Lords of Alba

by Ian W. Walker

  In 889 King Giric died at Dundurn and, presumably as a consequence of this, his associate Eochaid, son of Rhun was expelled from the kingdom, although whether the kingdom of Fortriu or Strathclyde is meant is unclear. The man who expelled Eochaid was Donald II, son of Constantine or Domnall mac Castantin, who ruled quietly for some eleven years. In this period the Danes, who had settled around York under Halfdan and others, participated in a number of raids launched by other Vikings, who had arrived from the Continent in 891. The raids were directed principally against Mercia and Wessex until the combined Viking forces were defeated at Buttington in 893 and withdrew to Northumbria in 896. This failure in the south perhaps encouraged the Danes to turn their attentions to the north again. The Scottish Chronicle reports that Northmen, presumably from York, ravaged the kingdom of Fortriu during Donald’s reign although it fails to date this event.

  In 900 the Annals of Ulster report the death of Donald, son of Constantine, who is for the first time styled ri Albann or ‘King of Alba’. This is the first mention of this new name for the united kingdom of the Picts and Scots and serves, perhaps, to mark its coming of age. The kings had previously borne the title ri Fortrenn or ‘King of Fortriu’ in Gaelic texts and rex Pictorum or ‘King of the Picts’ in Latin texts. The kingdom, first brought together by Constantine, son of Fergus, in 792 and subsequently reinvented by Kenneth MacAlpin in the 850s, had been forged as a result of its rough handling by the Vikings into a single, unified kingdom, recognised by its new name of ‘Alba’. The name had originally signified Britain as a whole but would from now on be employed for that northern part of Britain controlled by Gaelic speakers. The union between the Picts and Scots, whether originally enforced or not, had brought to an end the warfare between these peoples and produced a new and stronger kingdom. Its inhabitants were no longer Picts or Scots but fir Albann or ‘men of Alba’ and its kings were no longer rulers of Picts or Scots but bore the title ri Albann or ‘King of Alba’. This larger and more powerful kingdom of Alba had the potential to become more than the sum of its parts. It was free from the constraints of earlier disputes and might therefore play a much larger role in the politics of northern Britain than either of its predecessors. Whether it would ever fulfil this potential would depend very much on its rulers and their abilities.

  The new kingdom was not entirely free from internal dissent from those unreconciled to the new polity, especially given its custom of alternating the succession to the kingship between contending lines of descent. The existence of rival candidates for the throne provided plenty of opportunities for malcontents to exploit. This meant that few of its rulers went unchallenged at some point during their reign and many ruled too briefly to make any impact at all. The new kingdom still faced serious danger of encirclement and perhaps even elimination. The threat came mainly from a series of fluid but threatening coalitions of Viking powers, which might unite against it at any time. In the north was the earldom of Orkney with its satellite settlements stretching southwards on the mainland as far as the Cromarty Firth. In the west was an at times fragmented but potentially powerful kingdom in the Isles, which included most of the Western Isles and sometimes the Isle of Man. In the south was the Viking kingdom of York, which included a large part of northern England. The situation was not entirely bleak, however. The new kingdom was also presented with opportunities in the shape of a couple of small states to the south, which had been even more severely damaged by the Vikings: the weakened British kingdom of Strathclyde, which stretched from the Clyde Valley southwards into north-west England; and the truncated remnant of English Northumbria, which extended from the Firth of Forth to the northern borders of the later Yorkshire. In these circumstances, the various individual kings of Alba faced tremendous challenges, which only a few were able to master sufficiently to make a difference.

