent amalgamated, and under the influence of the dominant race of the Scots were identified with them in name.

Their power was now to be further consolidated, and their influence extended during the thirty years’ reign of a king who proved to be the last of his race, and who was to bequeath the kingdom, under the name of Scotia, to a new line of kings. This was Malcolm, the son of Kenneth, who slew his predecessor, Kenneth, the son of Dubh, at Monzievaird. Malcolm appears to have inaugurated the commencement of his reign by the usual attempt on the part of the more powerful kings of this race to wrest Bernicia from the kings of England, but which resulted in defeat and a great slaughter of his people. The Ulster Annals tell us that in the year 1006 a great battle was fought between the men of Alban and of Saxonia, in which the men of Alban were overcome, and a great slaughter made of their nobles;^[548] and Simeon of Durham furnishes us with further details. He says that ‘during the reign of Ethelred, king of the English, Malcolm, king of the Scots, the son of King Kyned, collected together the entire military force of Scotland, and having devastated the province of the Northumbrians with fire and sword, he laid siege to Durham. At this time Bishop Aldun had the government there, for Waltheof, who was the earl of the Northumbrians, had shut himself up in Bamborough. He was exceedingly aged, and in consequence could not undertake any active measure against the enemy. Bishop Aldun had given his daughter Ecgfrida in marriage to his son Uchtred, a youth of great energy and well skilled in military affairs. Now when this young man perceived that the land was devastated by the enemy, and that Durham was in a state of blockade and siege, he collected together into one body a considerable number of the men of Northumbria and York, and cut to pieces nearly the entire multitude of the Scots; the king himself and a few others escaping with difficulty.’^[549]

But if Malcolm thus met with this great defeat in his first attempt to extend his territories beyond the Firth of Forth on the south, he does not appear to have been more successful in wresting the districts north of the Spey from the grasp of Sigurd, the powerful earl of Orkney. The only change which appears to have taken place in Sigurd’s relations with the kings of the Scots is, that from being a pagan he had become Christian under the influence of Olaf Tryggvesson, the first Christian king of Norway, who, returning from a viking expedition to the west, came to the Orkneys in the year 997, and seized Earl Sigurd as he lay under the isle of Hoy with a single ship. King Olaf offered the earl to ransom his life on condition he should embrace the true faith and be baptized; that he should become his man, and proclaim Christianity over all the Orkneys. He took his son Hundi or Hvelp as a hostage, and left the Orkneys for Norway, where Hundi stayed with him some years, and died there.^[550]

This event was more likely to confirm than to shake Sigurd’s hold over the Scottish provinces, and he had now the support of the king of Norway, who, according to the Olaf Tryggvesson’s Saga, ‘promised him that he should hold in full liberty as his subject, and with the dignity of an earl, all the dominions which he had had before.’ Malcolm appears to have found it more expedient to form an alliance with Sigurd, as the next event recorded in the history of the Norwegian earl is, that he then married the daughter of Melkolf, the king of the Scots, by whom he had a son, Thorfinn. A great event, however, was now approaching, which was not only to terminate Sigurd’s sway over these districts with his life, but to free Ireland almost entirely from the domination of the Danes. The native tribes of Ireland at length resolved to make a serious effort to throw off the Danish yoke. The war commenced in Munster, and the leader was the celebrated Brian Boroimhe, the head of one of its most powerful tribes. His success in this war led to his becoming the monarch of all Ireland, about a year or two before Malcolm ascended the Scottish throne. The struggle between the two races in Ireland, the Scandinavian and the Gaelic, soon became a vital one, and each party recognised that it must terminate either in the freedom of Ireland from the Danish dominion, or in its entire and permanent subjection to them. This final conflict between the two races took place in the year 1014.

