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the Northumbrian earls, in whose province it was included, may be said to have remained in a state of anarchy till the conquest.”—Scotland under her Early Kings, vol. i., p. 70.

"The last retreat of the Romanized Britons was called originally Strathclyde, but in later times more frequently Cumbria.

"In the scanty notices of the chroniclers the district is generally called a kingdom, but this may have been more from the habit of using that term towards the neighboring nations, than because there was any fixed form of monarchical government in Strathclyde.”—Burton, History of Scotland, vol. i., pp. 182, 278, 279.

22 Again, in 875, the same restless enemy, sallying forth from Northumberland, laid waste Galloway, and a great part of Strathcluyd. Thus harassed by the insatiable Northmen, many of the inhabitants of Alcluyd resolved upon emigrating to Wales. Under Constantin, their chief, they accordingly took their departure; but were encountered by the Saxons at Lochmaben, where Constantin was slain. They, however, repulsed their assailants, and forced their way to Wales, where Anarawa, the king, being at the time hard pressed by the Saxons, assigned them a district which they were to acquire and maintain by the sword. In the fulfilment of this condition, they aided the Welsh in the battle of Cymrid, where the Saxons were defeated and driven from the district. The descendants of these Strathcluyd Britons are said to be distinguished from the other inhabitants of Wales at the present day. The Strathcluyd kingdom was, of course, greatly weakened by the departure of so many of the best warriors; and it continued to be oppressed both by the Scots and Anglo-Saxon princes. The judicious selection of a branch of the Scottish line as their sovereign had the effect of securing peace between the two nations for some time. Hostilities, however, at length broke out with great fury, in consequence of Culen — who ascended the Scottish throne in 965 — having dishonored his own relative, a granddaughter of the late King of Strathcluyd. Incensed at the insult, the inhabitants flew to arms, under King Ardach, and marching into Lothian, there encountered the Scots. The battle was a fierce one, and victory declared for the Alcluydensians. Both Culen and his brother Eocha were slain. This occurred in 971. The Scottish throne was ascended by Kenneth III. [II.]; and the war between the Scots and Cumbrians continuing, the latter, under Dunwallin-the successor of Ardach—were at length overpowered on the bloody field of Vacornar; where, the Welsh Chronicle states, the victors lost many a warrior. Dunwallin retired to Rome in 975. The Strathcluyd kingdom, now fairly broken up, was annexed to the Scottish crown, and the inhabitants became mixed with the Scots and Picts. This was a successful era for the Scots. Though the country had been overrun by Æthelstan, the Saxons gained no permanent advantage. On the contrary, Eadmund, in 945, ceded Cumberland, in England, to Malcolm I., on condition of unity and aid. Lothian, which had previously been held by England, was also delivered up to Malcolm III., in 1018, after the battle of Carham with Uchtred of Northumberland.-Paterson, History of the County of Ayr, p. 15.

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An occasional brief entry in the early chronicles reveals the anxiety of the rulers of the Picts and Scots to avail themselves of the gradual decline of the Northumbrian power for the purpose of extending their own influence over the neighboring province of Strathclyde. Some such motives may have instigated Kenneth to seek for his daughter the alliance of a British prince; and a few years later, the death of Artgha, King of Strathclyde, which is attributed by the Irish annalists to the intrigues of Constantine the First, may have been connected with the same policy of aggrandizement, and have furthered the claims of Eocha, the son of Constantine's sister. The advancement of Eocha to the Scottish throne was shortly followed by important consequences to his native province, and after the flight and death of the Welsh prince Rydderch ap Mervyn had deprived the northern Britons of one of their firmest supporters, a considerable body of the men of Strathclyde, relinquishing the ancient country of their forefathers, set out, under a leader of the name Constantine, to seek another home amongst a kindred people in the south. Constantine fell at Lochmaben in attempting to force a passage through Galloway; but his followers, undismayed at their loss, persevered in

their enterprise, arriving in time to assist the Northern Welsh at the great battle of the Conway, where they won the lands, as the reward of their valor, which are supposed to be occupied by their descendants at the present day. (An. Ult., 876, 877; An. Camb. and Brut y Tywys. 880; Caledonia, vol. i., book iii., ch. v., p. 355.)