  2

  The Kingdom of Alba

  In the year 900 the kingdom of Alba was a brand new creation. It was an entirely new polity first mentioned in the Annals of Ulster on the death of King Donald II, son of Constantine, under the year 900. It had been created from the fusion of the earlier independent kingdoms of the Picts and Scots. It had first appeared in this form at the end of the eighth century under Constantine, son of Fergus, and received its future dynasty during the middle of the ninth century under Kenneth MacAlpin. The new kingdom had far deeper roots than this, however. The Picts, who probably spoke a Celtic language closely related to Welsh, had been present in northern Britain since pre-Roman times and were still there when the Romans left in the fourth century. The Gaelic-speaking Scots had arrived on the western shores of Scotland from Ireland some time before their first appearance in historical records in the late Roman period. These two peoples had therefore been close neighbours for at least five centuries before their union under a single kingship. They probably also shared to some extent a common Celtic cultural background. They had exchanged gifts and trade goods and intermarried since the earliest times.

  In the sixth century, the completion of the conversion to Christianity of the Picts provided the two peoples with a common faith. This increased intellectual contacts and reinforced existing cultural affinities. The associated introduction of the Latin language provided a new common channel of communication and removed the need for translation. The flourishing artistic tradition of northern Britain in the period between the sixth and the eighth centuries bears witness to this rich fusion of cultures. The comparison of Pictish sculpture with illuminated Gaelic manuscripts and of decorated metalwork from Ireland and northern Britain reveals the common cultural heritage of the two peoples.

  In the eighth and early ninth centuries the political, social and cultural contacts between the Picts and the Scots increased and intensified. In this period Scots began to migrate eastwards across the mountains into Pictish territory. In the same period Pictish and Scottish kings contested for control of northern Britain and this process occasionally but increasingly succeeded in uniting the two polities under a single rule. The intermarriage of the respective royal families of these peoples increasingly blurred the distinctions between them and made the rival kings more acceptable to both peoples. This intermittent joint rule became more or less continuous from around 790 onwards under a dynasty which although usually identified as Pictish, appears in effect to have been of mixed race. This process reinforced the common aspects of the cultural identity of Picts and Scots over a long period of time. It finally resulted in a Picto-Scottish kingdom under a Picto-Scottish king.

  In the middle of the ninth century, when Kenneth I, son of Alpin, stepped onto this stage as King of the Picts and the Scots, he was completing a gradual process of the merging of two cultures which had begun centuries before. As mentioned in the previous chapter, he did not massacre the Picts en masse to replace them with Scots. There was no ethnic cleansing in northern Britain but rather a slow fusion of two cultural groups over a long period of time. It should be noted, however, that the new kingdom of Alba itself does not appear to be associated with Kenneth MacAlpin himself. In the Irish annals Kenneth and his immediate successors, Donald I, Constantine I, Aed and Giric, still appear as rex Pictorum or ‘King of the Picts’. It is not until the turn of the century, in 900, that Donald II, son of Constantine appears as the first ri Albann or ‘King of Alba’. What happened to bring about this significant change?

  The name ‘Alba’ had previously been used to represent the island of Britain itself, rather than any particular political entity. The new use of this name in 900 was clearly meant to indicate a wider hegemony than could be represented by existing terminology. The Picts and the Scots were now so intermingled that old ethnic titles like ‘King of the Picts’ or ‘King of the Scots’ were no longer adequate. In addition, this same period probably witnessed the subjection of the last independent kings of Strathclyde, either in 872 or perhaps in 889. The new kings exercised hegemony over every non-English Christian people in the north of Britain. This was the context for the introduc
tion of the new title, ‘King of Alba’. It signified the fact that the new kingdom encompassed the entire non-English Christian sphere of northern Britain. The kingdom of Alba was now to all intents and purposes the equivalent of ‘Britain’ as far as the wider Gaelic-speaking world in Ireland was concerned.

