Thare thai slwe hym before day.
Hymself bwndyn and wowndyt syne
Thai pwt hym in hys awyn kychyne,
In thair felny and thare ire
Thare thai brynt hym in a fyre.”
The Saga tells that when the tidings of this outrage reached King Alexander he was greatly enraged, and that the terrible vengeance he took was still fresh in memory when the Saga was written. Fordun states that the king had the perpetrators of this deed mangled in limb and racked with many a torture. The Icelandic Annals are more precise. They say that he caused the hands and feet to be hewn from eighty of the men who had been present at the burning, and that many of them died in consequence.
With this tragic and ill-omened event the chequered history of the line of the Norse Earls draws to a close. Earl John sought to clear himself from the guilt of complicity in the murder of the bishop by the testimony of “good men” that he had no hand in it; but seeing that he had neither assisted the bishop nor sought to punish his murderers, he was heavily fined by King Alexander, and deprived of part of his Scottish earldom. Subsequently he had an interview with the king at Forfar, and bought back his lands. In the summer of 1224 he was summoned by King Hakon to Norway, having fallen under suspicion of a desire to aid the designs of Earl Skule against Hakon’s power in Norway; and after a conference with the king at Bergen he returned to Orkney, leaving his only son Harald behind him as a hostage. In 1226 Harald was drowned at sea, probably on his passage home from Norway. In 1231, Earl John having become involved in a feud with Hanef Ungi, a commissioner whom King Hakon had sent over to the Orkneys, Snækoll Gunnason, grandson of Earl Rögnvald (Kali Kolson), and Aulver Illteit, they attacked him suddenly in an inn at Thurso, set fire to the house, and slew him in the cellar, where he had sought to conceal himself.
Thus the ancient line of the Norse Earls, that had ruled the Orkneys since 872—a period of 350 years—became extinct, and the earldom passed into the possession of the house of Angus.
V. The Earldom in the Angus Line—1231-1312.
On the failure of the line of the Norse Earls by the death of Earl John in 1231, King Alexander II. of Scotland, in 1232, granted the earldom of North Caithness to Magnus,[[48]] the second son of Gilbride, Earl of Angus. Sutherland, or the southern land of Caithness, was now made a separate earldom, and given to William, son of Hugh Freskyn, who was thus the first of the Earls of Sutherland.