In a work of this scope, it is impossible to describe all the wars
between the petty kingdoms peopled by races of various languages, which
occupied Scotland. In 603, in the wild moors at Degsastane, between the
Liddel burn and the passes of the Upper Tyne, the English Aethelfrith of
Deira, with an army of the still pagan ancestors of the Borderers,
utterly defeated Aidan, King of Argyll, with the Christian converted
Scots. Henceforth, for more than a century, the English between Forth
and Humber feared neither Scot of the west nor Pict of the north.
On the death of Aethelfrith (617), the Christian west and north exercised
their influences; one of Aethelfrith's exiled sons married a Pictish
princess, and became father of a Pictish king, another, Oswald, was
baptised at Iona; and the new king of the northern English of Lothian,
Edwin, was converted by Paullinus (627), and held Edinburgh as his
capital. Later, after an age of war and ruin, Oswald, the convert of
Iona, restored Christianity in northern England; and, after his fall, his
brother, Oswiu, consolidated the north English. In 685 Oswiu's son
Egfrith crossed the Forth and invaded Pictland with a Northumbrian army,
but was routed with great loss, and was slain at Nectan's Mere, in
Forfarshire. Thenceforth, till 761, the Picts were dominant, as against
Scots and north English, Angus MacFergus being then their leader (731-
761).
Now the invaders and settlers from Scandinavia, the Northmen on the west
coast, ravaged the Christian Scots of the west, and burned Iona: finally,
in 844-860, Kenneth MacAlpine of Kintyre, a Scot of Dalriada on the
paternal, a Pict on the mother's side, defeated the Picts and obtained
their throne. By Pictish law the crown descended in the maternal line,
which probably facilitated the coronation of Kenneth. To the Scots and
"to all Europe" he was a Scot; to the Picts, as son of a royal Pictish
mother, he was a Pict. With him, at all events, Scots and Picts were
interfused, and there began the _Scottish_ dynasty, supplanting the
Pictish, though it is only in popular tales that the Picts were
exterminated.
Owing to pressure from the Northmen sea-rovers in the west, the capital
and the seat of the chief bishop, under Kenneth MacAlpine (844-860), were
moved eastwards from Iona to Scone, near Perth, and after an interval at
Dunkeld, to St Andrews in Fife.
The line of Kenneth MacAlpine, though disturbed by quarrels over the
succession, and by Northmen in the west, north, and east, none the less
in some way "held a good grip o' the gear" against Vikings, English of
Lothian, and Welsh of Strathclyde. In consequence of a marriage with a
Welsh princess of Strathclyde, or Cumberland, a Scottish prince, Donald,
brother of Constantine II., became king of that realm (908), and his
branch of the family of MacAlpin held Cumbria for a century.
ENGLISH CLAIMS OVER SCOTLAND.
In 924 the first claim by an English king, Edward, to the over-lordship
of Scotland appears in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The entry contains a
manifest error, and the topic causes war between modern historians,
English and Scottish. In fact, there are several such entries of
Scottish acceptance of English suzerainty under Constantine II., and
later, but they all end in the statement, "this held not long." The
"submission" of Malcolm I. to Edmund (945) is not a submission but an
alliance; the old English word for "fellow-worker," or "ally," designates
Malcolm as fellow-worker with Edward of England.
This word (midwyrhta) was translated _fidelis_ (one who gives fealty) in
the Latin of English chroniclers two centuries later, but Malcolm I. held
Cumberland as an ally, not as a subject prince of England. In 1092 an
English chronicle represents Malcolm III. as holding Cumberland "by
conquest."
The main fact is that out of these and similar dim transactions arose the
claims of Edward I. to the over-lordship of Scotland,--claims that were
urged by Queen Elizabeth's minister, Cecil, in 1568, and were boldly
denied by Maitland of Lethington. From these misty pretensions came the
centuries of war that made the hardy character of the folk of Scotland.
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THE SCOTTISH ACQUISITION OF LOTHIAN.
We cannot pretend within our scope to follow chronologically "the
fightings and flockings of kites and crows," in "a wolf-age, a war-age,"
when the Northmen from all Scandinavian lands, and the Danes, who had
acquired much of Ireland, were flying at the throat of England and
hanging on the flanks of Scotland; while the Britons of Strathclyde
struck in, and the Scottish kings again and again raided or sought to
occupy the fertile region of Lothian between Forth and Tweed. If the
dynasty of MacAlpin could win rich Lothian, with its English-speaking
folk, they were "made men," they held the granary of the North. By
degrees and by methods not clearly defined they did win the Castle of the
Maidens, the acropolis of Dunedin, Edinburgh; and fifty years later, in
some way, apparently by the sword, at the battle of Carham (1018), in
which a Scottish king of Cumberland fought by his side, Malcolm II. took
possession of Lothian, the whole south-east region, by this time entirely
anglified, and this was the greatest step in the making of Scotland. The
Celtic dynasty now held the most fertile district between Forth and
Tweed, a district already English in blood and speech, the centre and
focus of the English civilisation accepted by the Celtic kings. Under
this Malcolm, too, his grandson, Duncan, became ruler of Strathclyde--that
is, practically, of Cumberland.
Malcolm is said to have been murdered at haunted Glamis, in Forfarshire,
in 1034; the room where he died is pointed out by legend in the ancient
castle. His rightful heir, by the strange system of the Scots, should
have been, not his own grandson, Duncan, but the grandson of Kenneth III.
The rule was that the crown went alternately to a descendant of the House
of Constantine (863-877), son of Kenneth MacAlpine, and to a descendant
of Constantine's brother, Aodh (877-888). These alternations went on
till the crowning of Malcolm II. (1005-1034), and then ceased, for
Malcolm II. had slain the unnamed male heir of the House of Aodh, a son
of Boedhe, in order to open the succession to his own grandson, "the
gracious Duncan." Boedhe had left a daughter, Gruach; she had by the
Mormaor, or under-king of the province of Murray, a son, Lulach. On the
death of the Mormaor she married Macbeth, and when Macbeth slew Duncan
(1040), he was removing a usurper--as he understood it--and he ruled in
the name of his stepson, Lulach. The power of Duncan had been weakened
by repeated defeats at the hands of the Northmen under Thorfinn. In 1057
Macbeth was slain in battle at Lumphanan, in Aberdeenshire, and Malcolm
Canmore, son of Duncan, after returning from England, whither he had fled
from Macbeth, succeeded to the throne. But he and his descendants for
long were opposed by the House of Murray, descendants of Lulach, who
himself had died in 1058.
The world will always believe Shakespeare's version of these events, and
suppose the gracious Duncan to have been a venerable old man, and Macbeth
an ambitious Thane, with a bloodthirsty wife, he himself being urged on
by the predictions of witches. He was, in fact, Mormaor of Murray, and
upheld the claims of his stepson Lulach, who was son of a daughter of the
wrongfully extruded House of Aodh.
Malcolm Canmore, Duncan's grandson, on the other hand, represented the
European custom of direct lineal succession against the ancient Scots'
mode.