  The new kingdom of Alba was therefore the product of a complex process of long-term cultural assimilation and more recent political creation. What was it like? It was undoubtedly a ‘Celtic’ kingdom, despite this term becoming increasingly unfashionable among historians. Its people spoke a Celtic language and had a largely Celtic culture. They were probably already increasingly Gaelic in speech and more and more representative of the culture common to Gaelic Ireland and its colonies in northern Britain, although residual Pictish elements still remained. It is usually fairly easy to trace the Gaelic elements in the society of Alba through comparisons with contemporary society in neighbouring Gaelic Ireland. It is not possible, however, simply to adopt Irish models in their entirety since there are important differences in Alba, which derive from its Pictish element. On the other hand, it is impossible to establish the Pictish elements, in this way, since there are simply so few records of any kind of Pictish society. The best that can be done is to identify aspects of the society of Alba which have no close comparisons in contemporary Ireland. It can then be assumed – although this can only be an assumption – that these aspects are likely to be Pictish.

  In the new kingdom, the rulers bore the Gaelic title ri Albann or ‘King of Alba’. They also had predominantly Gaelic names and this appears to have provided their primary cultural roots. They certainly boasted genealogies that traced their ancestry back to the kings of Dalriada, however dubiously, rather than to those of the Picts. They were most probably actual descendants of Gaelic families but they clearly also wished to associate themselves with the increasingly predominant Gaelic culture in the new kingdom. In light of this, it is therefore quite natural to assume that they were identical in other respects to kings in Gaelic Ireland. It is dangerous, however, to rely on this assumption entirely. They were after all rulers of an entirely new and composite political entity formed on the basis of Pictish and Gaelic traditions. The origins of their new office might therefore contain elements drawn from either or both traditions.

  If, for example, the names of the kings of Alba are considered in more detail, a few exceptions to the Gaelic predominance noted above will be found. The most obvious is the name ‘Constantine’, which was carried by no less than three kings of Alba. This name appears nowhere else in Gaelic tradition. Its use appears to have been inspired by the great Constantine, son of Fergus, who ruled jointly over the Scots and Picts from 789 to 820 before the succession of the dynasty of Kenneth MacAlpin. In spite of this man’s own possible Gaelic origins, ‘Constantine’ is not a name found among the dynasty of Dalriada. Indeed, in the period before 789 the name Constantine is only found in Britain among the British kingdoms, i.e. St Constantine and Constantine of Dumnonia. It was derived in British tradition from the Christian Roman Emperor, Constantine the Great. It seems to have arrived in Pictland either directly from Roman Imperial and Christian traditions or indirectly from the British kingdoms, possibly neighbouring Strathclyde.

  The succession system followed by the kings of Alba also appears to be derived directly from Irish tradition. There was no primogeniture at this time when it was crucial that kingdoms were ruled by able-bodied adult males who could command military forces in person. In place of primogeniture, the kingdom of Alba followed a system largely based on the Gaelic derbfine or ‘certain kin’, which identified those male relations of a ruling king from which the rigdamnai or ‘royal heirs’ might be selected. This derbfine included all those males whose great-grandfather had been a king and who were therefore theoretically eligible for the kingship. It must be admitted that contemporary Pictish succession practices are highly obscure, at least in our scarce sources. The little that can be glimpsed, however, does not suggest any close resemblances to the system used in Alba. It is only at the very end of the independent Pictish kingdom under the united kingship established by Constantine son of Fergus and his successors that any sign of Gaelic succession patterns appears. This is a time when the kingdom was clearly falling under Gaelic influence and it might therefore be expected.

  This succession system meant that the kingship could be claimed by any fit adult male descendant of a previous king. It effectively ensured that a suitable adult male was always available to rule the country and lead its armies and avoided the potential dangers of minority rule. It usually meant a predominance of succession by brothers and cousins across the same generation with the succession of their sons in the next generation effectively postponed until after their deaths. It almost never witnessed the succession of a father by his own son. The system had a tendency, however, to encourage competition between different lineages over time as brothers with close ties were replaced by cousins who were only distantly related. This resulted in a great deal of factional unrest within the later kingdom, which produced much bloodletting and eventually civil war.