Each party assembled from all quarters such forces as they could command. In addition to the native tribes of Munster, Connaught, and Meath, who followed Brian, he had also an auxiliary force from Alban under Donald, son of Eimin, son of Cainnich, the Mormaer of Marr,^[551] and advanced against Dublin in the spring of that year. The Danes of Dublin, besides a party of the native tribes of Leinster who adhered to them, assembled the Northmen, both Danes and Norwegians, from all quarters. Among the former came Danes from Northumbria, and among the latter Sigurd, earl of Orkney, with the Norwegians of Orkney and Caithness, and those of the Isle of Man, of Skye, of Lewis, of Kintyre, and Airergaidhel or Argyll, as well as from Wales.^[552] This fleet arrived from every quarter at Dublin, and with the Danes of Dublin formed a very great force, consisting of three strong battalions. A great battle took place at Cluantarbh near Dublin on Good Friday in the year 1014 which ended in the entire defeat of the Danes and their auxiliaries. The slaughter was very great on both sides. On the side of the Irish, Brian himself, then an old man, fell after the victory had been won, and Domnall, the Mormaer of Marr from Alban, was slain in the battle. On the side of the Danes, most of the leaders, with Sigurd, the earl of Orkney, were slain.^[553]

By the death of Sigurd the provinces in Scotland which had been subjected by him seem to have passed at once from under the domination of the Norwegian earls. In fact the relation of these earls towards the territory under their rule varied considerably, and was more or less close according to the hold which the Norwegians had over them. When they had entirely settled and colonised a district, it was close and intimate, and the death of each earl in no way altered its position, and it passed naturally to his successor. This was the case with the Orkney Islands, which had become entirely Norwegian, and were held as an earldom under the kingdom of Norway. They passed from him to his sons by his first marriage—Sumarlidi, Brusi, and Einar—who divided the islands among them and were accepted as earls. Those possessions which had been only partially settled by the Norwegians were usually claimed by them, and also by their native lords, and either formed part of the Norwegian earldom or were separated from it according to the power and ability of the Norwegian earl to retain their possession. Such was the position of Caithness, which was claimed by the Norwegian earl as part of his hereditary possessions, and also by the king of Scots as one of the dependencies of his kingdom. When Sigurd went on his expedition to Ireland which ended so fatally for him, he had sent his son Thorfinn, by his second wife, the daughter of Malcolm, king of the Scots, to his grandfather; and though he was only five years old at his father s death, the king of the Scots ‘bestowed Caithness and Sutherland upon him with the title of earl, and gave him men to rule the domain along with him.’^[554] Those districts, on the other hand, which the Norwegians had rendered tributary to them without dispossessing their native rulers, or to any great extent colonising them, were in a different position. Their relation to the Norwegian earl seems to have been one mainly personal to the earl whose power had subjected them to his authority, and ceased at his death, as it is said with reference to a subsequent earl that on his death ‘many “Rikis” which the earl had subjected fell off, and their inhabitants sought the protection of those native chiefs who were territorially born to rule over them.’^[555] This was the case with the province of Moray and Ross, which we find after Sigurd’s death ruled over by the same Finleikr from whom he had wrested them, and who appears in Tighernac as Findlaec mac Ruaidhri, Mormaer Moreb, and in the Ulster Annals as ‘Ri Alban,’ indicating that he claimed a position of independence both from the earls of Orkney and the kings of the Scots. Such too may have been the position of those of the Sudreys which were under Earl Gilli. He is mentioned in the year of the battle of Cluantarbh, but he did not accompany the Norwegian chiefs to Ireland. He appears to have been merely tributary to them, and readily transferred his obedience from one Norwegian leader to another, which, as well as the form of his name, confirms the impression that he was a native ruler and belonged to that portion of the Gaelic tribes who from their subjection to foreign rule were termed Gall gaidhel, and the islands under his immediate rule may now for a time have owned the authority of the king of the Scots.^[556] Such too was probably the position of the province termed by the Norwegians Dali, or the Dales, and which seems to have been the western districts known as Airer Gaidhel, and part of which was formerly Dalriada. This may also have been the position of Galloway, as we find in that district, immediately after Cluantarbh, an Earl Melkolf or Malcolm, whose name marks him out as a native chief.^[557]

