Annals thus record it in 741: "Battle of Drum Cathmail between the Cruithnigh and the Dalriads against Innrechtach." The locality of this battle appears to have been in Galloway, not far from Kirkcudbright, and Innrechtach was probably the leader of the Galloway Picts. One of the chronicles appears to have preserved the traditionary account of his death when it tells us that Alpin was slain in Galloway, after he had destroyed it, by a single person who lay in wait for him in a thick wood overhanging the entrance of the ford of a river as he rode among his people. The scene of his death must have been on the east side of Loch Ryan, where a stream falls into the loch, on the north side of which is the farm of Laight, and on this farm is a large upright pillar stone, to which the name of Laight Alpin, or the grave of Alpin, is given. In the same year we have the short but significant record of the crushing of the Dalriads by Angus, son of Fergus.-Celtic Scotland, vol. i., pp. 291–292.

Edbert, king, in the eighteenth year of his reign, and Unust, king of the Picts, led an army to the city of Alcluyd, and there the Britons thereof received [i. e., surrendered upon] conditions, the first day of August.—Annals of Ulster.

During the reign of Eadberht in the middle of the eighth century, the kingdom of Northumbria had apparently attained to a position of as great power as that to which it had been raised in the previous century by Ecgfrid. The two provinces of Deira and Bernicia were united under his rule; the territories of the Britons south of the Solway Firth and the province of Galloway on the north were parts of his kingdom; he had himself added to it Kyle and the adjacent districts, and in conjunction with Angus, the equally powerful king of the Picts, had enforced the submission of the Britons of Alclyde when, after a reign of twenty-one years, he, in the year 758, abdicated his throne in favor of his son Oswulf, and took the tonsure. His son was in the following year treacherously slain by his own people, and with him ended the direct descendants of Ida. The kingdom seems then to have fallen into a state of disorganization, and has thus been well described: "One earldorman after another seized on the government, and held it till his expelled predecessors returned with a superior force, or popular favor or successful treason had raised up a new competitor." And thus it continued till the end of the century, when the arrival of the Northmen added an additional element of confusion. In 867 the monarchy completely broke down. In the previous year a large fleet of Danish pirates, under the command of Halfdan, Inguar, and Hubba, the sons of Ragnar Lodbrog, had arrived on the coast of England, and had wintered in East Anglia, and this year they invaded Northumbria, and took possession of the city of York. The Northumbrians had just expelled their king Osbryht, and placed Alla on the throne, but the former was now recalled, and the two kings, uniting their forces, attempted to wrest the city of York from the Danes, and were both slain. The Danes then took possession of the whole of Northumbria as far as the river Tyne, and placed Ecgbert as king over the Northumbrians north of the Tyne. After a reign of six years Ecgbert died, and was succeeded by Ricsig. It was in his time that, in 875, Halfdan, with his Danes, again entered Northumbria, and brought the whole country under his dominion. In the following year Ricsig died, and Halfdan is said by Simeon of Durham to have placed a second Ecgbert over the Northumbrians beyond the Tyne. He is said to have reigned only two years. But notwithstanding, in 883, or seven years after, when Halfdan dies, we are told by Simeon that by the advice of the abbot Eadred, Guthred, son of Hardicnut, was made king, and reigned at York; but Ecgbert ruled over the Northumbrians. There is no mention of this second Ecgbert either in his History of Durham or of the Archbishops of York, and he appears with his inconsistent dates to be a mere reproduction of the Ecgbert who was placed over the Northumbrians north of the Tyne in 867, introduced to fill up a period when the historian did not know or did not care to tell who really ruled over Bernicia at that time. This is, however, the period of Girig's reign, and he may, like his predecessor Kenneth, have overrun Lothian and obtained possession of Bamborough, the chief seat of the Bernician kings, which lies at no great distance from the south bank of the Tweed; and Simeon himself indicates this when he tells us in his History of the Church of Durham that during the

64

reign of Guthred the nation of the Scots had collected a numerous army and, among other deeds of cruelty, had invaded and plundered the monastery of Lindisfarne." His object, too, may have been to free the Britons, his own countrymen, from the Anglic yoke, and certainly, if he conquered Bernicia, and perhaps that part of Anglia which consisted of the British possessions extending from the Solway to the Derwent, their reunion with the kingdom of the Strathclyde Britons, as well as the freedom of Galloway from Anglic supremacy, would be the natural result.-Celtic Scotland, vol. i., pp. 331-333.