  The main function of the king of Alba was to lead the fir Albann or ‘men of Alba’ in war. It is this vital function that is also best recorded in our few surviving sources. Unfortunately, the precise nature of the powers of the king in this area is now obscure and probably lost to us. It may, however, be possible to recover some of them from later sources, provided caution is used. What appears to be an ancient power features as ‘common army’ or ‘Scottish army’ in twelfth-century charters, presumably to distinguish it from later knight service. It must therefore reach back at least to pre-feudal times in the eleventh century and probably much further than that. Unfortunately, the references to this military service in the charters provide no detail since it is assumed that everyone knows exactly what is involved. This common army was undoubtedly based on some form of local assessment system. The tenth-century text known as Senchus fer nAlban or ‘The History of the Men of Alba’, records a sophisticated system of assessment employed in early Dalriada to recruit armies and navies. The existence of this text establishes beyond reasonable doubt that the later kingdom of Alba had a similarly sophisticated system, even if its details are no longer recoverable.

  The kings used this military power in the first place to defend their kingdom and their subjects against external foes. Constantine I fought to defend his kingdom and his faith against the heathen Vikings with variable results and Constantine II fought against the same opponents with much more success in Strathearn in 904. They also used military power to control their own kingdom by crushing internal opposition or rebellion. Malcolm I and Malcolm III struck against the recalcitrant mormaers of Moray in 943 and 1077 respectively. They used the same power frequently to launch campaigns of raiding or conquest against neighbouring kingdoms. Malcolm I, Malcolm II and Malcolm III all launched raids into England to secure cattle and slaves but also perhaps to seize territory in 950 and 952, in 1006, and in 1070 and 1093 respectively. Constantine II also launched more far-reaching campaigns in league with allies and fought major battles at Corbridge in 918 and Brunanburh in 937.

  In contrast, there are few written records which provide us with information on the actual armies led into battle by the kings. It is fortunate therefore that surviving examples of monumental stone sculpture offer a unique pictorial representation of these armies. The Dupplin Cross in Perthshire, which commemorates King Constantine, son of Fergus, shows the king as a mounted warrior in a panel on its east face. Immediately below, another panel portrays the royal army as close ranks of well disciplined infantry, equipped with spears and shields. Sueno’s Stone near Forres, which commemorates a famous but so far unidentified battle of this era, also offers a sophisticated portrait of a contemporary army. It consists of organised units of both cavalry and infantry, fully equipped with swords, spears and shields. This builds on the picture of military sophistication already displayed on earlier Pictish sto
nes including that at Aberlemno, which is thought to commemorate the Battle of Dunnichen in 685. The men of Alba were not a rabble of painted savages but a sophisticated and well organised military machine broadly comparable to those of their English and Viking opponents.

  The king of Alba also appears to have had a role in the administration and delivery of justice in the kingdom. The contemporary Scottish Chronicle records a number of examples of legislative pronouncements by the kings. The establishment of ‘the rights and laws of the kingship of Aed, son of Eochaid’ was announced by Donald I around 860. In 906, Constantine II and Bishop Cellach ‘covenanted to guard the laws and disciplines of the faith and also the rights of the churches and gospels’. The precise meaning of these announcements is no longer clear but they do appear to relate to the introduction of new laws or the proclamation of existing laws. The Life of St Margaret confirms the royal legislative role, when it declares, ‘by her [Margaret’s] counsel the laws of the kingdom were put in order’, although it seems more likely that the king actually fulfilled this role. The Life of St Margaret also mentions ‘the tumult of lawsuits’ as a feature of the royal Court, which suggests a judicial role in addition to the legislative one. In earlier times their Pictish and Dalriadic predecessors had fulfilled a similar function. In 697, Bruide, son of Derile, King of the Picts, and Eochaid, son of Domangart, King of Dalriada, were among those who endorsed Adomnan’s ‘Law of the Innocents’, which offered protection to non-combatants.