The Highlanders of Scotland - Clan Strachan Society

CHAP. V] OF SCOTLAND 257
Norwegians ; and his sons were driven out by Macbeth, who
thus added the South of Scotland, for the time, to the Norwegian
conquest.
The circumstances attending the establishment of the race of
on the throne are well known but there is no fact
Crinan again ;
which so completely establishes the entire overthrow of the
Scots, and that the country wrested by Malcolm Kenmore from
the Norwegians, had been completely divested of its nobility,
than this, that Malcolm's family were no sooner in possession of
the crown, than they divided the Lowlands of Scotland into
earldoms, according to the Saxon polity, which were all of them
granted to different members of the royal family. The districts
included in Thorfinn's original conquest, we know reverted to
the descendants of the original proprietors, but the earldoms
into which the rest of the country was divided, can all be traced
originally in the possession of Malcolm Kenmore.
These earldoms, however, consisted of exactly the country
actually inhabited by the Scots, and the earldom of Atholl possessed
by the Northern PiCTS. The establishment of Malcolm
Kenmore, as king of Scotland, would, in the circumstances, place
the Scottish districts at his disposal, and there is therefore the
strongest presumption that Atholl was the original possession of
his race before they ascended the throne. This is confirmed by
the circumstance that when the descendants of Duncan, the
eldest son of Malcolm Kenmore, were excluded from the crown
by his younger sons, they succeeded, nevertheless, as we shall
afterwards see, to the earldom of Atholl, and still more by the
designation which our earlier historians gave to Crinan, the
founder of this royal race. Fordun, in mentioning the marriage
of Crinan, abbot of Dunkeld, with Beatrice, daughter of Malcolm
II., the issue of which marriage was Duncan, who succeeded his
maternal grandfather, and was murdered by Macbeth, styles
Crinan '''
Abthanus de Diil ac seneschallus insularum." With
regard to the first of these two titles, Pinkerton remarks, " To
support this nonsense, Fordun brings more nonsense, and tells
us abba is father, and thana is respondence vel numerans, and
the abthane was a chamberlain, who managed the king's rent
and treasury. But who," adds Pinkerton, " ever heard of an
abthane? and who knows not that Dull, a village, could not