CHAPTER VIII.
Earls David and John.
On the death of Earl Harold Maddadson in 1206, he was followed in the earldom of Orkney, without Shetland, by his elder surviving son, David, who also, it would seem, was allowed to succeed to the Caithness earldom and some of its territory. But out of the Caithness earldom there had been taken the lands forming the Lordship of Sudrland or Sutherland held by Hugo Freskyn from about 1196, and this comprised, as already stated, the parishes of Creich, (then including Assynt), Dornoch, Rogart, Kilmalie (now Golspie), Clyne, Loth, and by far the greater part of the parishes of Kildonan and Lairg. Out of these lands Hugo granted, as already stated, to his relative Gilbert de Moravia, Archdeacon of Moray from 1204 till 1222, and to his heirs and assigns whomsoever, all Creich and much of Dornoch parish up to the boundaries of Ross, and the date of this grant was probably about 1211. The Mackays were beginning to occupy the western parts of Strathnavern, their title being probably their swords, and they held their lands "manu forti," their country being a refuge for their Morayshire kinsmen, the MacHeths, who were in constant rebellion. The eastern portion of Strathnavern, and particularly the neighbourhood of Loch Coire and Loch Naver, and all the Strathnaver valley were probably insecurely held by members of the Erlend and Moddan family after Harald Ungi's death at the battle of Clairdon in 1198; and Gunni, probably a grandson of Sweyn Asleifarson, who had married Ragnhild, Harald Ungi's youngest sister, after the death in the same battle of Lifolf Baldpate, her first husband, became chief of the Moddan Clan there and in Caithness. After 1200 Ragnhild had by Gunni a son called Snaekoll Gunni's son, who thus became, on his father's death, the chief representative in Scotland, both of the Moddan family and of the line of Jarls Erlend Thorfinnson, St. Magnus, and St. Ragnvald, and of Eric Stagbrellir and of Earl and Jarl Harald Ungi; and Snaekoll afterwards laid claim to their possessions in Orkney, as the sole male representative of this line. Gunni and Ragnhild must have held the Strathnaver lands, and the Moddan family lands in Caithness, formerly Earl Ottar's estates, till their deaths, and Snaekoll was their sole known male heir. The Harald Ungi share of the Caithness earldom lands, which The Flatey Book and Torfaeus state that Jarl Ragnvald had held, does not appear to have been granted to David, or to any successor to the Caithness earldom of his line, or to any other person at this time. Indeed, the line of Paul were the last persons to whom such a grant would be made.
It was, therefore, to a very much reduced territory and earldom that David succeeded in 1206, as Earl of Caithness. We hear almost nothing of him, save that for the latter part of the eight years of his rule,[1] more or less inefficient probably through ill health, he shared the earldom and what had been left to him of its lands with his younger brother John. David died without issue in 1214[2] probably soon after Hugo Freskyn, and David was succeeded by his brother John in the jarldom of Orkney and in the reduced earldom of Caithness as sole jarl and earl.
Immediately after David's death, King William the Lion, who had, in 1211, suppressed a rebellion in Moray of the Thanes of Ross under Guthred son of Donald Ban MacWilliam whom a few years later he captured and beheaded,[3] came to Moray again; and, about the 1st of August 1214, King William demanded, and received[4] Earl John's daughter, whose name is not known, as a hostage for her father's loyalty, and a guarantee of the peace then made, under which John was probably recognised as earl and as entitled to his reduced territory. His daughter may, at this time, have been her father's sole heiress, although she did not remain so, because we find that he had a son who lived till 1226, called Harald. Meantime Bishop Adam, after the death in 1213 of Bishop John, his half-blinded and mutilated predecessor, succeeded to the Episcopal See of Caithness,[5] and seems to have reversed Bishop John's policy of leniency to his flock by exacting from them heavier and heavier tithes, as years went by.