10 Eadberht, the king of Northumbria, abdicated his throne in 758, and was succeeded by his son Osulf, who had reigned only one year when he was slain, and by his own people; and in 759, Æthelwald, called Moll, became king; and in the third year, Simeon tells us, a battle was fought between him and Oswine, one of his generals, at Eldun near Melrose, in which Oswine was slain, which shows that Æthelwald's kingdom still extended at least as far as East Lothian. The place meant is the Eildon Hill near Melrose. The English Chronicle calls the place Edwine's Cliffe.

11 Simeon of Durham tells us that in 774 King Alchred, by the design and consent of all his connections, being deprived of the society of the royal family and princes, changed the dignity of empire for exile. He went with a few of the companions of his flight first to the city of Bamborough, and afterwards to the king of the Picts, Cynoht by name; and Æthelred, the son of his predecessor, occupied the throne of Northumbria for six years.

19" Presently, in the ninth and tenth centuries, the English who had thus invaded the land of the Britons were themselves invaded in the land which they had made their own. In a considerable part of England the conquerors themselves became the conquered. A new nomenclature was brought in; through a large part of several English shires the names which the English had given to the spots which they wrested from the Briton gave way to new names which marked the coming of another race of conquerors. Wherever names end in by, we see the signs of this new revolution, the signs of the coming of a new element in the land, and an element which indeed supplied a wide field for adoption, but which hardly stood in need of assimilation. As the English came on the Britons, so the Danes came on the English; they occupied a considerable part of England; in the end they placed a Danish king on the throne of what by that time had become the united English kingdom. Such an event as this is a mighty one, filling no small space in a narrative history of the English people.

"But, in such a sketch as I am now setting before you, the great tale of the Danish invasions goes for but little. Misleading as such a view would be in an ordinary history, I might for my present purpose almost venture to speak of the Danish conquest as the last wave of the English conquest, as the coming of a detachment who came so late that they could settle only at the expense of their comrades who had settled already. For the Danes were a kindred folk to the English, hardly differing more from some of the tribes which had taken a part in the English conquest than those tribes differed from one another. The coming of the Dane hardly amounted to more than the addition of a fourth Teutonic element to the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who had come already."- Freeman, The English People in its Three Homes, p. 150.

13 "In Ecgberht's day Britain had come to consist of three long belts of country, two of which stretched side by side from the utmost north to the utmost south, and the population of each of which was absolutely diverse. Between the eastern coast and a line which we may draw along the Selkirk and Yorkshire moorlands to the Cotswolds and Selwood, lay a people of wholly English blood. Westward again of the Tamar, of the western hills of Herefordshire, and of Offa's Dyke, lay a people whose blood was wholly Celtic. Between them, from the Lune to the coast of Dorset and Devon, ran the lands of the Wealh-cyn-of folks, that is, in whose veins British and English blood were already blending together and presaging in their mingling a wider blending of these elements in the nation as a whole.

“The winning of Western Britain opened, in fact, a way to that addition of outer ele

ments to the pure English stock which has gone on from that day to this without a break. Celt and Gael, Welshman and Irishman, Frisian and Flamand, French Huguenot and German Palatine, have come successively in, with a hundred smaller streams of foreign blood. So far as blood goes, few nations are of an origin more mixed than the present English nation; for there is no living Englishman who can say with certainty that the blood of any of the races we have named does not mingle in his veins. As regards the political or social structure of the people, indeed, this intermingling of blood has had little or no result. They remain purely English and Teutonic.

"The firm English groundwork which had been laid by the character of the early conquest has never been disturbed. Gathered gradually in, tribe by tribe, fugitive by fugitive, these outer elements were quietly absorbed into a people whose social and political form was already fixed. But though it would be hard to distinguish the changes wrought by the mixture of race from the changes wrought by the lapse of time and the different circumstances which surround each generation, there can be no doubt that it has brought with it moral results in modifying the character of the nation. It is not without significance that the highest type of the race, the one Englishman who has combined in their largest measure the mobility and fancy of the Celt with the depth and energy of the Teutonic temper, was born on the old Welsh and English borderland, in the forest of Arden.”—Green, Conquest of England, ch. i., §§ 2, 3.

