Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/502

Rh 480 SCOTLAND [HISTORY. 1014-1058. came into the possession of a Celtic mormaer, Finlay, who is called king of Alba by one of the Irish chronicles, and the Hebrides probably into that of a Norse earl, Gilli, from whom they were afterwards recovered by Thorfinn. While the Celts of Ireland were thus expelling the Danish invaders and in Scotland there was divided possession, the result of compromise and of intermarriage, England fell under the dominion of the Danish kings Sweyn and Canute. Canute committed Northumberland to Erik, a Dane, as earl ; but Eadulf Cudel, a weak brother of the brave Oswulf and son of Waltheof, the Anglian earl, still retained the northern district as lord of Bamborough. Profiting by the distracted state of northern England, Malcolm again invaded Northumberland with Owen of Cumbria, called the Bald, and by the victory of Carham Conquest (101 8) near Coldstream won Lothian, which remained of from that time an integral part of Scotland. Canute, Lothian. Qn j^ re ^ urn f rom a pilgrimage to Rome, is said by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to have gone to Scotland, where Malcolm and two other kings, Maelbeth and Jeh- marc, submitted to him, but he held Scotland for only a little while. Maelbeth is supposed to be Macbeth, then mormaer of Moray, afterwards king, and Jehmarc, a Celtic or Scandinavian chief in Argyll. The hold which Canute, who was trying to grasp Norway and Denmark as well as England, had upon northern Britain must have been slender as well as short; but the acknowledgment of the supremacy of so great a king was natural. At his death his overgrown empire fell to pieces, and Scotland was left to itself. Two years before Malcolm IL died. His conquest of Lothian perhaps led to the new name of Scotia (now generally applied to his kingdom), which was to become its permanent name. The Scotland he governed still had its centre at Scone, but included besides the original Pictish district of Perthshire, Angus and Mearns, Fife, the southern district of Aberdeen, and Lothian, his own conquest, while Moray and western Ross, and perhaps Argyll and the Isles, owned his suze- rainty. But the Norse earl, Thorfinn, at this time held the Orkneys, Caithness, Sutherland, and the Hebrides. Whether a Cumbrian king still ruled Strathclyde and Galloway is doubtful. After Owen the -Bald, who fought at Carham, the next king mentioned is Duncan, son of the grandson and the successor of Malcolm. Malcolm II. was liberal to the church, as we know from his gifts to the church of Deer ; but the foundation of Mortlach (Banff- shire), the future see of Aberdeen, belongs to the reign of Malcolm Canmore. The laws attributed to him are spurious, introducing into the Celtic kingdom a fully deve- loped feudalism, which was not known in England, still less in Scotland, till after the Conquest. As he left no male heir, Malcolm's death led to a doubtful succession and a perplexed period of Scottish history. The Scottish historians and the Norse sagas can with difficulty be reconciled. Little light can be got from either the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle or the Irish Annals. Shakespeare seized the weird story of Macbeth, as told by Boece and translated in Holinshed, and history can hardly displace the tragedy, so true to the dark side of human nature, by the meagre outline at its command. This outline is supported by authentic evidence, and agrees with the situation which existed between the death of Mal- colm II. and the accession of Malcolm Canmore. Duncan. Malcolm II. was succeeded by his grandson Duncan (1034-40), son of his daughter Bethoc and Crinan, a lay or secular abbot of Dunkeld ; but his right was probably from the first contested by Thorfinn, who had become the most powerful of the Norse earls. If the Orkney saga could be relied upon, he had as many as eleven earls or mormaers subject to him, and a modern but unsafe in- terpretation of one passage extends his dominion as far as Galloway. Duncan, after an unsuccessful attempt on Durham, turned his arms to the north to check the further advance of his kinsman, but was defeated on the Pentland Firth. Modclan, whom he had tried to set up as earl of Caithness, was burnt in his own house, and Duncan him- self was killed at Bothgownan near Elgin by Macbeth, his own general. Macbeth was son of Finlay, mormaer of Macl> Moray, and his wife Gruoch was daughter of Boete, son of Kenneth II.; thus he had a possible pretension to the crown if it could descend by females. But his real posi- tion appears to have been that of a successful general asserting the independence of the northern Celts against Duncan, who by his marriage with the daughter of Earl Siward, the Northumbrian earl, had shown the tendency to unite Saxon with Celtic blood which was followed by his son Malcolm (III.) Canmore. Macbeth reigned seventeen years (1040-57). He was, as far as records state, an able monarch, who succeeded in repelling the attacks of Siward on behalf of his grandson, who showed liberality to the church, as the foundation of himself and his wife at Loch Leven testify, sent money for the poor to Rome, and possibly went with it on a pilgrim- age; but he fell at last in the battle of Lumphanan in Mar, where the young Malcolm was aided by Tostig, son of Godwine, the great West Saxon earl who had become earl of Northumberland. A few months later, Lulach, the son of Gillecomhain, a former mormaer of Moray, who had continued the war, and is nominally counted a king, though called fatuous, was slain at Essie in Strathbogie (N.W. Aberdeen), and Malcolm Canmore became king. With his reign a new and clearer era of the history of Scotland commences. The Scottish Gaels had proved themselves capable of govern- Mon- meut. The united monarchy of Scone lasted for two centuries in archy spite of its powerful neighbours, but it was dependent almost Scorn entirely on the attachment of the clans to their chiefs and of the whole race to the hereditary king. It was traditional, not consti- tutional, with some accepted customs, otherwise it could not have held together, but with little settled law and no local government. It wanted the elements of civil life, for it had no organized towns or assemblies of the people. There was little commerce or trade. Cattle and sheep were the chief commodities and the medium of exchange. There is no trace of an independent coinage. Chris- tianity had not yet leavened the whole population, though the monasteries were centres of light within limited circles. The Celtic character, alien to set and quick forms of business, was Celti< alive to the pleasures of the imagination, oratory, and song. Its and cardinal defect was a light regard for truth. Its chief virtue was Angli devotion to a leader, whether priest, chief, or king. The Christian Saxoi Anglo-Saxons of the Lothians, the Norsemen, only recently and chara half converted, in the islands of the north and west, brought qualities and customs into the common stock of the future Scottish people which were wanting to the Celts. The Anglo-Saxon in his original home, as in Britain the inhabitant of the plain "the creeping Saxon," as he was called by an Irish bard developed in the house and the town a better regulated freedom, the domestic and civic virtues. His imagination, even his poetry, had a touch of prose, but he possessed the prosaic qualities of plain speech, common sense, and truth, the essence of trust. The contact for it was a contact, not a conquest with this race was of the highest value to the Scottish nation of the future. The Normans introduced new elements, the spirit of chivalry and the too rigid bonds of the feudal law. The changes due to these new elements began in Scotland in the reign of Malcolm Canmore, and were completed in those of his descendants. The Scottish Celtic kingdom became gradually civilized under Saxon and Norman influences, while retaining its native vigour. The result was the establishment of the independence of Scotland within its present bounds during the prosperous reigns of the Alexanders (1107-1285). 4. Transition from a Celtic to an Anglo-Norman Feudal Mala Moizarchy: Malcolm Canmore and his Descendant*. Malcolm Canmore (1058-93) spent his boyhood in Cum- 11 bria, his youth at the court of Edward the Confessor of England. He was by race only half a Celt, for his mother was an Anglo-Dane, sister of Earl Siward. The court which helped to form his character was already sub-