Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time | Page 9

was at work, probably
to a greater extent, among those of lower rank, who could not find or
import Norse wives, if they would, as the jarls frequently did.
One or two other introductory points remain to be noted and borne in
mind throughout.
We must beware of thinking that all the land in an earldom such as Cat
was the absolute property of the chief, as in the nineteenth century, or
the latter half of it, was practically true in the modern county of
Sutherland. The fact was very much otherwise. The Maormor and
afterwards the earl doubtless had demesne lands, but he was in early
times, ex officio, mainly a superior and receiver of dues for his king;[15]
and this possibly shows why very early Scottish earldoms, as for
instance that of Sutherland, in the absence of male heirs, often

descended to females, unless the grant or custom excluded them. It was
quite different with later feudal baronies or tenancies, where military
service, which only males could render, was due, and which with rare
exceptions it was, after about 1130, the policy of the Scottish kings to
create; and in the case of baronies or lordships the land itself was often
described and given to the grantee and his heirs by metes and bounds,
in return for specified military service, and his heirs male were
exhausted before any female could inherit.
In Ness and in the rest of Cat there were many Norse and native holders
of land within the earldom, and much tribal ownership. Duncan of
Duncansby or Dungall of Dungallsby, as he is variously called, allowed
part at least of his dominions to pass by marriage to the Norse jarls; but
both Moddan and Earl Ottar, whose heir was Earl Erlend Haraldson,
who left no heir, owned land extensively in Ness and elsewhere, while
Moddan "in Dale" had daughters also owning land, one of whom,
Frakark, widow of Liot Nidingr, had many homesteads in upper
Kildonan in Sudrland and elsewhere, and possibly it is her sister
Helga's name that lingers in a place-name lower down that strath near
Helmsdale, at Helgarie.
What is worthy of notice is that it is clear from the place-names that
after the Norse conquest the Norse held and named most of the lower or
seaward parts of the valleys and nearly all the coast lands of Cat and
Ross as far south as the Beauly Firth, and the Picts occupied and were
never dispossessed of the upper parts of the valleys or the hills all
through the Norse occupation. In other words, as conquerors coming
from the sea, the Norsemen seized and held the better Pictish lands near
the coast, which had been cultivated for centuries, and on which crops
would ripen with regularity and certainty year after year. But as time
went on the Pictish Maormor pressed the Norse Jarl more and more
outwards and eastwards in Cat.
We must also remember the enormous power of the Scottish Crown
through its right of granting wardships, especially in the case of a
female heir. Under such grants the grantee, usually some very powerful
noble, took over during minority the title of his ward and all his

revenues absolutely, in return for a payment, correspondingly large, to
the Crown. If the ward was a female, the grantee disposed of her hand
in marriage as well.
After these preliminary notes, we may now again glance at the Scots,
who were destined, from small beginnings, by a series of strange turns
of fortune and superior state-craft, in time to conquer and dominate all
modern Scotland north of the Forth, then known as Alban.
The Scots, as already stated, had come over from Ulster and settled in
Cantyre about the end of the fifth century, and for long they had only
the small Dalriadic territory of Argyll, and even this they all but lost
more than once. At the same time, after 563, they had a most valuable
asset in Columba, their soldier missionary prince, and his milites
Christi, or soldiers of Christ, who gradually carried their Christianity
and Irish culture even up to Orkney itself, with many a school of the
Erse or Gaelic tongue, and thus paved the way for the consolidation of
the whole of Alban into one political unit by providing its people with a
common language.
But in order to live the Scots had been forced to defeat many foes, such
as the Britons of Strathclyde, whose capital was at Alcluyd or
Dunbarton,[16] the Northumbrians on the south, and the Picts of Atholl,
Forfar, Fife and Kincardine, which comprised most of the fertile land
south of the Grampians. The great Pictish province of Moray on the
north of the Grampians, however, remained unsubdued, and it took the
Scots several centuries more to