14 The king of Scots with his whole nation, and Reginald, the king of the Danes, with the English and Danes inhabiting Northumberland, the king also of the Strathclyde Britons with his people, chose the elder king for their father and lord, and contracted with him a firm league.—Florence of Worcester. (Anno 921). See p. 359.

15 It has usually been assumed that this refers to the district in England afterwards called Cumberland alone, but the people termed by the same chronicle the Strathclyde Welsh had now come to be known under the Latin appellation of Cumbri, and their territory as the land of the Cumbrians, of which "Cumbraland" is simply the Saxon equivalent. Their king at this time was Donald, the son of that Eugenius or Owin, who was at the battle of Brunanburh. He is called king of the Northern Britons, and his kingdom extended from the Derwent in Cumberland to the Clyde. Accordingly we find in the British annals that at this time Strathclyde was ravaged by the Saxons. There can be little question that the tenure by which the Cumbrian kingdom was held by Malcolm, was one of fealty towards the king of England, and this seems to be the first occasion on which this relation was established with any reality between them, so far, at least, as this grant is concerned.-Celtic Scotland, vol. i., p. 362.

Cumbria, or Cambria, was the name given to the northern territory retained by the Romanized Britons-a territory described as a continuation northward of their Welsh territory. Gradually, however, the name of Strathclyde was given to that portion reaching from the Solway northwards-in fact, the portion within modern Scotland. The word Cumbria continued to be frequently used as equivalent to Strathclyde, but about the period of the gift, it had come to apply to the English portion only of the old British territory—a portion in which Saxons and Norsemen had successively planted themselves. If what King Edmond handed over to the King of Scots was Strathclyde, he professed to give a territory that was not his own, but was, indeed, naturally lapsing into the other dominions of the King of Scots. Whatever meaning, then, we are to give to the passage in the chronicle, must connect it with the country now known as Cumberland and Westmoreland. Of these territories. it can only be said, that at this period, and for long afterwards, they formed the theatre of miscellaneous confused conflicts, in which the Saxons, the Scots, and the Norsemen, in their turn, partake. Over and over again we hear that the district is swept by the Saxon kings' armies, but it did not become a part of England until after the Norman Conquest. Meanwhile, to the King of Scots it was not so much an object of acquisition as the more accessible: territory of Northumberland.-Burton, History of Scotland, vol. i., p. 337.

16 It has yet to be recorded, nine years later, in 946, that Æthelstane's successor reduced all Northumberland under his power; and the Scots gave him oath that they would all that he would. It happens, however, that the year before this we have an entry which the tenor of those we have been dealing with renders still more inexplicable than they are themselves : 'Anno 945.—In this year King Eadmond harried over all Cumberland, and gave it all up to Malcolm, King of the Scots, on the condition that he should be his co-operator both on sea and on land." Three years before this, Constantine had retired from his throne, and became abbot of the Culdees at St. Andrews-an office, as we shall see, not unworthy of a tired king. It was to his successor, Malcolm, that this strange gift was made.-Burton, vol. i., p. 336.

17 Worsaæ states that the Northmen, by the Danish conquests, became the progenitors of as much as half of the present population of England. The Saxon race in the north has been greatly exaggerated. They were principally located in the south of England, and, in proof of this, the dialects in the north and south were always different. The first has much of the Scandinavian, while the latter is considered to have more of the Belgian or Low Dutch. There are in England specimens of written Saxon as early as the seventh century. From ritual books it is seen that Saxon of about A.D. 890 and Dano-Saxon of about 930 differ to a considerable extent.-Galloway, Ancient and Modern, p. 78.