“Chalmers gives the name of Constantine to their first leader, whilst, according to Caradoc, Hobart was their chief when they reached Wales. To some old tradition of this migration, and to the encroachments of the Galwegians, the Inquisitio Davidis probably alludes: Diverse seditiones circumquaque insurgentes non solum ecclesiam et ejus possessiones destruxerunt verum etiam totam regionem vastantes ejus habitatores exilio tradiderunt.' (Reg. Glasg) In fact it would appear as if a Scottish party had dated its rise from the days of Kenneth MacAlpin, and secured a triumph by the expulsion of its antagonists, on the accession of Eocha to the Scottish throne, and by the election of Donald in the reign of the second Constantine.

"With the retreating emigrants, the last semblance of independence departed from the Britons of the north; and upon the death of their king Donald, who was probably a descendant of Kenneth's daughter, Constantine the Second experienced little difficulty in procuring the election of his own brother Donald to fill the vacant throne. Henceforth a branch of the MacAlpin family supplied a race of princes to Strathclyde; and although for another hundred years the Britons of that district remained in a state of nominal independence, they ceased to exist as a separate people, appearing, on a few subsequent occasions, merely as auxiliaries in the armies of the Scottish kings."—Scotland under her Early Kings, vol. i., p. 54.

The Angles only retained their power over the Picts of Galloway and the Cumbrians south of the Solway, together with the city of Carlisle, which Ecgfrith, shortly before his death, had given to St. Cuthbert, with some of the land around it. The Cumbrians north of the Solway became independent, and had kings of their own again, of whom one is recorded as dying in 649, and another in 722. But the Picts of Galloway continuing under the yoke of the Northumbrians, the king of the latter managed in 750 to annex to Galloway the district adjoining it on the north and west, which was then a part of the land of the Cumbrians, though it may have long before belonged to the Picts. In the same year, a war took place between the former and the Picts of Lothian, who suffered a defeat and lost their leader, Talorgan, brother to the King of Alban, in a battle at a place called Mocetauc in the Welsh Chronicle, and supposed to be in the parish of Strathblane in the county of Stirling; but in 756 we read of the Picts and the Northumbrians joining, and pressing the Cumbrians sorely. Afterwards little is known of them (except that Alclyde was more than once destroyed by the Norsemen) until we come down to the end of the ninth century, when we meet with a Welsh tradition that the Cumbrians who refused to submit to the English were received by the King of Gwynedd into the part of North Wales lying between the Dee and the Clwyd, from which they are made to have driven out some English settlers who had established themselves there. How much truth there may be in this story is not evident, but it is open to the suspicion of being based to some extent on the false etymology which identifies the name of the Clwyd with that of the Clyde. It is needless to say that the latter, being Clota in Roman times, and Clut in old Welsh, could only yield Clud in later Welsh. Harassed and weakened on all sides, the Cumbrians ceased to have kings of their own race in the early part of the tenth century, when a Scottish line of princes established itself at Alclyde; and in 946 the kingdom was conquered by the English king Eadmund, who bestowed the whole of it from the neighborhood of the Derwent to the Clyde [?] on the Scottish king Maelcoluim or Malcolm, on condition that he should assist him by land and sea, the help anticipated being intended against the Danes. . . William the Red made the southern part of Cumbria, including the city of Carlisle, an earldom for one of his barons; and thus it came to pass that the name of Cumberland has ever since had its home on the English side of the border, while the northern portion, of which the basin of the Clyde formed such an important part, is spoken of

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in the Saxon Chronicle as that of the Strathclyde Welshmen. It may here be added that this last was still more closely joined to the Scottish crown when David became king in 1124; but its people, who formed a distinct battalion of Cumbrians and Teviotdale men in the Scotch army at the battle of the Standard in 1130, preserved their Cymric characteristics long afterwards. How late the Welsh language lingered between the Mersey and the Clyde we have, however, no means of discovering, but, to judge from a passage in the Welsh Triads, it may be surmised to have been spoken as late as the fourteenth century in the district of Carnoban (see Gee's Myvyrian Archæology, p. 401, triad 7), wherever between Leeds and Dumbarton that may turn out to have been.-Rhys, Celtic Britain, pp. 146–148.