As Thorfinn was only five winters old when his father, Earl Sigurd, was slain in 1014, this places the marriage of King Malcolm’s daughter to the Norwegian earl in the year 1008,^[558] but another and evidently an elder daughter had been already married to Crinan, or as the Irish Annals term him, Cronan, ‘Abbot of Dunkeld.’ Though bearing this designation he was not an ecclesiastic, but in reality a great secular chief, occupying a position in power and influence not inferior to that of any of the native Mormaers. The effect of the incessant invasions and harassing depredations, directed as they were largely against the ecclesiastical establishments, had been to disorganise the Christian Church to a great extent, and to relax the power and sanction by which the constitution and the lives of her clergy were regulated. They became secular in their lives and habits, married, and had children who inherited their possessions. The more important benefices passed into the hands of laymen, who, along with the name of the office, acquired possession of the lands attached to it, without taking orders or attempting to perform clerical duties, and these offices with the possessions attached to them became hereditary in their families.^[559] After the church of Dunkeld had been founded or at least reconstructed by Kenneth mac Alpin, we find mention of an abbot of Dunkeld, who was also chief bishop of Fortrenn, and whose death is recorded in 865. Eight years after the abbot is termed simply Superior of Dunkeld.^[560] In the following century we find Donnchadh or Duncan, abbot of Dunkeld, appearing at the head of his followers, and taking part in a war of succession in support of one of the claimants to the throne. He was no doubt a lay abbot, and the possessions of the church of Dunkeld were sufficiently extensive to give him an important position among the Mormaers of Alban. Crinan or Cronan, as lay abbot of Dunkeld, probably possessed, with the lands belonging to it and other foundations intimately connected with it, territories in the district of Atholl of great extent, including almost the whole of the western part of it,^[561] and must have occupied a position of power and influence. He had by the king’s daughter a son Duncan, and probably another son Maldred, and the name of his eldest son leads to the inference that he was probably the son or grandson of Duncan the lay abbot who was slain in battle in 965, and in whose person the lay abbacy had become hereditary.

In the year 1016 Uchtred, the earl of Northumbria who had inflicted so disastrous a defeat upon Malcolm in the early years of his reign, was slain by Cnut, a Dane who was then in possession of the greater part of England, and became its king in the following year, and the earldom of Northumbria was bestowed by him upon Eric, a Dane. Eadulf Cudel, however, the brother of Uchtred and the heir to his earldom, appears to have maintained possession of the northern division north of the Tyne. Malcolm seems to have felt this to be a favourable opportunity for making a second attempt upon the northern districts. He was now in firm possession of the kingdom of Alban; he could count upon the assistance of the Britons of Cumbria, whose sub-king was under his dominion; and the outlying provinces of the north and west were for the time freed from the Norwegian rule, and might be won to aid him.

With as large a force as he could raise, he, in the year 1018, invaded Northumbria along with Eugenius the Bald, king of the Strathclyde Britons, and penetrated the country south of the Firth of Forth as far as the river Tweed, where he encountered the Northumbrian army at a place called Carham on the Tweed, a couple of miles above Coldstream, where a great battle took place, in which the Northumbrians were entirely defeated, and their army, drawn mainly from the region between the Tees and the Tweed, almost entirely cut off.^[562] Simeon of Durham tells us in his history of that church that in that year ‘a comet appeared for thirty nights to the people of Northumbria, a terrible presage of the calamity by which that province was about to be desolated. For, shortly afterwards (that is, after thirty days), nearly the whole population, from the river Tees to the Tweed and their borders, were cut off in a conflict in which they were engaged with a countless multitude of Scots at Carrum.’^[563] The effect of this great victory was that the long-pending claims upon these districts which the Scots had so long tried to enforce, whatever they might be, were now settled by the surrender to them of the whole district north of the Tweed, which now became the southern boundary of the Scottish kingdom. In his account of the siege of Durham, Simeon tells us that Eadulf Cudel, an indolent and cowardly man, apprehensive that the Scots would revenge upon himself the slaughter which his brother had inflicted upon them, yielded up to them the whole of Lodoneia in satisfaction of their claim and for a solid peace; and in this manner, he adds, Lodoneia or Lothian in its extended sense was annexed to the kingdom of the Scots.^[564]

