Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 30.djvu/446

 writing about 1395, attribute the treachery to Fenella. Fordoun and later annalists tell in various forms the story that she constructed a figure which, on the touch of the king, shot arrows from crossbows which destroyed him; this is probably an invention, to give a vivid image of her treachery.

The real drift of Kenneth's reign appears to have been the consolidation and defence of the central districts of Scotland, from the Forth and Clyde to the Mounth or the Grampians. Cumbria was held at the time by a separate line of princes, and it may be doubted whether Kenneth possessed permanently any territory south of the Forth.

[The contemporary chronicles have been mentioned above. Freeman's Norman Conquest gives the modern English, Skene's Celtic Scotland and E. W. Robertson's Scotland under her Early Kings the modern Scottish, version of their scanty statements.] 

KENNETH III (d. 1005?), son of Duff, the elder brother of Kenneth II [q. v.], succeeded Constantine, the son of Culen [q. v.], as king of the Scottish Pictish monarchy in 997. He is sometimes called the Donn or Brown, sometimes the Grim, and is said, in the prophecy of St. Berchan, to have come from ‘strong Duncaith,’ perhaps the hill of that name on the Sidlaws, the range which separates Strathmore from the Carse of Gowrie, where the descendants of Kenneth I [q. v.] appear to have held several forts. The single event of his reign recorded in the ‘Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’ is a raid made upon Cumberland by Ethelred the Unready [q. v.] in 1000; and the ‘Ulster Annals’ assign his death to a battle fought ‘among the men of Alban themselves’ in 1005. One of the later Scottish chronicles gives the place as Monaghavard (Monzievaird) in Strathearn, and his successful opponent as Malcolm II, Kenneth II's son, who succeeded him on the throne.

[Chronicles of the Picts and Scots; Wyntoun and Fordoun; Skene's Celtic Scotland.] 