18 Edmond Ironside left two infant sons, Edwin and Edward. By order of Canute, they were conveyed out of England in 1017 (Chron. Sax.). At length they found an asylum in Hungary. Edwin died there. Edward was recalled by Edward the Confessor in 1057. He only lived to see the land of his nativity, from which he had been exiled during forty years (Ibid., p. 169). The Children of Edward were Edgar Ætheling, Margaret, and Christian. “There is a confusion, hardly to be unravelled, as to the time and manner of Edgar's retreat into Scotland, and his sister's marriage. In Chron. Sax. (pp. 173, 174) it is said that Edgar went into Scotland in 1067, with Maerleswegen, and the other malcontents. S. Dunelm places this event in 1068 (p. 197). According to Chr. Melrose. (p. 158), the nuptials of Margaret were solemnized in 1067; but, according to the same history (p. 160), in 1070. Fordun, l. v., c. 16, relates from Turgot, that Edgar, with his mother and sisters, had embarked, in order to return to the place of his nativity, but that he was driven to Scotland by a tempest. With him Aldred concurs (De Genealogia Regum Anglorum, p. 367). Fordun adds, that the place where the ship anchored was called Sinus S. Margareta (now St. Margaret's Hope); and (c. 17), that the nuptials were solemnized at Dunfermline. Hovedon (p. 226) relates the same story of the tempest; but places it in 1067. He adds, that, at that time, the marriage of Margaret and the King of Scots was agreed on, hac quoque occasione actum est, ut Margareta Regi Malcolmo nupta traderetur.'”—Hailes, Annals of Scotland, vol. i., p. 7.

19 On his death he left the kingdom in possession for the first time of the same southern frontier which it ever after retained. It was now separated from the kingdom of England by the Solway Firth, the range of the Cheviot Hills and the River Tweed. From the Solway to the Clyde extended that portion of Cumbria which still belonged to the Scottish king; from the Tweed to the Forth, the district of Lothian. From the Forth to the Spey was Alban or Albania, now called Scotia. Beyond it, on the north, the province of Moravia; on the west, Airergaidhel or Argathelia; while beyond these were, on the north, Caithness and the Orkney Isles forming the Norwegian earldom of Orkney; and, on the west, the Sudreys or Western Islands still occupied by the Norwegians, though since the death of Thorfinn belonging nominally to Scotland.-Celtic Scotland, vol. i., p. 432.

WE

CHAPTER XX

FROM MALCOLM CANMORE TO KING DAVID

E now have our annals brought down to a period where the written history of Scotland may be said to begin. From this time on, we have accessible what are practically contemporary records of the events occurring in and after the reign of Malcolm Canmore. There is no early connected account of Scottish history before his time that can be taken as authentic. Such records of events as are preserved are to be found only in the brief and ofttimes contradictory notices of the Irish, Welsh, and English annalists. There have already been given such references as are contained in the English chronicles, and the substance of the contents of the others. It only remains to add a short account of the Irish and Welsh chronicles in order that we may know what are the foundations for that portion of Scottish history now passed in outline, and which at this late day can only be tentatively constructed from their meagre and fragmentary details.

The oldest of these records is the Pictish Chronicle, compiled in the reign of Kenneth Mac Malcolm (971-995), the contents of which consist mainly of a list of the Pictish kings, with the dates of commencement of their respective reigns. The latter portion of this list has already been given.' One edition of the same exists in Latin, which is said to have been translated from a Gaelic original; and a version may also be found in the Irish Nennius.

In the reign of Kenneth's son, Malcolm (1004-1034), between the years 1014 and 1023, appeared the Synchronisms of Flann Mainistrech, or Flann, the Ferleighin of the monastery called Mainister Boice, which contains a list of the kings of Ireland synchronized with contemporary rulers of other countries, including many who ruled in Scotland; the chronicle being brought down to the early part of the eleventh century. Flann died in 1056.

The third chronicle is that of Marianus Scotus, who was born in 1028, and died in 1082-83. This covers a period extending from the creation of the world to the year 1082.

Another list of the early rulers of Scotland is given in the Irish version of the British, or Welsh, chronicle which goes by the name of Nennius. This book was translated from the Latin into Irish by Gillacaemhan, who died in 1072, and considerable additions were made to it by him from Irish and Pictish sources.

Gillacaemhan is also reputed to have been the author of a brief historical poem known as the Albanic Duan, which probably appeared between the time of Malcolm Canmore's accession to the throne (1057) and the death of its author (1072).