Malcolm appears to have retained Lothian without objection or interference either from the earls of Northumbria or the king of England for upwards of ten years. Eugenius or Owen, the son of Domnall, sub-king of Cumbria, who was with him in this expedition, was slain either in battle or elsewhere in the same year; and this line of provincial kings, descended from the same royal house with Malcolm himself, terminated with him, as the next king of the Cumbrians we hear of was Duncan, the grandson of the Scottish king, whom he now probably placed over the whole territory belonging to his kingdom south of the firths of Forth and Clyde.^[565]

But while the king of the Scots thus at length obtained possession of a part at least of Bernicia, and his rule could now be legitimately exercised as far at least as the river Tweed, the question still remained open as to the relation in which it was to place him towards the king of England. All the rights that the Earls of Northumbria could give him to the district of Lothian he had obtained by treaty; but, as part of Northumbria, it belonged to the kingdom of the Angles, and was under the dominion of its kings, and their right, as overlords, could obviously not be thus transferred. Cnut the Dane had, the year before the battle of Carham, become king of all England, but he had enough to occupy his attention during the first few years of his reign, and it was not till the year 1031 that he could take any active steps to vindicate his right as king of England. In that year, we are told by the Saxon Chronicle, ‘King Cnut went to Rome, and as soon as he came home, he went to Scotland, and the Scots king, Malcolm, submitted to him and became his man; but held that only a little while; and two other kings, Maelbaethe and Jehmarc.’ The actual kingdom of Alban, now called Scotia, extended only from the Firth of Forth to the river Spey, and the provinces beyond them, though viewed by the kings of the Scots as dependencies upon their kingdom, were not yet considered as forming an integral part of it; those lying to the north and west of the kingdom proper frequently passing under the rule of the Norwegians. It is to these outlying provinces we must look for the two kings who are said to have separately submitted along with Malcolm. It is to this period that a description of Britain belongs in which these provinces are separately distinguished. The part which refers to Scotland is thus described:—‘From the Tweed to the great river Forth are Loonia and Galweya.’ From thence to Norwegia and Dacia—that is, to the districts occupied by Norwegians and Danes—are ‘all Albania, which is now called Scotia, and Moravia;’ and the districts and islands here included under the terms Norwegia and Dacia are ‘Kathenessia, Orkaneya, Enchegal, and Man, and Ordas, and Gurth, and the other Western Islands around them.’^[566] Loonia is Lothian, recently annexed to the Scottish kingdom, and the name Galweya was afterwards extended so as to include the whole country from the Solway to the Clyde. Albania is here distinguished from the provinces south of the Firths, on the one hand, and from Moravia, north of the Spey, on the other, and we are told that it is now called Scotia. Moravia, in its extended sense, was the province of Moray and Ross. North and west of these provinces was the territory occupied by the Norwegians and Danes. On the mainland it consisted of Kathenessia or Caithness, and Airergaidhel, here probably meant by Enchegal. Ordas and Gurth are probably intended for Lewis and Skye, the old forms of which names were Lodus and Sgithidh, and which are usually mentioned separately from the other islands.

Moravia is here not included among the Norwegian and Danish possessions. On the death of Sigurd, the Norwegian earl of Orkney, it had become freed from the Norwegian rule, and its rulers appear to have considered themselves so far independent as to claim the Celtic title of Ri or king. Findlaec, the son of Ruadhri, who appears in the sagas under the name of Finleikr Jarl, and whose slaughter by the sons of his brother Maelbrigdi in 1020 is recorded by Tighernac as Mormaer of Moreb, is termed in the Ulster Annals ‘Ri Albain;’ and Tighernac, in recording the death of his successor Malcolm, the son of his brother Maelbrigdi, and one of those who slew him, in 1029, terms him ‘Ri Albain.’^[567] There can therefore be little doubt that the king Maelbaethe, who submitted to King Cnut, was Macbeth, the son of Findlaec, who appears under the same title which had been borne by his cousin and his father.^[568] The native rulers of Airergaidhel or Argathelia appear also to have borne the Celtic title of Ri, and it is probable that Jehmarc represents in a corrupted form the name of the ruler of this district.^[569] These kings would probably have little scruple in rendering their submission to King Cnut the Dane, from their having so recently been under Norwegian rule.

