Читать книгу Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time; or, The Jarls and The Freskyns - Gray James Martin - Страница 12

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It was in the reign of Constantine I, son of the great Pictish king, Angus MacFergus, that the new and disturbing influence mentioned above appeared in force in Alban. Favoured in their voyages to and fro by the prevailing winds, which then, as now, blew from the east in the spring and from the west later in the year, the Northmen, both Norsemen and Danes, neither being Christians, had, like their predecessors the Saxons and Angles and Frisians, for some time made trading voyages and desultory piratical attacks in summer-time on the coasts of Britain and Ireland, and probably many a short-lived settlement as well. But as these attacks and settlements are unrecorded in Cat, no account of them can be given.

In 793 it is on record that the Vikings first sacked Iona, originally the centre of Columban Christianity but then Romanised, and they repeated these raids on its shrine again and again within the next fifteen years. Constantine thereupon removed its clergy to Dunkeld, "and there set up in his own kingdom an ecclesiastical capital for Scots and Picts alike,"¹ as a step towards the political union of his realm, which Norse sea-power had completely severed from the original home of the Scots in Ulster.

The Northmen now began the systematic maritime invasions of our eastern and northern and western coasts and islands, which history has recorded. North Scotland was attacked almost exclusively by Norsemen, and Norsemen and Danes invaded Ireland. The Danes seized the south of Scotland, and the north of England, of which latter country, early in the eleventh century in the time of King Knut, they were destined to dominate two-thirds, while Old Norse became the lingua franca of his English kingdom, and enriched its language with hundreds of Norse words, and gave us many new place and personal names.

In 844, Kenneth, king of the Scots, the small North Irish sept which, as stated above, had crossed over from Erin and held the Dalriadic kingdom of Argyll with its capital at Dunadd near the modern Crinan Canal, succeeded in making good his title, on his mother's side, to the Pictish crown by a successful attack from the west on the southern Picts² at the same time as their territory was being invaded from the east coast by the Danes. Thereafter, these Picts and the Scots gradually became and ever afterwards remained one nation, a course which suited both peoples as a safeguard not only against their foreign foes the Northmen, but also against the Berenicians of Lothian on the south. With the object of ensuring the union of the two peoples Kenneth is said to have transferred some of the relics of Columba, who had become the patron saint of both, from Iona to Dunkeld, which thus definitely remained not only the ecclesiastical capital of the united Picts and Scots, but the common centre of their religious sentiment and veneration. Incidentally, too, the Pictish language gradually became disused, as that people were absorbed in the Scots; and unfortunately, through the fact that no written literature survived to preserve it, that language has almost entirely disappeared. The better opinion is that it was more closely akin to Welsh and Breton than to Erse or Gaelic, the Welsh and the Picts being termed "P" Celts, and the other races "Q" Celts, because in words of the same meaning the Welsh used "P" where the Gaelic speaking Celt used the hard "C". For instance, "Pen" and "Map" in Welsh became "Ken" (or Ceann) and "Mac" in Gaelic.³

In the reign of Constantine II, Kenneth's son and next successor but one, further incursions by the Northmen took place under King Olaf the White of Dublin in 867 and 871; while in 875 his son Thorstein the Red, by Aud "the deeply-wealthy" or "deeply-wise," landed on the north coast, and, we are told, seized "Caithness and Sutherland and Moray and more than half Scotland,"⁴ being killed, however, by treachery within the year. His mother Aud thereupon built a ship in Caithness, and sailed for the Faroes and Iceland with her retinue and possessions, marrying off two grand-daughters on the way, one, called Groa, to Duncan, Maormor of Duncansby in Caithness, the most ancient Pictish chief of whom we hear in that district, and probably ancestor of the Moldan, or Moddan, line in Cat. Two years later, in 877, King Constantine was defeated by a force of Danes at Dollar, and slain by them at Forgan in Fife.⁵

After the great decisive battle of Hafrsfjord in Norway in 872, because Orkney and Shetland and the Hebrides had become refuges for the Norse Vikings, who had been expelled from their country or had left it on the introduction of feudalism with its payment of dues to the king, but were raiding its shores, Harald Harfagr,⁶ king of Norway, along with Jarl Ragnvald of Maeri attacked and extirpated the pirate Vikings in their island lairs; and, as compensation to the jarl for the loss of his son Ivar in battle, Harald transferred his conquests with the title of Jarl of Orkney and Shetland to Ragnvald, who, in his turn, with the king's consent, soon made over his new territories and title to his brother Sigurd.

This new jarl, the second founder of the line of Orkney jarls, conquered Caithness and Sutherland as far south as Ekkjals-bakki,⁷ which is believed by some to be in Moray, and by others, with more truth, to be the ranges of hills in Sutherland and Ross lying to the north and to the south of the River Oykel and its estuary, the Dornoch Firth; and the second part of the name still happens to survive in the place-name of Backies in Dunrobin Glen and elsewhere in Cat where the Norse settled. About the year 890,⁸ after challenging Malbrigde of the Buck-tooth to a fight with forty a side, to which he himself perfidiously brought eighty men, Sigurd outflanked and defeated his adversary, and cut off his head and suspended it from his saddle; but the buck-tooth, by chafing his leg as he rode away from the field, caused inflammation and death, and Jarl Sigurd's body was laid in howe on Oykel's Bank at Sigurthar-haugr, or Sigurds-haugr, the Siwards-hoch of early charters now on modern maps corruptly written Sidera or Cyderhall, near Dornoch, which, when translated, is Sigurd's Howe.⁹ "Thenceforward," as Professor Hume Brown tells us, "the mainland was never secure from the attacks of successive jarls, who for long periods held firm possession of what is now Caithness and Sutherland. As things now went, this was in truth in the interest of the kings of Scots themselves. To the north of the Grampians they exercised little or no authority; and the people of that district were as often their enemies as their friends. Through the action of the Orkney jarls, therefore, the Scottish kings were at comparative liberty to extend their territory towards the south; and the day came when they found themselves able to crush every hostile element even in the north.¹⁰

It is this process of consolidation in the north which it is proposed to describe so far as Sutherland and Caithness are concerned, using both Norse and Scottish records, and piecing them together as best we can, and, be it confessed, in many cases filling up great gaps by necessary guess-work when records fail.

