In 1158, Ragnvald and Harold went, as they did every year, to hunt red deer and reindeer[38] in Caithness, their hunting ground being probably near the Ben-y-griams, which lay on the way to Kildonan, or Strathnaver, where Eric probably lived; and some think there are still remains of walls used as a pen for driven deer on Ben-y-griam Beg, though these are more probably the ancient ramparts of a hill-fort.[39] When they landed at Thurso, they heard that Thorbiorn Klerk was hiding and lying in wait in Thorsdale[40] in order to make an onslaught on Ragnvald, if he got a chance. After riding with a band of a hundred men, twenty of them mounted, they spent the night at a place where there was what the Celts call an "erg" (airigh) but the Norse call "setr," the modern sheiling. Next day, as they rode up along Calfdale, Ragnvald was in advance of the party, and, at a homestead called Force,[41] Halvard hailed him loudly by name. Thorbiorn was inside the house, and burst out through an old doorway, and dealt Ragnvald a great wound, and the jarl fell, his foot sticking in his stirrup, when Stephen, an accomplice, gave him a spear thrust; whereupon Thorbiorn, after dealing him another wound, and receiving a spear thrust in the thigh himself, fled to the moor. Earl Harold at first would not interfere; and though Magnus son of Havard Gunni's son insisted, Earl Harold again declined to pursue Thorbiorn to the death, but left Magnus to besiege him at Asgrim's Ergin or Shielings,[42] now Assary, near Loch Calder, where, by setting fire to the hut in which he was, his pursuers succeeded in smoking him out and killing him. They then brought the jarl's body from Force to Thurso, and thence took it over to Orkney, to be buried in the choir of St. Magnus' Cathedral, which he had founded and built in his uncle's honour.
"Jarl Ragnvald's death was a very great grief, for he was very much beloved there in the Isles, and far and wide elsewhere." It took place on the 20th August 1158.
"He had been a very great helper," the Saga adds, "to many men, bountiful of money, gentle, and a steadfast friend; a great man for feats of strength, and a good skald" or poet. In 1192 he was canonised as St. Ragnvald[43] with, it is said, full Papal sanction. Save during Harold Maddadson's minority he was never Earl of Caithness, and then had the title only as guardian of his ward Harold.
Ragnvald left a daughter, his only surviving child, Ingirid or Ingigerd, whom as we have seen, Audhild's son, Eric Stagbrellir had married four years before her father's death; and their children, who come into the story afterwards, were three sons, Harald Ungi or Harald the Young, Magnus nick-named Mangi, and Ragnvald, and three daughters, Ingibiorg, Elin[44] and Ragnhild, all of whom, so far as the Saga relates, died childless save Ragnhild, whose son by her second husband Gunni, was Snaekoll Gunni's son, who about 1230 claimed the Ragnvald lands in Orkney from Earl John, son of Earl Harold Maddadson,[45] and complained that Earl John was keeping him out of his rights in Caithness to Ragnvald's share of the earldom lands there.
After Thorbiorn Klerk's death, Olvir Rosta being "out of the story," Eric's children, who were mainly Norse in blood, were the only heirs left in Caithness not only for Jarl Ragnvald's lands, but also for the upper parts of the river valleys of Strathnavern and Ness, which the Moddan family had held through the whole Norse occupation of Caithness and Sutherland, along with the hill country in Halkirk and Latheron and Strathnavern and probably also in Sutherland, lands on which few Norse place-names are found, and which came to Eric through Audhild his mother on the deaths of Earls Ottar and Erlend Haraldson without issue. These lands would of right descend to Eric's eldest son, Harald Ungi, and on his death without issue, to his brothers if alive, and, failing them, to his sisters and their heirs, as happened in the case of Ragnhild and her son Snaekoll Gunni's son, neither Ingibiorg nor Elin receiving any share of this property, for reasons now undiscoverable, but which we shall endeavour to explain later, by presuming that one of them had died unmarried, or had married abroad, while the other and her descendants were amply provided for otherwise by marriage with Gilchrist, Earl of Angus.
CHAPTER VII.
Harold Maddadson and the Freskyns.
After the death of Jarl Ragnvald in 1158, Harold Maddadson at the age of twenty-five "took all the isles under his rule, and became sole chief over them."[1] Ever since 1139 he had been sole Earl of Cat save for Erlend Haraldson's grant,[2] though Jarl Ragnvald seems to have had a share of its lands and managed the Earldom of Caithness for Harold during his minority, bearing the title of his ward till the latter attained his majority in 1154. Harold had married Afreka, daughter of Duncan, Earl of Fife, one of the most loyal supporters of the Scottish kings, and their children were two sons, Henry, who afterwards claimed Ross, and of whom we hear no more, and Hakon, Sweyn Asleifarson's foster-child, and two daughters, Helena and Margret, of whom we hear nothing save their names. Hakon, from boyhood, went with Sweyn on all his spring and autumn "vikings" or piratical cruises, undertaken every year to the Hebrides, Man, and Ireland, in one of which Sweyn took two English ships near Dublin, and returned to Orkney laden with broadcloth, wine, and English mead.[3] Sweyn's life is thus described in c. 114 of the Orkneyinga Saga. "He sat through the winter at home in Gairsay, and there he kept always about him eighty men at his beck. He had so great a drinking-hall that there was not another as great in all the Orkneys. Sweyn had in the spring hard work, and made them lay down very much seed, and looked much after it himself. But when that toil was ended, he fared away every spring on a Viking-voyage, and harried about among the southern isles and Ireland, and came home after midsummer. That he called spring-viking. Then he was at home until the cornfields were reaped down, and the grain seen to and stored. Then he fared away on a viking-voyage, and then he did not come home till the winter was one month spent, and that he called his autumn-viking." At last, in a cruise to Dublin, which he captured, Sweyn was killed by stratagem on landing to receive payment of its ransom from the town, and the boy Hakon probably fell there with him in 1171. "And," the Saga adds, "it is the common saying of Sweyn that he was the most masterful man in the western lands, both of yore and now-a-days, among those men who had no higher rank than himself." Sweyn was, in fact the greatest man of his time. For he robbed whom he pleased, made and undid jarls and earls as he chose, and was the friend or tool of more than one Scottish king.
Earl Harold had put his wife Afreka away, and probably after Sweyn's death formed a union, at a date which it seems impossible to fix, with Hvarflod or Gormflaith, daughter of Malcolm MacHeth of Moray, who was in rebellion in 1134, and was imprisoned in Roxburgh Castle until 1157, when he was released and created Earl of Ross, so that Gormflaith, who could hardly have been born during her father's imprisonment, must have been born either before 1135 or after 1157. Harold and Gormflaith's children were Thorfinn, who predeceased him, and also David and John, both afterwards in succession earls of Caithness and jarls of Orkney, and three daughters, Gunnhilda, Herborga, and Langlif; and of the daughters the Saga-writers tell us nothing, except that the Icelander S230;mund, Magnus Barelegs' grandson, wished to marry Langlif but did not do so;[4] and her son Jon Langlifson, according to the Saga of Hakon was in 1263 a spy on the Norse side.