Three years after this expedition Malcolm died. Tighernac records his death in 1034 as king of Alban and head of the nobility of the west of Europe;^[570] but we now obtain an additional source of information for this period of the history of very great value in the Chronicle of Marianus Scotus, who was born in the reign of this Malcolm, in the year 1028, and notices a few of the events in Scottish history which took place during his own lifetime. The first Scotch event noticed by him is the death of Malcolm, which he says took place on the twenty-fifth of November 1034, and he terms him ‘king of Scotia.’^[571] The kings of Alban occasionally appear as kings of the Scots, but this is the first instance in which the name of Scotia is applied as a territorial designation of their kingdom. Used by a contemporary writer, who was himself a native of Ireland, it is evident that the name of Scotia had now been transferred from Ireland, the proper Scotia of the previous centuries, and become adopted for the kingdom of the Scots in Britain in the reign of Malcolm, son of Kenneth, which ushers in the eleventh century, superseding the previous name of Alban.

With Malcolm the descendants of Kenneth mac Alpin, the founder of the Scottish dynasty, became extinct in the male line. Had any male descendant existed, there would have been great risk of the territories now composing the kingdom becoming again disunited. As Malcolm had no son, but at least two daughters who had male issue, Cumbria and Lothian would naturally have passed to the nearest heir in the female line; while a male collateral who could trace his descent from the founder of the family would, by the law of Tanistic succession, have had a preferable claim to the regions north of the Firths of Forth and Clyde, forming the kingdom of Alban proper, and would probably have received the support of the Scottish part of its population at least; but the existence of any such male descendant cannot be traced, and the last male scion of the race appears to have been slain by King Malcolm in the year which preceded his own death, probably to make way for the quiet accession of Duncan, his grandson through his daughter, to the whole of the territories which he had united under his sway.^[572]

He attained his object, for Duncan appears at first to have succeeded him in the whole of his dominions without objection, but ere long to have provoked aggression both in the south and in the north. In the south, Eadulf Cudel, the earl who had ceded Lothian to the Scots, did not long survive the battle of Carham, and was succeeded in the Bernician earldom by Aldred, a son of Uchtred, on whose death his brother Eadulf succeeded him, and in the year 1038 invaded Cumbria and devastated the whole country.^[573] Duncan, however, was not equally successful in an invasion of the territories of Eadulf, for Simeon of Durham, in his history of that church, tells us that Duncan, king of the Scots, advanced with a countless multitude of troops and laid siege to Durham, and made strenuous but ineffective efforts to carry it, for a large proportion of his cavalry was slain by the besieged, and he was put to a disorderly flight, in which he lost all his foot-soldiers, whose heads were collected in the market-place, and hung up upon posts.^[574]

