Three parties may be said to have divided Scotland at the period of Malcolm’s death. In the north, the partizans of the house of Moray, crushed by the decisive victory gained by the late king over Lulach’s son Malsnechtan, were in no condition to sustain the pretensions of any member of his family to the vacant throne. Along the eastern coast, and in the south, the supporters of the reigning family were divided between the national and foreign factions; the former composed of the hereditary adherents of the house of Atholl, mostly of pure Gaelic or of Scoto-British descent; the latter of the refugees from England, and probably of the descendants of the ancient Northumbrians of the Lothians. The influence of Margaret at her husband’s court, as well as motives of policy, had induced Malcolm to show especial favour to the countrymen of his queen, thus implanting the seeds of a bitter feeling of hostility in the breasts of many of the Scottish nobles at a line of conduct exhibiting, as they thought, an undue partiality for the Saxons and their innovations. The smothered enmity of the Scots blazed forth after the death of the king, and the haste and secrecy with which the body of the royal Margaret was removed by Ethelred to its last resting-place, discloses the existence amongst many of her contemporaries of a feeling of antipathy against the Saxon Queen, widely different from the enthusiastic veneration paid by their descendants to the memory of the Royal Saint.[185] The election of Donald Bane to his brother’s throne was the natural consequence of this wide-spread jealousy, A. D. 1093. as well as of a reactionary feeling in favour of the ancient national usage, according to which he was undoubtedly the rightful heir; and the immediate expulsion of the detested Saxons followed upon the triumph of the national party.[186]
The state of Scotland had not been unnoticed at the court of the English king, where Duncan appears to have resided, ever since the death of the Conqueror, in an equivocal position between a guest and a hostage. Brought from his native country at a very early age, he had imbibed the ideas of a feudal baron, and when Robert conferred upon him the honour of knighthood, after his liberation from his former captivity, the youthful knight preferred remaining at a court to which he was accustomed from his infancy, to returning to a country of which he knew but little, and where he may have feared a doubtful reception. Presenting himself before William, on learning the accession of his uncle, he requested the grant of his fathers kingdom, promising to hold it in fealty and allegiance in return for the king’s assistance. This was readily accorded on the terms of the petitioner; A.D. 1094. and when the return of spring favoured the march of an army, Duncan, placing himself at the head of a band of English and Norman auxiliaries, drove out his uncle Donald and took possession of the kingdom. The Scots appear to have been taken by surprise, for upon recovering from their first astonishment, they at once returned in sufficient force to overwhelm the followers of Duncan, putting most of them to the sword; but as their hostility was confined to the foreign soldiery, and they entertained no personal antipathy to a member of Malcolm’s family, they readily permitted Duncan to retain the crown on condition of introducing no more aliens into the country.[187]
The temporary success of Duncan appears to have thrown Donald Bane upon the support of a partizan of the northern faction, and he enlisted in his behalf the assistance of Malpeter MacLoen, the Mormaor of Mærne; whilst another party to his conspiracy for regaining the crown was Edmund, one of the surviving sons of Malcolm and Margaret, who was to be rewarded for his connivance in the death of his half-brother by sharing the royal power with his uncle Donald. Their intrigues were only too successful, and the treacherous slaughter of Duncan at Monachedin on the banks of the Bervie, where a rude stone still marks the supposed locality of his death, reinstated Donald, after an interval of six months, whilst the surviving followers of his murdered nephew were slain or driven from the kingdom.[188]
The second reign of Donald lasted without opposition for three years, but it would be impossible to say whether Edmund shared the throne, for a veil of mystery has been thrown over all his actions. During this period the remaining children of Malcolm were exiles from their native land, whilst William was occupied in fruitless wars with the Welsh, in reducing the too powerful de Mowbray of Northumberland, and in negotiating with his brother Robert the purchase of the duchy of Normandy. A. D. 1097. At length towards the close of the year in which the Saxon chronicler laments over “the grievous oppression of the people who were driven up from the country districts to London, to work at the wall they were building about the Tower, and the Bridge, and the King’s Hall at Westminster, whereby many perished,”[189] Edgar Atheling was dispatched to Scotland, and, after a severe struggle, he succeeded in placing his eldest nephew Edgar upon the throne, under similar conditions to the terms imposed upon Duncan.[190] Donald, falling into the victor’s power, was treated with the severity of a cruel age, and was sentenced to pass the remainder of his days, in blindness and in chains, at Roscolpie or Rescobie in Forfarshire; whilst his confederate Edmund, the only degenerate son of Malcolm and Margaret, seems to have adopted a course which saved his own life, and preserved the honour of the family. He expiated his crime by assuming the cowl at Montague, a Cluniac Priory in Somersetshire; and the honourable imprisonment of the princely monk in the retirement of a distant cloister, so effectually obliterated the recollection of his treason amongst the people of his native land, that a halo of peculiar sanctity gradually encircled his memory, and he was handed down to posterity as a man of more than ordinary holiness. Such a reputation must, for obvious reasons, have been favoured by the members of his family, and the saintly character attributed to Edmund may have been partly owing to the austerities of a repentance, which prompted his dying wish to be buried in chains.[191]
Edgar 1097–1107.
Hardly were the sons of Malcolm reinstated in their ancestral dominions,—for the autumn must have been far advanced before the army of the Atheling reached its destination,—when the western coasts of Scotland were threatened with a repetition of the early invasions of the Northmen.