In 1217, King Hakon's rival, Jarl Skuli, thought Earl John so promising a traitor as to send him letters forged with the Norse king's seal.[6] In 1218 John was present at Bergen to witness the ordeal successfully undergone by King Hakon's mother in order to prove that king, then a boy, to be her son by the late King Hakon Sverri's son, and so rightly entitled to the Norwegian crown.[7]
After Earl John's return from Norway, the bishop's exactions of tithes of butter reached such a pitch that the Caithness folk met near his house at Halkirk, and demanded that the earl should protect them against the bishop's rapacity, and, either at the earl's suggestion or without any opposition on his part, they attacked the bishop in his house, which was close to Breithivellir (now Brawl) Castle, where John lived. The Saga gives the following description of this affair:—[8]
"They then held a Thing on the fell above the homestead where the earl was. Rafn the Lawman was then with the bishop, and prayed the bishop to spare the men; also he said he was afraid how things might go. Then a message was sent to Earl John with a prayer that he would reconcile the bishop and the freemen; but the earl would come never near the spot. Then the freemen ran down from the fell and fared hotly and eagerly. And when Rafn the Lawman saw that, he bade the bishop devise some plan to save himself. He and the bishop were drinking in a loft, and when the freemen came to the loft, the monk went out at the door; and was straightway smitten across the face, and fell down dead inside the loft. And when the bishop was told that, he answered, 'That had not happened sooner than was likely, for he was always making our matters worse.' Then the bishop bade Rafn tell the freemen that he wished to be reconciled with them. But when this was told to the freemen, all those among them who were wiser were glad to hear it. Then the bishop went out and meant to be reconciled. But when the worse kind of men saw that, those who were most mad, they seized Bishop Adam, and brought him into a little house and set fire to it. But the house burned so quickly that they who wished to save the bishop could do nothing. Thus Bishop Adam died, and his body was little burnt when it was found. Then a fitting grave was bestowed on it,[9] and a worthy burial. But those who had been the greatest friends of the bishop, then sent men to find the King of Scots. Alexander was then King of Scots, the son of King William the Saint. But when the king was ware of these tidings" (he took it) "so ill that men have those miseries in mind which he wrought after the burning of the bishop, in maiming of men and manslaying, and loss of goods and banishment out of the land."
From the above account of the matter, it appears that Earl John, who was responsible for law and order in Caithness at the time, although invited by Rafn the Lawman to intervene, and although he was on the spot, did nothing, saying "he could give no advice" and "that he thought it concerned him very little," and adding that "two bad things were before them, that it was unbearable" and that "he could suggest no other choice,"[10] that is, but to pay the bishop's tithes, however exorbitant, or not pay them, or possibly to make an end of him. It is clear also that the monk who was with the bishop was to blame for his exactions. But there is some excuse in the fact that Bishop John had been censured by Rome for his neglect in collecting the dues of Rome or Peter's Pence as greatly as Bishop Adam was blamed by the people of Caithness for his greediness. There is no need to brand Bishop Adam as a voluptuary for excessive drinking and immorality.[11]
These events took place in 1222, and King Alexander, urged by the remainder of the bishops in Scotland, at once marched into Caithness with an army, and took vengeance on the bishop's murderers by mutilating a large number of those concerned and seizing their lands,[12] while in 1223 the Pope excommunicated them and also interdicted them from their lands.
The Annals of Dunstable, however, paint Earl John in much blacker colours, and state that he himself caused the bishop, who was escaping from the fire, to be cast into it again, and the bodies of two others previously slain, his nephew and the monk, to be thrown upon him, and that King Alexander forfeited half John's earldom.[13]
The Saga says that the king forfeited Earl John's lands for the murder of the bishop. Wyntoun, however, states that afterwards, at Christmas festivities at Forfar,
"Thare borwyd that erle than his land
That lay unto the Kyngis hand
Fra that the byschape of Cateness,
As yhe before herd, peryst wes."[14]
By this "borrowing," however, Earl John recovered only the reduced earldom above described, that is without the Lordship of Sutherland, to which William de Moravia, Hugo's son, had succeeded between 1211 and 1214, and without that south-western portion of it, which, as stated, had been given to Gilbert de Moravia by Hugo in 1211, and without the Moddan family's lands near Loch Coire and in Strathnaver and Caithness, and without Harald Ungi's moiety or half share of the Caithness earldom; and, as already stated, the lands appertaining to this share were probably occupied by his family as represented by Gunni and Ragnhild, Eric Stagbrellir's youngest daughter, and by the members of the Moddan clan, and the retainers of the Erlend line.
In 1223, Earl John was again at Bergen, with Bishop Bjarni of Orkney and others, to consider the rival claims of King Hakon and Jarl Skuli to the Norse crown,[15] and in 1224 he went thither again to leave his only son, Harald, as a hostage for his own loyalty.[16] In 1226, Harald was drowned at sea, probably on his return voyage, thus leaving John without any male heir, and save for his nameless hostage daughter or her children, if any, without any direct lineal heirs for the jarldom and earldom of Orkney and of Caithness respectively.
In 1228 John sent presents to the Norse king, and received in return a good long-ship and many other gifts; and in 1230 John is found aiding Olaf, King of Man, a friend of the Norse king, by giving him a like vessel, "The Ox," to enable him to complete his voyage back from Norway to his own kingdom, and in the same year John rendered assistance to the Norse expedition, which had attacked the South Hebrides, by harbouring its ships in Orkney on their voyage back to Norway.[17]
From the above facts it is clear that Earl John, though he owed allegiance to both kings, was more inclined to favour Norway than Scotland, and that he was more constantly in attendance at the Norse, than at the Scottish Court. At the same time it became more and more likely that he would have to choose between his two masters, as war for the Sudreyar or Hebrides was already certain to break out between the two countries, and, save for civil war in Norway, would have broken out at once.