The aggression, however, which he provoked in the north brought a formidable competitor into the field, and was destined to terminate more fatally for him. The details of this war are preserved to us in the Orkneyinga Saga; and though its authority is not unexceptionable, and the events it records are not to be found elsewhere, the narrative still carries with it an air of truth, and it fills a blank in the meagre records of the time which supplies in a great measure a clue to their real character. In this narrative the king who succeeded Malcolm appears under the strange designation of Karl or Kali Hundason,^[575] that is, either the Churl, or Kali the son of the hound; and from the appellation here given to Duncan’s father, we learn that the Hundi Jarl or the Hound Earl, who fought with Sigurd the Stout, earl of Orkney, could have been no other than Crinan, the warlike lay abbot of Dunkeld. On Sigurd’s death the islands of Orkney fell to his three sons, Sumarlidi, Einar, and Brusi, among whom they were divided; while Thorfinn, his son by the daughter of King Malcolm, received from his grandfather Caithness and Sutherland, with an earl’s title. The last of the three brothers among whom the Orkneys were divided died, however, a few years before the death of King Malcolm;^[576] and when his grandson Duncan succeeded him, Thorfinn had been for some years in possession of the entire earldom of Orkney. Duncan seems to have considered that Thorfinn having become earl of Orkney, he might resume possession of Caithness, or at least demand tribute from it. Thorfinn, on the other hand, considered that it was his inheritance from King Malcolm through his mother, and that he had obtained it before Duncan inherited the kingdom. Thus, says the Saga, they became open enemies and made war on each other. Duncan took the initiative, and bestowed Caithness with the title of earl upon a relation of his own, Moddan, said to be his sister’s son, who proceeded immediately to the north and collected forces in Sutherland. Earl Thorfinn on his part raised the men of Caithness, and on being joined by Thorkell Fostri with an army from the Orkneys, Moddan retired before his superior forces. Thorfinn then subdued the districts both of Sutherland and Ross, and after plundering in the district south of them, returned to Caithness and remained at Dungallsbae or Duncansby, with five war-ships and their crews, the rest of the army returning to Orkney. Moddan then sought the king, whom he found at Berwick, then probably on his return from his unsuccessful invasion of Northumbria, and told him the result of his expedition. Duncan organised a more formidable attack. He sent Moddan by land with a considerable force to make his way to Caithness, and he himself sailed from Berwick with a naval force, consisting of eleven warships and a numerous army. His intention was by landing on the north of Caithness to place Earl Thorfinn between the two armies, but the latter anticipated his plan by sailing out in his own ships and attacking Duncan’s fleet in the Pentland Firth. Though the latter fleet was superior in numbers, the Scots could not stand against the fierce onslaught of the Norwegians, and after an obstinate conflict gave way before them, and fled south into the Moray Firth, where Duncan landed and proceeded south to collect a new army. Thorfinn remained in the north till he was again joined by Thorkell Fostri with the Orkneymen, and then went south into the Moray Firth in pursuit of Duncan, and began to plunder the districts on its southern shore. In the meantime, Moddan, who had no one to oppose him, appears to have occupied Caithness with his army, and took up his quarters at Thurso, where he remained waiting for reinforcements, which he expected to receive from Ireland. Thorfinn, hearing this, again anticipated him. He remained himself in Scotland, and continued plundering the country, while he sent Thorkell north with a portion of the army. The people of Caithness were in his interest, and thus Thorkell succeeded in surprising Moddan in Thurso, where he came by night, set fire to the house in which Moddan was, and slew him. His men then surrendered, and Thorkell went from thence to the Moray Firth to rejoin Thorfinn with all the men he could collect in Caithness, Sutherland, and Boss, and found him in Myrhaevi or Moray. King Duncan now collected as large an army as he could assemble from the rest of Scotland; or, as the Saga expresses it, ‘as well from the south as the west and east of Scotland, and all the way south from Satiri or Kintyre, and the forces for which Earl Moddan had sent, also came to him from Ireland.^[577] He sent far and near to chieftains for men, and brought all this army against Earl Thorfinn.’ Earl Thorfinn appears to have been stationed at Torfness or Burghead, where the Borg was which his ancestor Sigurd had built to enable the Norwegians to maintain their footing in Moray, and here the great battle took place which was to decide this contest. Thorfinn first attacked the Irish division, who were immediately routed, and never regained their position. King Duncan then brought his standard forward against Earl Thorfinn, and the fiercest struggle took place between the Scots and the Norwegians; ‘but,’ says the Saga, ‘it ended in the flight of the king, and some say he was slain.’ Earl Thorfinn then drove the fugitives before him through Scotland, and laid the land under him wherever he went, and all the way south to Fife.^[578]

Such is the account given us by the Saga of this war. Marianus supplements it by telling us that in the year 1040 Donnchad, king of Scotia, was slain in autumn, on the 14th of August, by his general, Macbethad, son of Finnlaech, who succeeded him in the kingdom.^[579] Macbeth was at this time the Ri or Mormaer of the district of Myrhaevi or Moray, which finally became the seat of war, and when Duncan sent far and wide to the chieftains for aid, he probably came to his assistance with the men of Moray, and filled the place which Moddan had formerly occupied as commander of his army; but the tie which united the mormaers of Moray with the kings of the Scots was still a very slender one. They had as often been subject to the Norwegian earls as they had been to the Scottish kings; and when Duncan sustained this crushing defeat, and he saw that Thorfinn would now be able to maintain possession of his hereditary territories, the interests of the Mormaer of Moray seem to have prevailed over those of the commander of the king’s army, and he was guilty of the treacherous act of slaying the unfortunate Duncan, and attaching his fortunes to those of Thorfinn.