From a very early period the whole of the islands along the western coasts of Scotland were favourite resorts of the Scandinavian Vikings, who established themselves amongst the scanty population of the Hebrides with far greater ease than upon the mainland. From the intermixture of the natives with the northern invaders, sprung the race to which the Irish annalists, and occasionally the Sagas, give the name of Gallgael, a horde of pirates plundering on their own account, and under their own leaders, when they were not following the banner of any of the greater sea-kings, whose fleets were powerful enough to sweep the western seas, and exact tribute from the lesser island chieftains. Man was from an early period the seat of the sovereignty of the Isles, which was long centred in the family of the Hy Ivar, lords of Dublin, and often kings or Jarls of Danish Northumbria. In the middle of the tenth century the Islands fell under the dominion of Eric Blodæxe, whose rivalry with Olave Sitricson weakened and divided the power of the Anglo Northmen; and after the death of Eric they were ruled by Magnus Haraldson and his family, the representatives of the elder Sitric, who appear to have been driven from Limerick, the early seat of that branch of the Hy Ivar. The exploits of this line of princes upon the coasts of Wales are continually to be met with in the Welsh and Irish chronicles of the period, but their title of Oirrigh is a proof that they were not independent, and they probably paid tribute to the head of their family at Dublin.
The united power of the Orkneys, the Islands, and the western coasts of Scotland, in addition to the Irish Norsemen, failed to avert the catastrophe of Clontarf, A. D. 1014. and the eleventh century opened upon the decline of the Hy Ivar. The personal energy of Thorfin, the great accession of territory resulting from his connection with Malcolm the Second, and the union of all the northern islands with his wide possessions on the mainland, enabled him to take advantage of their weakness; and if the Sagas are correct, in attributing to him a large Riki in Ireland, and in extending his dominion from Thurso Skerrey to Dublin, the Jarl of the Orkneys may have assumed the prerogatives of the earlier kings of Dublin, exacted tribute from their dependants, and become the acknowledged leader of the Scottish and Irish Northmen. During the ascendancy of Thorfin the Islands were for some time under the rule of a certain Gille, and of Suibne MacKenneth, A. D. 1034. names pointing to the Gaelic element amongst the Gallgael; and it is not unlikely that they owed their rise to the Jarl, and were amongst the earliest of the mainland chiefs of the Oirir-Gael who disputed the possessions of the Hebrides with the kings of Man.[192]
Towards the middle of the eleventh century Dermot MacMalnembo, lord of Hy Kinselagh and king of Leinster, was occupied in establishing the supremacy of his family throughout his native province; and entering the territory of the Dublin Norsemen, A. D. 1052. which was known as Fingal, in the year 1052, he ravaged the country up to the walls of their capital, driving out Eachmarcach, the son of Reginald, then the head of the race of Olave Sitricson, and establishing his dominion over the whole district and its inhabitants, whilst Eachmarcach fled from his enemy to Man. A. D. 1061. Nine years later, Murchad, the son of Dermot, following up the successes of his father, pursued Eachmarcach to his island retreat, wrested the sovereignty of the Islands from the race of Ivar, and rendered them tributary to the line of Leinster. Thorfin, whose ascendancy appears to have declined before this period, A. D. 1064. died soon after the transfer of the Islands to Dermot; and his two sons, escaping from the slaughter at Stamford Bridge, whither they had followed in the train of the king of Norway, returned to their northern home, A. D. 1066. and without dividing the possessions of their warlike father, passed a peaceful and inglorious existence as joint Jarls during the remaining thirty years of the century.[193]
Amongst the fugitives from Stamford Bridge was a son of Harald the Black of Iceland, Godfrey, surnamed Crovan or “the White Hand,” who found a hospitable reception in Man from another Godfrey who, at the time of his arrival, was king, or Oirrigh, of the island.[194] A. D. 1072. Six years after the arrival of the fugitive, Dermot of Leinster fell in battle, after raising the power of his province to the highest pitch, and uniting the supremacy over the whole of southern Ireland, with the dominion of the Isles and of “the Britons”—the inhabitants, apparently, of the Isle of Anglesey;[195] and three years later, upon the death of Godfrey of Dublin, the son of Eachmarcach and head of the race of Hy Ivar, Godfrey Crovan attempted to seize upon the Islands.[196] A. D. 1075. Twice was he defeated in his attacks upon Man; but refusing to be foiled, he determined upon risking a final effort, and with a fleet collected from the other islands, sailed up the river Selby by night, landed his forces, and concealed a body of three hundred men amongst the wooded sides of a neighbouring hill called Skeafell. As soon as it was light, the Manxmen, perceiving the enemy whom they had already twice defeated, assembled to give him battle, and attacked with headlong confidence, heedless of the ambuscade, which fell upon them in the heat of the engagement with decisive and fatal effect. They turned and fled precipitately; but finding on arriving at the river that the stream was unfordable, for the tide was then at its height, throwing down their arms they begged for mercy from the conqueror; and as his object was attained by their submission, he put an immediate stop to the slaughter. His next step was to reward his confederates the Islesmen, to whom he offered the choice of remaining and appropriating the island, or of plundering it and returning to their homes; and as the latter course was most congenial to his allies, the property of the Manxmen was delivered over to their mercy. Many of the Islesmen, however, consented subsequently to remain behind, and they were settled by Godfrey in the south of the island, around his own immediate residence, whilst the earlier Norse population was confined to the north, a division which can long be traced in the little kingdom; and the conqueror assuming to himself, as usual, the sole right of property in his dominions, the Manxmen lost their Odal privileges in the same manner as the Orkneymen had been deprived of theirs, from the time of the first Einar, to the days of Sigurd Lodverson.[197]