23 On the west were the districts occupied by the Britons of Strathclyde. In the previous century and a half these had been narrowed to the vale of the Clyde, with Alclyde or Dumbarton as its stronghold, and the rest of the British districts had, along with Galloway, been under the dominion of the Angles of Northumbria; but their rule had been relaxed during the period of disorganization into which the Northumbrian kingdom had fallen, and had by degrees become little more than nominal, when the invasion of Bernicia by the Briton Giric, who for a time occupied the Pictish throne, led to the severance of these districts from Northumbria, and the whole of the British territory from the Clyde to the river Derwent in Cumberland became once more united under the rule of an independent king of the Britons. -Celtic Scotland, p. 346.

24 Et in suo octavo anno cecidit excelsissimus rex Hibernensium et archiepiscopus apud Laignechos id est Cormac mac Cuilennan. Et mortui sunt in tempore hujus Donevaldus rex Britannorum et Duvenaldus filius Ede rex eligitur.-Chronicles of the Picts and Scots, p. 9. Fugato deinde Owino rege Cumbrorum et Constantino rege Scotorum, terrestri et navali exercitu Scotiam sibi subjugando perdomuit.—Simeon of Durham, Hist. de Dun. Ec. 96 English Chronicle, Anno 945.

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944, Strathclyde was ravaged by Saxons.-Brut y Tywysogion.

946, Stratclut vastata est a Saxonibus.-An. Camb.

The life of St. Cadro gives us almost a contemporary notice of the Cumbrian kingdom. St. Cadro was a native of Alban, and flourished in the reign of Constantin who fought at Brunanburgh, and leaves him to go on a foreign mission. He comes to the "terra Cumbrorum," and Dovenaldus, the king who ruled over this people, receives him gladly and conducts him " usque Loidam civitatem quæ est confinium Normannorum atque Cumbrorum." -Chronicles of the Picts and Scots, p. 116.

27 Statim predavit Britanniam ex parte Pedestres Cinadi occisi sunt maxima cede in Moin na Cornar.-Pictish Chronicle.

28 He was, no doubt, the son of that Donald who was king of the Cumbrians when his kingdom was overrun by King Eadmund and bestowed upon Malcolm, King of Alban, and this shows that though the sovereignty was now vested in the Scottish kings, the line of provincial kings still remained in possession of their territory.-Celtic Scotland, vol. i., p. 382.

29 With him ended the kingdom of Strathclyde. Galloway as a portion of it then fell into the full possession of the Norsemen.-Mac Kerlie, Galloway, Ancient and Modern, p. 92.

CHAPTER XVII

THE NORSE AND GALLOWAY

HE Norwegian and Danish invasions of Britain began in 793.

year the Northmen made an attack upon the island of Lindisfarne, which lies a little south of Tweedmouth. Their raid is thus described by Simeon of Durham :

In the same year [793] of a truth, the pagans from the northern region came with a naval armament to Britain like stinging hornets, and overran the country in all directions like fierce wolves, plundering, tearing, and killing not only sheep and oxen, but priests and levites, and choirs of monks and nuns. They came, as we before said, to the church of Lindisfarne, and laid all waste with dreadful havoc, trod with unhallowed feet the holy places, dug up the altars, and carried off all the treasures of the holy church. Some of the brethren they killed, some they carried off in chains, many they cast out naked and loaded with insults, some they drowned in the sea.