Snaekoll[18] Gunni's son, as the sole male representative of the Erlend Thorfinnson, St. Magnus, St. Ragnvald, Eric Stagbrellir and Harald Ungi line remaining in Scotland, who had probably about this time succeeded, or at least was recognised as next heir to the Moddan family estates in Strathnaver and Caithness, approached Earl John in 1231, and demanded from him Jarl Ragnvald's lands in Orkney. But the earl, who held Orkney in its entirety as the representative of the line of Paul and of Harold Maddadson, who had seized it when Jarl St. Ragnvald died in 1158, refused to give Snaekoll any part of those lands; and Snaekoll, failing to obtain any redress, sought the aid of Hanef, formerly a page, but now Commissioner in Orkney, of the Norse King, and demanded his help in recovering his lands there. Snaekoll and Hanef with a large following accordingly crossed the Pentland Firth to Thurso to enforce the claim, but the earl again angrily refused to restore the lands in Orkney, and it would seem that he was also unwilling to let Snaekoll have his rights in Caithness.[19]
Each party occupied separate lodgings in Thurso with their separate followings, and Hanef and his friends, warned by a messenger of the earl's reported design of killing them, forestalled it by attacking the earl first, and they slew him with nine wounds in the cellar of his lodgings. After the affray they crossed over to Orkney, where they fortified the small but massive castle[20] or tower of Kolbein Hruga or Cobbie Row, in the Island of Vigr or Wyre, now called Veira, near Rousay in Orkney, and provisioned it for a siege, which lasted the whole winter, and was raised only after both sides had come to an agreement that all questions arising out of the earl's death at Thurso, should be referred, not to the Scottish courts, but to the Norse king, Hakon, in Bergen.
Both parties, with their witnesses, accordingly crossed the North Sea in 1232, and Hakon heard the case, and punished the partisans of Snaekoll, some with death and others with imprisonment. Snaekoll himself, who, as the heir of Jarl Ragnvald, was too valuable a pawn to be sacrificed, was retained, and lived long in Norway with Earl Skuli, and afterwards with King Hakon.[21] It is noteworthy that a gaedinga ship (no Jewish Ship,[22] as Torfaeus states, but a ship of the gaedingar or lendirmen of the Earl of Orkney) was, on the return voyage, lost at sea; and, bearing in mind the large number of Orkney notables who had been slain at the battle of Floruvagr in Norway in 1194, men of means and standing must have been scarce in Orkney for long after this time.
There is a tradition mentioned by Alexander Pope of Reay,[23] the translator of the Orcades of Torfaeus, that Snaekoll, being deprived of his rights in Orkney by King Hakon, returned late in life to Caithness, where the Norse King could not deprive him of anything, and lived in that county at Ulbster. If so, why did he return?
The answer brings us to a mysterious lady, who is known to us through a charter[24] of May 1269 preserved in the Registrum Episcopatus Moraviensis or Chartulary of the Bishopric of Moray, and who is called therein nobilis mulier domina Johanna, the then deceased wife of Freskin de Moravia, Lord of Duffus, who had died before her. From her name of Johanna this lady is stated to have been a daughter of Earl John, amongst others by so eminent an authority as the late Mr. William F. Skene in a paper "on the Earldom of Caithness," first read to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland on the 11th March 1878, which is reprinted as Appendix V to the Third Volume of his Celtic Scotland at pages 448 to 453, and the lady is generally known as Lady Johanna de Strathnavir; and on her descent much subsequent history depends.
Skene's conclusion is that the half of Caithness which afterwards belonged to the Angus earls was that half usually possessed by the line of Erlend Thorfinnson, and that Joanna (or Johanna) was Earl John's daughter, and, as such, inherited the Paul share of the earldom and brought it to Freskin de Moravia, when he married her, without the title.
We doubt the accuracy of this conclusion, for reasons which, however, rest not on direct evidence, but, like those given in Mr. Skene's paper, on mere probabilities; and we hold that the converse is true, and that Johanna was no daughter of John, and that it was the Erlend half of the Caithness earldom lands that went to her and her husband Freskin de Moravia of Duffus, while the moiety of Paul, in our opinion, remained with a nameless daughter of John, and went along with the title of Earl of Caithness, to her husband Magnus, and so to the Angus earls of Caithness, though the lands which went with it were then much curtailed in extent.
But it must be remembered that, in the absence of records, any solution of this difficult problem at present rests on mere speculation and guesswork, and the opinions expressed here must be accepted as mere conjectures unsupported by direct contemporary evidence, and based only upon reasonable probability.
We propose to attempt to deal with this difficult subject in the next chapter.