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Origines Islandicae. Vigfusson & York Powell. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1905.

Origines Parochiales Scotiae. Vol. ii, part ii. Edinburgh, W.H. Lizars, 1855.

Orkney and Shetland, by John R. Tudor. London, Edward Stanford, 1883.

Orkney and Shetland Folk, by A.W. Johnston. Viking Society, 1914.

Orkneyinga Saga. Dasent's Translation, Rolls Edition.

Orkneyinga Saga. Anderson, and Hjaltalin and Goudie's Translation. Edinburgh, Edmonston & Douglas, 1873.

Oxford Essays, 1858. . London, John W. Parker & Son, 1858.

Rhys' Celtic Britain. London, S.P.C.K., 1908.

Robertson's Index. Edinburgh, Murray and Cochrane, 1798.

Rymer. Foedera.

Saint-Clair. Roland William. The Saint-Clairs of the Isles. Auckland, H. Brett, 1898.

Scandinavian Britain, by W.G. Collingwood. London, S.P.C.K., 1908.

Scon. Liber Ecclesiae de.

Scott, Rev. Archibald--The Pictish Nation, its people and Church. Edinburgh and London, Foulis Press, 1918.

Scottish Annals from English Chroniclers, Alan O. Anderson. London, David Nutt, 1908.

Scottish Kings. Sir Archibald Dunbar, Bart. Edinburgh, David Douglas, 1906.

Scottish Peerages. Paul and Cokayne .

Skene, W.F. Celtic Scotland. Edinburgh, Edmonston & Douglas, 1878.

Skene, W.F. Chronicles of the Picts and Scots. Edinburgh, H.M. General Register House, 1867.

Sutherland Book, by Sir William Fraser. Edinburgh, 1892.

Sutherland and the Reay Country, by the Rev. Adam Gunn. Glasgow, John Mackay, Celtic Monthly Office, 1897.

Sverri's Saga. Translation by J. Sephton. London, David Nutt, 1899.

Tacitus--Agricola.

Thorgisl's Saga in Origines Islandicae .

Viking Club. Caithness and Sutherland Records.} London Viking Club. Old Lore Miscellany. } 29 Ashburnham Viking Society. Saga Books, &c. } Mansions, Chelsea

William the Wanderer, by W.G. Collingwood. G.C. Brown Langham & Co., 47 Great Russell Street, London, W.C., 1904.

Worsaae. Danes and Norwegians. London, John Murray, 1852.

Worsaae. The Prehistory of the North. London, Tr?bner, 1886.

Wyntoun's Chronicle. Edinburgh, Edmonston & Douglas, 1872.

Early Sources of Scottish History, A.D. 500 to 1286, by Alan O. Anderson. Oliver & Boyd, Edinburgh.

NOTE.--Since this little book was printed, the above great work has appeared. To the student of the Norse invasions its value is inestimable.

Page 1, line 13, for "they" read "Man." " 28, line 9, for "or" read "of." " 40, line 23, for "Kundason" read "Hundason." " 42, line 24, after "note" reference omitted. " 50, line 17, for "mainland of" read "Unst in." " 65, line 35, for "burnings" read "revenges." " 65, line 37, for "burnt" read "killed." " 87, line 18, for "Earl Ragnvald" read "Jarl Ragnvald." " 104, lines 4 and 5, for "Magnus' great-grandson's granddaughter's husband" read "Magnus' granddaughter's great-grandson." " 117, line 16, omit "a child of."

SUTHERLAND AND CAITHNESS IN SAGA-TIME OR, THE JARLS AND THE FRESKYNS.

In the following pages an attempt is made to fit together facts derived, on the one hand, from those portions of the Orkneyinga, St. Magnus and Hakonar Sagas which relate to the extreme north end of the mainland of Scotland, and, on the other hand, from such scanty English and Scottish records, bearing on its history, as have survived, so as to form a connected account, from the Scottish point of view, of the Norse occupation of most of the more fertile parts of Sutherland and Caithness from its beginning about 870 until its close, when these counties were freed from Norse influence, and Man and the Hebrides were incorporated in the kingdom of Scotland by treaty with Norway in 1266.

References to the authorities mentioned above and to later works bearing on the subject have been inserted in the hope that others, more leisured and more competent, may supplement them by further research, and convert those portions of the narrative which are at present largely conjectural from story into history.

The first four of the nine centuries above referred to had seen the Romans under Agricola in 80 to 84 A.D. attempt, and fail, to conquer the Caledonians or men of the woods, whose home, as their name implies, was the great woodland region of the Mounth or Grampians. Those centuries had also seen the building of the wall of Hadrian between the Tyne and Solway in the year 120, the campaigns of Lollius Urbicus in 140 A.D. and the erection between the Firths of Forth and Clyde of the earthen rampart of Antonine on stone foundations, which was held by Rome for about fifty years. Seventy years later, in the year 210, fifty thousand Roman legionaries had perished in the Caledonian campaigns of the Roman Emperor Severus, and over a century and a half later, in 368, there had followed the second conquest of the Roman province of Valentia which comprised the Lothians and Galloway in the south, by Theodosius. Lastly, the final retirement of the Romans from Scotland, and indeed from Britain, took place, on the destruction of the Roman Empire in spite of Stilicho's noble defence, by Alaric and the Visigoths, in 410.

