[140] Innes, Ap. 5. Tigh. 1040. Mar. Scot. 1040. Slain “a duce suo,” writes Marianus. Tighernach adds immaturâ ætate, contrary to all modern ideas of Duncan. Marianus was born in 1028, Tighernach was his senior; their authority, therefore, at this period, as contemporaries, is very great. Bothgowanan means “the smith’s bothy,” and under this word may lurk some long forgotten tradition of the real circumstances of Duncan’s murder. The vision of a weary fugitive, a deserted king, rises before the mind’s eye, recalling “Beaton’s mill” and the fate of James the Third. Two hundred years after his death a chaplain was appointed by his descendant, Alexander the Second, to celebrate masses in Elgin Cathedral for the benefit of Duncan’s soul. No allusion is made in the Saga to any alliance between Thorfin and Macbeth, and whilst the former is described as collecting reinforcements from Ross, Sutherland, and Caithness, Duncan retires upon Moray as a friendly province in which he recruits his forces. Considering the hereditary enmity between the Jarls of Orkney and the Mormaors of Moray, it seems more probable that the ill fortune of the young king tempted Macbeth to aspire to the crown, and to murder his rival in “the Smith’s bothy,” where he was resting after retreating from the field of his last defeat. In the Saga, Kali disappears after the battle and is heard of no more, from which it would appear that the Orkneymen and their allies had nothing to do with his death, of which they were probably ignorant.
[141] Chalmers, who has traced in his Caledonia the memorials of these contests with all the zeal of an enthusiastic antiquary, is angry with Pinkerton for asserting that “there is not a shadow of authority for the Danish wars of Malcolm the Second;” remarking that “popular tradition, with well vouched remains, are historical documents of sufficient authority for narrative facts.” For the facts, undoubtedly, but not for the narratives, which have been subsequently appended. The remains, so industriously noted down by Chalmers, fully attest the frequent conflicts occurring along the Scottish coasts with the Northmen, but they do not prove the truth of minute descriptions of battles unknown before the time of Boece, who wrote in the early part of the sixteenth century.
[142] Wynton, bk. 6, c. 16, 18. Much needless confusion is thrown over the period of Macbeth by raising unnecessary questions about his birth and his rights to the crown. All the best authorities—his contemporaries Tighernach and Marianus, and the Registry of the Priory of St. Andrews, which records his gift to the Culdees of Lochleven—unite in calling him the son of Finlay, the Register describing his wife as the daughter of Boedhe, whose claims she inherited. Another difficulty is raised because Macbeth appears as the immediate successor of Malcolm the Second in Sim. Dun. de Gestis, 1034, contrary to every other authority. That this is an error, of some transcriber apparently, is very evident, for the same Simeon, in his History of Durham, l. 3, c. 9, calls Duncan the king of Scots, adding that he was defeated before Durham in the fifth year of Harald’s reign, i.e., 1040, and soon afterwards slain by his own subjects. The supposed relationship between Macbeth and Duncan may have been grounded upon the real connection between the king and Thorfin, with whom the Moray Mormaor seems to have been confounded in more ways than one.
[143] Reg. Prior. St. And., p. 114.
[144] Mar. Scot. 1050.
[145] Tigh. An. Ult. 1045. The flight of Duncan’s children—mere infants—one to Cumbria, the other to the Isles, is a fiction founded on the ideas of the time when it first appears, three or four centuries later. They probably remained amongst their hereditary partizans in Atholl and the southern provinces, occupying the same position which their cousin Lulach had done during the reign of their father—the position of the Head of the Hy Nial, when Brian Boru achieved the sovereignty of Ireland; or of a Duke of Bavaria or Austria, in the olden time, when another magnate had been elected to the empire.
[146] Flor. Wig. 1052.
[147] Tigh. An. Ult. Chron. Sax. 1054. Neither the contemporary Irish annalist, nor the two MSS. of the Chronicle which describe the expedition of Siward, allude to any cause for it, or note any result beyond the immense booty obtained. They never mention the name of Malcolm or of the Confessor, and the MS. Cot. Tib., B I, expressly adds that Macbeth escaped from the battle. It remained for the writers of the Anglo-Norman era to confound the events of two separate years for their own purposes, and to represent Siward as the slayer of Macbeth and the restorer of Malcolm to the throne of Scotland, at the command of Edward the Confessor, though the Northumbrian earl died three years before the accession of the Scottish prince. The ever ready pen of the Prior of Belvoir, to a literal transcription of Florence, adds the words “de se tenendum,” to complete the feudality of the transaction; the addition resting on grounds quite as good as the rest of the story, which almost seems to have been adapted upon the events which occurred forty years later, in the days of Malcolm Ceanmore’s sons, Edward standing in the place of Rufus, Siward in that of the Atheling, and Macbeth playing the part of Donald Bane.
[148] Tigh. An. Ult. 1058. Innes, Ap. 5. Wynton is the first to mention the popular story of Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinnan, but he places the death of Macbeth at Lumphanan, attributing it to “a knycht nowcht borne of wyf,” who is transformed by Boece into Macduff. As Fife was “in the crown” in the days of Malcolm Ceanmore, who granted the earldom to his son Ethelred, the Macduff Earl of Fife of the fabulists—a being unknown to Wynton—must be set down as a myth. Since the days of the younger Angus, the founder of St. Andrews, the province appears to have been connected with the royal family—the abbacy of the leading monastery of the district having been held by Constantine the Second, just as the abbacy of Dunkeld belonged invariably to a member of the house of Atholl—and the first earl, who cannot be traced to the reigning family, was Dufagan or Duff, a witness of the Foundation Charter of Scone in the time of Alexander the First; his immediate successors being Constantine and Gillemichael Macduff. Fife appears to have been the latest earldom held by the old Scottish tenure, and its earls, like the earls of Atholl—a branch of the reigning family—never appear in the ranks of the king’s enemies. Indeed they may be looked upon in early times as premier Earls of Scotland, with certain privileges attaching to their dignity, to account for which the legend of Macduff was probably framed; though it is not impossible that the earldom with its prominent position and privileges was granted to the historical Duff or Dufagan as a reward for his assistance in restoring the sons of Malcolm to the throne. Many examples could be given of the transposition of events from one period to another. A prominent one occurs in Norwegian history, the whole of the actions of Olaf Tryggveson in England having been transferred to Olaf the Saint.
[149] According to Tighernach, Lulach perished, per dolum, a vague word, which may imply either treachery or simply an ambuscade. The Latin chroniclers sometimes call him Lulach fatuus—the simple.