Scotland under her early kings, Volume 1 (of 2)

by Eben William Robertson

[60] Innes, Ap. 3. It probably resembled those meetings of the Anglo-Saxon Witan, at which the ecclesiastical Dooms, so often preceding the secular Dooms in the Anglo-Saxon laws, were promulgated, and may have had some reference to the recent elevation of the See of St. Andrews to the primacy.

[61] An. Ult. 871. According to this authority, Constantine “procured” the death of Artga.

[62] An. Ult. 876, 877. An. Camb. and Brut y Tywys, 880. Caradoc, Hist. Wales, p. 38. Caledonia, vol. i., bk. 3, c. 5, p. 355. Chalmers gives the name of Constantine to their first leader, whilst, according to Caradoc, Hobart was their chief when they reached Wales. To some old tradition of this migration, and to the encroachments of the Galwegians, the Inquisitio Davidis probably alludes:—“Diversæ seditiones circumquaque insurgentes non solum ecclesiam et ejus possessiones destruxerunt verum etiam totam regionem vastantes ejus habitatores exilio tradiderunt” Reg. Glasg. In fact it would appear as if a Scottish party had dated its rise from the days of Kenneth MacAlpin, and secured a triumph by the expulsion of its antagonists, on the accession of Eocha to the Scottish throne, and by the election of Donald in the reign of the second Constantine.

[63] Innes, Ap. 3. Donald and Eocha, or Eogan, were the invariable family names (with only one exception) of the princes of Strath Clyde, until the extinction of the race in the time of Malcolm II.

[64] An. Ult. 901–903. The Egill’s Saga (Antiq. Celt.-Scand. p. 32), in describing Olave the Red, calls him “the son of a native Scot, by a descendant of Ragnar Lodbroc,” meaning by the expression “a native Scot,” that his father was of Scottish descent by both parents. This description cannot apply to Olave’s father Sitric and his brothers, the well-known grandsons of Ivar, whose children could not possibly have been of pure Scottish descent. It is remarkable, however, that the name of the father of Sitric and his brothers is never mentioned by the Irish annalists, who invariably call them Hy Ivar, or grandsons of Ivar (for the Hy had not yet become a family prefix), whilst they also frequently allude to Godfrey and Sitric, the sons of Ivar, and their descendants, who never attained to the same celebrity as the others. These latter more famous Hy Ivar appear to have been in some way connected with the Western Isles, where their descendants were long regarded in the light of a royal race. The first appearance of Reginald Hy Ivar is in a naval battle off the Isle of Man; and as his family had no footing at that time either in England, Scotland, or Ireland, he must have recruited his fleet from amongst the Gall-Gael. Nearly thirty years later the son of Reginald was driven from the same Western Islands, which he probably had inherited in his childhood (for Reginald and his brothers were young), when the English and Irish possessions of his father fell to the share of his uncles Sitric and Godfrey. (An. Ult. 942. An. F. M. 940.) After the death of Godfrey Mac Fergus in 853, who figures in the genealogy of Somarled, lord of the Oirir-Gael, and must have been (from his name) of Scottish descent by the father’s side, the Isles next appear under the rule of Caittil or Ketil, a Norwegian, but as his sons settled in Iceland after the expedition of Harfager (Landnamabok), he could not have transmitted his power to his descendants; and the Sagas say that the Isles then fell into the hands of Scottish and Irish Vikings. If one of these Vikings, a Scottish lord of the Gall-Gael or Oirir-Gael, had married Ivar’s daughter, the description in the Egill’s Saga would exactly apply to himself, his wife, and his sons, and it would be only necessary to suppose that the writer of the Saga, aware of Olave’s descent from a Scottish Viking and a grand-daughter of Ragnar Lodbroc, made him by mistake the son instead of the grandson of the Scot. This supposition would equally account for the connection of the Hy Ivar with the Isles, and the ignorance of the Irish annalists respecting their father’s name.

[65] An. Ult. 913–917. In 888 the Irish annalists record that Sitric, the son of Ivar, killed, or was killed by, his brother. In 919 the same authorities mention that Sitric, the grandson of Ivar, slew Nial, King of Ireland, in battle. Some of the Anglo-Norman chroniclers, and one late MS. of the Saxon Chronicle, evidently confounding these events, make the younger Sitric the murderer of his brother Nial.