The following year a party of Norsemen plundered the monastery at the mouth of the Wear, where their chief was killed, and their fleet afterwards wrecked by a storm. In the same year one of their fleets laid waste the Western Isles and sacked the church of Iona. Four years later they again visited the Western Isles. In 802 they burned the Iona church; and in 806 killed the inhabitants of that island, numbering sixty-eight persons. These pirates were distinguished by the Irish as belonging to two races, the Finngaill-white, or fair-haired strangers (Norse),-and the Dubhgaill,—black, or dark-haired strangers (Danes).

While it has been generally customary to speak of them as Northmen, yet so far as Scotland was concerned they approached it from the east-and in the case of the Danes from the southeast the distance between Norway and Scotland being but about two hundred miles. First sailing to the Orkneys these invaders proceeded down along the west coast into the Irish Sea, and made their landings in Ireland, Cumberland, or Galloway' as the hope of plunder might lead them. The Irish gave to the Danes the name of Ostmen, or Men of the East, which properly described them; but that point of the compass from which they approached Normandy and the southern coast of England is the one that furnished them with the name by which they are best known.

The following account of the operations of the Norse in Northern, Western, and Southwestern Scotland is based chiefly on the Orkneyinga and other Norse sagas, and on the Annals of Tighernac and of Ulster (see Appendixes O and P).

In 825, Blathmhaic, son of Flann, was killed by the Norse in Iona. In

839, the Danes came to Dublin with sixty-five ships. After plundering Leinster, they entered Scotland through Dalriada, and, in a battle with the Picts and Scots, killed their ruler, Eoganan, son of Angus. This helped to open the way for the accession of Kenneth MacAlpin to the Pictish throne.'

During Kenneth's reign his country was often harassed by these troublesome visitors. Later they seem to have made permanent settlements in some parts of the island, particularly in the north and in Galloway.' In the , latter district they intermarried with and made allies of the natives, who in time became known along the western coast of Scotland and in Ireland as the "Gallgaidhel ", or "stranger (i. e., renegade) Gaels."

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The fragments of Irish Annals published by the Irish Archæological Society state that in 852 a battle was given by Aedh, King of Ailech, to the fleet of the Gallgaidhel, who were said to be Scots and foster-children of the Northmen, and who themselves were formerly called Northmen. They were defeated and slain by Aedh, many heads being carried off as trophies by himself and Niall. The Irish justified their action on this occasion by saying that "these men were wont to act like Lochlans" (Northmen). Again it is stated of them in 858 that the Gallgaidhel were a people who had renounced their baptism, and were usually called Northmen, for they had the customs of the Northmen, and had been fostered by them, and though the original Northmen were bad to the churches, these were by far worse in whatever part of Erin they used to be." In 866 a large fleet of Danish pirates, under command of Halfdan and his two brothers, arrived off the coast of England. After spending the winter in East Anglia, they invaded Northumbria, took the city of York, killed the two rival claimants to the Northumbrian throne, and made Ecgberht king. He ruled for six years, and was succeeded by Ricsig.

In the same year in which occurred Halfdan's invasion of Northumbria, Olaf the White, the Norwegian king of Dublin, who had married a daughter of Kenneth MacAlpin and may have had designs upon the latter's throne, invaded Pictavia with the "Galls" of Erin and Alban, laid waste all the country, and occupied it from the kalends of January to the feast of St. Patrick (March 17th). On returning to Ireland, he took with him both booty and hostages. From the same source we learn that in the year 870 Alclyde was invested by the Northmen under Olaf and Imhair, and destroyed after a four months' siege; much booty and a great host of prisoners being taken. Olaf and Imhair seem also to have attacked both the Picts of Galloway and the Angles of Bernicia, for they are said to have returned to Dublin with two hundred ships and great booty of men, Angles, Britons, and Picts, as captives. In 875 a Danish army under command of Halfdan again ravaged Northumbria, Galloway, and Strathclyde," and made great slaughter of the Picts. In the same year, Thorstein the Red (son of Olaf the White by Audur, daughter of the Norseman, Kettil Flatnose), who had

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