The authorities for the history of Macbeth know nothing of Earl Thorfinn and his conquests. On the other hand the Sagas equally ignore Macbeth and his doings, and had to disguise the fact that Thorfinn was attacking his own cousin, and one who had derived his right to the kingdom from the same source from which Thorfinn had acquired his to the earldom of Caithness, by concealing his identity under the contemptuous name of Karl or Kali Hundason,^[580] while some of the chronicles have transferred to Macbeth what was true of Thorfinn, that he was also a grandson of King Malcolm,^[581] and a Welsh Chronicle denominates him king of Orkney.^[582] The truth seems to be that the conquest of the provinces south of Moray, which took place after this battle, was the joint work of Thorfinn and Macbeth, and that they divided the kingdom of the slain Duncan between them: Thorfinn receiving the districts which had formerly been under his father, with the addition of those on the east coast extending as far as Fife or the Firth of Tay. According to the Orkney-inga Saga, he possessed ‘nine earldoms in Scotland, the whole of the Sudreys, and a large riki in Ireland,’ and this is confirmed by the St. Olaf’s Saga, which tells us that ‘he had the greatest riki of any earl of Orkney; he possessed Shetland and the Orkneys, the Sudreys, and likewise a great riki in Scotland and Ireland.’^[583] Macbeth obtained those in which Duncan’s strength mainly lay—the districts south and west of the Tay, with the central district in which Scone, the capital, is situated. Cumbria and Lothian probably remained faithful to the children of Duncan.

The kingdom had thus hardly passed from the last male descendant of the founder of the Scottish dynasty to a new family, when it was again transferred to rulers of a different race. The whole of the northern part found itself under the rule of the Norwegian earl of Orkney, while the centre of the kingdom, in which the capital was situated, accepted as its king the hereditary ruler of Moray, a district the connection of which with the kingdom proper had hitherto been both slender and uncertain, who reigned over these districts for seventeen years. It is difficult to understand how a king who had no hereditary claim upon their allegiance should have been able to maintain his possession of the throne for so many years in a part of the country which was the stronghold of the Scots. That he should have slain his predecessor was no unusual circumstance, and would equally have excluded many of his predecessors. His only connection with the Scottish dynasty was, that his wife was Gruoch, the daughter of that Boete or Bode, son of Kenneth, whose son or grandson had been slain in 1032 by Malcolm mac Kenneth, and through her some claim upon the allegiance of the Scots seems to have been based. That he was not the tyrant he is represented by Fordun to have been seems very certain. There is no trace of it in any authentic record. On the contrary, St. Berchan speaks kindly of him. Thus—

And we find Macbeth son of Finnlaec, and Gruoch daughter of Bode, king and queen of the Scots, granting the lands of Kyrkness to the Culdees of Lochleven from motives of piety, and for the benefit of their prayers; and Macbeth, again, granting the lands of Bolgyne to the same Culdees, ‘with the utmost veneration and devotion.’^[584] That his hold over this part of the country, whether from personal character or from his claim through his wife, was quite equal at least to that of the family of the lay abbot of Dunkeld, we find from the unsuccessful attempt made by the latter to drive him from the throne a few years after his accession. Tighernac gives us the short but significant statement, that in the year 1045 a battle took place between the men of Alban on both sides, in which Crinan, abbot of Dunkeld, was slain, and many with him, viz., nine times twenty heroes.^[585]

Five years after this he seems to have gone to Rome, probably to obtain absolution for the murder of Duncan, as Marianus tells us that in the year 1050 the king of Scotia, Macbethad, freely distributed silver to the poor at Rome.^[586]