[66] Sim. Dun. Hist. Dun., l. 2, c. 16. Hist. St. Cuth., pp. 73, 74. Innes, Ap. 3. An. Ult. 917. The engagement is called by Simeon the battle of Corbridge-on-Tyne, and in Chron. 3 the battle of Tynemore, evidently Tyne Moor.

[67] An. Ult. 920.

[68] An. Ult. 926. Chron. Sax. 925, 926. According to the Irish annalists, Sitric died immaturâ aetate, and consequently his son Olave must have been too young to offer any opposition to Athelstan. The MS. C. T., B. iv., which alludes to Sitric and Godfrey, is, like the Ulster annals, a year behind the true date at this period. As Godfrey was present at a battle in Ireland, fought on 28th December 926, and left Dublin in the following year, upon hearing of the death of his brother, returning thither after an absence of six months, the transactions to which Malmesbury and the Chronicle allude must have taken place during this interval.

[69] An. Ult. 926. Chron. Sax. 926, 927. Malm. Gesta Regum, l. 2, s. 133. The Saxon Chronicle (MS. C. T., B. iv., of the eleventh century) states that the kings met at Emmet, in Yorkshire, and renounced idolatry, a singular compact for a prince who, twenty years before, had presided at an ecclesiastical council at Scone! Malmesbury, who takes his account from an old volume containing a metrical history of Athelstan, “in quo scriptor cum difficultate materiæ luctabatur (et) ultra opinionem in laudibus principis vagatur,” places the meeting at Dacor in Cumberland, adding that Athelstan commanded the son of Constantine to be baptised! Here again the Scottish King figures as a pagan, as he also does in the same writer’s description of the battle of Brunanburgh, where he says that the survivors of the vanquished host were spared to embrace Christianity. There is an evident confusion here between the pagan Northmen, to whom all this is very applicable, and the Christian Scots. It is highly probable both that Sitric “renounced idolatry” on the occasion of his marriage with Athelstan’s sister, and that his son Olave, who ended his life in the monastery of Iona, was baptised through the intervention of the English king, but the same cannot be said of the Christian King of Scotland. From time immemorial, as we learn from Malcolm Ceanmor (Sim. Dun. 1093), it was the custom of the English and Scottish kings to meet upon their respective frontiers; but though the borders of Yorkshire and Cumberland were the most appropriate places of meeting for Sitric and his English brother-in-law, they were on the Danish, not the Scottish frontier; and what should bring Constantine thither to renounce idolatry in his declining years, and baptise his son at the bidding of the English king? Much of the history of this period appears to have been derived from old songs and lays, in which due allowance must be made for the confusion and mistakes incidental to such legendary compositions, as well as for the “genus dicendi quod suffultum Tullius appellat,” especially in the struggles of the transcriber to Latinise the barbarous idioms of the vernacular, alluded to with such contemptuous pity by Malmesbury. The vague and exaggerated expressions of these old ballads were frequently copied literally, and latterly in the feudal idiom, into the dry chronicle of a subsequent era, a fate which has frequently befallen the sole Saxon record of the famous battle of Brunanburgh. In the scanty records of this, the most glorious and least known period of Anglo-Saxon history, it is very evident that Constantine has frequently usurped the place of Sitric,—just as in the Egill’s Saga Olave Sitricson figures as King of Scotland, to the total exclusion of his own father-in-law,—but it would be difficult to do more than point out the confusion. The Anglo-Norman writers, of course, take advantage of the confused and indistinct idea of a treaty between Athelstane and Constantine to turn it to their own account, but they have been far outdone by a modern historian, who has actually described the manner in which the Scottish king performed fealty to Athelstan—More Francico, in set form, as laid down in the Liber de Beneficiis—though it would be impossible to say from what source he has obtained his vivid description of the feudal ceremony, for it certainly is not contained in any of the authorities to which he refers (Malm., 27, 28. Flor., 602. Mail., 147), nor was the Frankish ceremony of homage in force amongst the Anglo-Saxons of that era.