In the reign of the great king Constantine III, between the years 900 and 942, the Danes again gave trouble. In 903 the Irish Danes ravaged Alban,¹¹ as Scotland north of the Forth was then called, for a whole year; in 918 Constantine and his ally, Eldred of Lothian, were defeated by another expedition of these invaders; and in 934 Athelstan and his Saxons burst into Strathclyde and Forfar, the heart of Constantine's kingdom, and the Saxon fleet was sent up even to the shores of Caithness, as a naval demonstration intended to brave the Norse, who had joined Constantine, on their own element. Lastly, in 937 Athelstan and Constantine met at Brunanburg, probably Birrenswark near Ecclefechan, and Constantine and his Norse allies were completely defeated.¹²

Meantime, since 875, a succession of jarls had endeavoured to hold, for the kings of Norway, Orkney and Shetland, as well as Cat, which then included Ness, Strathnavern, and Sudrland.¹³ The history of these early jarls is not told in detail in any surviving contemporary record, for the Sagas of the jarls as individuals have perished; but there is a brief account of them in the beginning of the Orkneyinga Saga, another in chapters 99 and 100 of the St. Olaf's Saga, and a fuller one in chapters 179 to 187 of the Saga of Olaf Tryggvi's Son, contained in the Flatey Book.¹⁴ From these the following story may be gathered.

After Jarl Sigurd's death, his son Guthorm ruled for one winter, and died without issue, so that Sigurd's line came to an end. When Jarl Ragnvald of Maeri heard of his nephew's death, he sent his son Hallad over from Norway to Hrossey, as the mainland of Orkney was then called, and King Harald gave him the title of jarl. Failing in his efforts to put down the piracy of the Vikings, who continued their slayings and plunderings, Hallad, the last of the purely Norse jarls, resigned his jarldom, and returned ignominiously to Norway. In the absence at war of Hrolf the Ganger, who became Duke of Normandy and was an ancestor of the kings of England, two others of Ragnvald's sons, Thorir and Hrollaug, were summoned to meet their father. At this meeting it was decided that neither of these should go to Orkney, Thorir's prospects in Norway being good, and Hrollaug's future lying in Iceland, where, it was said, he was to found a great family. Then Einar, the Jarl's youngest son by a thrall or slave woman, and thus not of pure Norse lineage, asked whether he might go, offering as an inducement to his father that, if he went, he would thus never be seen by him again. He was told that the sooner he went, and the longer he stayed away, the better his father would be pleased. A galley, well equipped, was given to him, and about the year 891 King Harald Harfagr conferred on him the title of Jarl of Orkney and Shetland, for which he sailed. On his arrival there, he attacked Kalf Skurfa and Thorir Treskegg,¹⁵ the pirate Viking leaders, and defeated and slew them both. He then took possession of the lands of the jarldom; and, from having taught the people of Turfness in Moray the use of turf or peat for fuel, was known thenceforward as Torf-Einar. He is said to have been "a tall man, ugly, with one eye, but very keen-sighted,"¹⁶ a faculty which he was soon to use.

When Jarl Ragnvald of Maeri, the first of the Orkney jarls, was killed in Norway by two of Harald Harfagr's sons, one of them, Halfdan Halegg or Long-shanks fled from their father's vengeance to Orkney. When Halfdan landed, Torf-Einar took refuge in Scotland, but returned in force, and after defeating Halfdan—who had usurped the jarldom—in North Ronaldsay Firth, spied him as a fugitive, in hiding, far off on Rinarsey or Rinansey (Ninian's Island) now North Ronaldsay, and seized him, cut a blood-eagle on his back, severed his ribs and pulled out his lungs, and, after offering him as a victim to Odin, buried his body there.¹⁷

Incensed at the shameful slaughter of his son, Harald Harfagr came over from Norway about the year 900 to avenge him, but, as was then not unusual, accepted as a wergeld or atonement for his son's death a fine of sixty marks of gold, which it fell to the islanders to pay. On their failure to find the money, Torf-Einar paid it himself, taking in return from the people their odal lands,¹⁸ which were lost to their families until Jarl Sigurd Hlodverson temporarily restored them as a recompense for their assistance in the battle fought by him between 969 and 995 against Finleac MacRuari, Maormor of North Moray, at Skidamyre in Caithness. Whether it was the Orkney jarls or their superiors, the kings of Norway, who owned them in the meantime, the odal lands were finally sold back to those entitled to them by descent by Jarl Ragnvald Kol's son about 1137, in order to raise money for the completion of Kirkwall Cathedral. Odal tenure in Orkney was thus in abeyance for over two centuries, save for a short time, and in any case its inherent principle of subdivision would have killed it, and after its renewal, in spite of its many safeguards against alienation to strangers, it gradually died out under feudalism and Scottish law and lawyers.¹⁹ In Cat it never seems to have taken root.