The immunity with which he enjoyed the fruit of his treachery towards Duncan may no doubt be attributed in a great measure to there being no one with a preferable right who was in a position to oppose him. The children of Duncan must have been in mere infancy at his death, and if the immediate succession of a son to his father’s throne was still somewhat strange to the Celtic population, that of an heir who was not of sufficient age to be capable of governing personally was totally opposed to their laws. He had too no doubt behind him the support of the powerful earl of Orkney, and if he had possessed a legitimate title, he would probably have maintained his position, and been recorded as one of the best of the Scottish kings; but the stamp of usurpation was upon him, and his immunity was to cease when Malcolm, the son of Duncan, reached an age to enable him to contest his right and claim, which was to bring a more powerful antagonist into the field than Macbeth had yet had to encounter. This was Siward, earl of Northumbria. He was of Danish race, and became connected with the earls of Northumbria by marriage with Elfleda the daughter of Ealdred, earl of Northumbria, and on the slaughter of Eadulf, his wife’s uncle, by King Hardacnut, in the year 1041, was made earl over the whole of Northumbria, extending from the Humber to the Tweed.^[587] Siward was doubly connected with the house of Crinan, the abbot of Dunkeld, for his wife’s aunt, Aldgitha, half-sister of Earl Ealdred, was married to Maldred, son of Crinan, and King Duncan himself married either the sister or the cousin of Earl Siward, by whom he had a son, Malcolm. On the assassination of his father, Malcolm must have been a mere child, but when he reached an age which enabled him to claim his father’s kingdom, Siward seems to have resolved to make an effort to drive Macbeth from the throne he had usurped.

The Saxon Chronicle tells us that in the year 1054 ‘Earl Siward went with a large army into Scotland, both with a naval force and a land force, and fought against the Scots, of whom he made great slaughter, and put them to flight, and the king escaped. Many also fell on his own side, both Danish and English, and also his own son Oshern, and his sister’s son Siward, and some of his “huscarls” and also of the kings were there slain, on the day of the Seven Sleepers, that is, on the 27th of July.’^[588] Tighernac records in the same year ‘a battle between the men of Alban and the men of Saxonia,’ in which many of the soldiers were slain;^[589] and the Ulster Annals add that ‘three thousand of the men of Alban were slain, and fifteen hundred of the men of Saxonia, around Dolfinn, son of Finntuir’Finntuir’ (or Thorfinn).^[590] There is a statement in Gaimar’s metrical chronicle not to be found elsewhere. We are there told that ‘Earl Syward made an agreement with the king of Scotland when he went, but Macbeth destroyed the peace, and ceased not to carry on war.’ He then gives an account of the expedition, evidently taken from the Saxon Chronicle.^[591]

As Siward advanced against Macbeth with both a naval force and a land army, he must have intended to enter the Firth of Tay with the former, while he penetrated by land into Scotland proper. To send a fleet merely into the Firth of Forth could in no way have aided his enterprise. His object therefore seems to have been Scone, the capital of the kingdom, to which he would penetrate by land by the usual route, crossing the Forth at Stirling, and passing through Stratherne, while his fleet entering the Firth of Tay, would not only support the land army, but prevent the force of the districts north of the Tay being used to turn the flank of his army. He seems to have been opposed by the people of Alban, who appear to have been united in support of Macbeth, who likewise had the aid of the Norwegians, as the son of Thorfinn, called by the Irish annalist Finntuir, fell in the contest. St. Berchan appears to allude to this battle at Scone, and to imply that a night attack had been made, when he says,

Although the Saxon Chronicle claims the victory for Siward, it admits the greatness of the slaughter on his side. It seems to have been a fiercely contested struggle, after which Siward found it necessary to retire without effecting his object of driving Macbeth from the throne of Scotia, as he reigned for three years longer; but he appears to have so far advanced the cause of young Malcolm, that he established him in possession of the territory of the Cumbrian Britons, and of Lothian as king of Cumbria.^[592]

In the following year Siward died, and Malcolm thus lost the powerful support of the Danish earl of Northumbria, but he appears to have formed a close alliance with his successor Tostig, the son of Earl Godwine, who, though not of the Northumbrian race, had been appointed earl by King Edward, so that they became sworn brothers; and in the year 1057, when he had been three years in possession of the districts south of the Firths of Forth and Clyde as king of Cumbria, Malcolm seems to have found himself strong enough to make an independent attempt to drive Macbeth from the throne he had usurped, and this time his attempt was successful. Of the details of this renewed attempt no account has been handed down to us, but it resulted in Macbeth being driven across the great range of the Mounth, and slain by Malcolm at Lumphanan in Marr on the 15th day of August in the year 1057.^[593]