Page:The dialect of the southern counties of Scotland - Murray - 1873.djvu/27

Rh in favour of their native leaders, the Scottish kings repeatedly overran the territories of Lothian and Northumberland, in co-operation with the Anglo-Saxon monarch. Similar reasons to those which prompted the transfer of Cumbria, led probably also to the cession of the Northumbrian frontier fortress of Eadwinesburh, to Malcolm's successor, Indulf, the son of Constantine, in whose time, according to the Pictish chronicle (954-962), "oppidum Eden vacuatum est, et relictum est Scottis usque in hodiernum diem." While Northumbria was an independent kingdom, whose relations to the Picts and Scots were generally hostile, Edinburgh was of course one of its most important bulwarks; but to the English kings, separated as it was from the rest of their dominions by the two only half-subdued Northern provinces, it was probably better in the hands of their ally and "fellow-worker," the king of the Scots, whose aid they so often required against their own refractory Northumbrian subjects. Whether the cession was due to the policy of Eadred or the weakness of Eadwig is unknown, but it shews the direction in which the Scottish kings were now casting eager glances, and it paved the way for that possession of Lothian and Tweeddale, which proved so pregnant with mighty consequences for the language, the laws, the civilization, and whole history of Scotland. The circumstances of the latter transaction are not quite clear, but according to John of Wallingford and Roger of Wendover, the grant of Lothian, or that part of Bernicia north of the Tweed, was made by Eadgar, who died 975, to Kenneth III., son of Malcolm I., who began to reign 970, and therefore between those two years; the latter holding it in the same capacity as it had been held by the Northumbrian eorls, and engaging that the province should retain its own laws and customs, and its Angle or English language ("promittens quòd populo partis illius antiquas consuetudines non negaret, et linguâ Anglicanâ remanerent"), stipulations which we know were faithfully observed; this "English" of Lothian, as we shall presently see, having become the national language of Scotland, or "Lowland Scotch."

Shortly after this date began the second great series of Danish invasions, which, after devastating England for forty years, resulted in placing a Danish dynasty upon the English throne. During the utter helplessness and prostration to which the central power was reduced in this struggle, the remote provinces again relapsed into quasi-independence, the eorls of Northumbria acting for themselves without any reference to their nominal sovereign in the south. A quarrel, the grounds of which we do not know, broke out between the eorl of Northumbria and Malcolm II., king of the Scots; perhaps the former wished, with the help of the Danes, to reunite Lothian to the rest of his dominion, and rule once more over a united Northan-hymbra-land,—at any rate,