From the Roman wars and occupation two main results followed. The various Caledonian tribes inhabiting the land had then probably for the first time joined forces to fight a common foe, and in fighting him had become for that purpose temporarily united. Again, possibly as part of the high Roman policy of Stilicho, St. Ninian had in the beginning of the fifth century introduced into Galloway and also into the regions north of the Wall of Antonine the first teachers of Christianity, a religion which, however, was for some time longer to remain unknown to the Picts generally in the north. But, as Professor Hume Brown also tells us in the first of the three entrancing volumes of his History, "In Scotland, if we may judge from the meagre accounts that have come down to us, the Roman dominion hardly passed the stage of a military occupation, held by an intermittent and precarious tenure." What concerns dwellers in the extreme north is that although the Romans went into Perthshire and may have temporarily penetrated even into Moray, they certainly never occupied any part of Sutherland or Caithness, though their tablets of brass, probably as part of the currency used in trade, have been found in a Sutherland Pictish tower or broch, a fact which goes far to prove that the brochs, with which we shall deal later on, existed in Roman times.

As the Romans never occupied Sutherland or Caithness or even came near their borders, their inhabitants were never disarmed or prevented from the practice of war, and thus enfeebled like the more southerly Britons.

After the departure, in 410, of the Romans, St. Ninian sent his missionaries over Pictland, but darkness broods over its history thenceforward for a hundred and fifty years. Picts, Scots of Ireland, Angles and Saxons swarmed southwards, eastwards, and westwards respectively into England, and ruined Romano-British civilisation, which the Britons, unskilled in arms, were powerless to defend, as the lamentations of Gildas abundantly attest.

In 563 Columba, the Irish soldier prince and missionary, whose Life by Adamnan still survives, landed in Argyll from Ulster, introduced another form of Christian worship, also, like the Pictish, "without reference to the Church of Rome," and from his base in Iona not only preached and sent preachers to the north-western and northern Picts, but in some measure brought among them the higher civilisation then prevailing in Ireland. About the same time Kentigern, or St. Mungo, a Briton of Wales, carried on missionary work in Strathclyde and in Pictland, and even, it is said, sent preachers to Orkney.

In the beginning of the seventh century King Aethelfrith of Northumbria had cut the people of the Britons, who held the whole of west Britain from Devon to the Clyde, into two, the northern portion becoming the Britons of Strathclyde; and the same king defeated Aidan, king of the Scots of Argyll, at Degsastan near Jedburgh, though Aidan survived, and, with the help of Columba, re-established the power of the Scots in Argyll.

About the year 664, the wars in the south with Northumbria resulted in the introduction by its king Oswy into south Pictland of the Catholic instead of the Columban Church, a change which Nechtan, king of the Southern Picts, afterwards confirmed, and which long afterwards led to the abandonment throughout Scotland of the Pictish and Columban systems, and to the adoption in their place of the wider and broader culture, and the politically superior organisation and stricter discipline of the Catholic Church, as new bishoprics were gradually founded throughout Scotland by its successive kings.

Meantime, during the centuries which elapsed before the Catholic Church reached the extreme north of Scotland, the Pictish and Columban churches held the field, as rivals, there, and probably never wholly perished in Norse times even in Caithness and Sutherland.

During these centuries there were constant wars among the Picts themselves, and later between them and the Scots, resulting, generally, in the Picts being driven eastward and northward from the south centre of Alban, which the Scots seized, into the Grampian hills.

After this very brief statement of previous history we may now attempt to give some description of the land and the people of Caithness and Sutherland as the Northmen found them in the ninth century.

Immediately to the south of Cat lay the great province of Moray including Ross, and, in the extreme west, a part of north Argyll; and the boundary between Cat and Ross was approximately the tidal River Oykel, called by the Norse Ekkjal, the northern and perhaps also the southern bank of which probably formed the ranges of hills known in the time of the earliest Norse jarls as Ekkjals-bakki. Everywhere else Cat was bounded by the open sea, of which the Norse soon became masters, namely on the west by the Minch, on the north by the North Atlantic and Pentland Firth, and on the east and south by the North Sea; and the great valley of the Oykel and the Dornoch Firth made Cat almost into an island.

Save in north-east Ness, and in favoured spots elsewhere, also below the 500 feet level, the land of Cat was a land of heath and woods and rocks, studded, especially in the west, with lochs abounding in trout, a vast area of rolling moors, intersected by spacious straths, each with its salmon river, a land of solitary silences, where red deer and elk abounded, and in which the wild boar and wolf ranged freely, the last wolf being killed in Glen Loth within twelve miles of Dunrobin at a date between 1690 and 1700. No race of hunters or fishermen ever surpassed the Picts in their craft as such.

The land, especially Sutherland, is still a happy hunting-ground not only for the sportsman but also for the antiquary. For the modern County of Sutherland is outwardly much the same now as it was in Pictish times, save for road and rail, two castles, and a sprinkling of shooting lodges, inns, and good cottages, which, however, in so vast a territory are, as the Irishman put it, "mere fleabites on the ocean." Much of the west of the land of Cat was scarcely inhabited at all in Pictish or Viking days, because as is clearly the case in the Kerrow-Garrow or Rough Quarter of Eddrachilles, it would not carry one sheep or feed one human being per hundred acres in many parts. The rest of it also remains practically unchanged in appearance from the earliest days till the present time, as it has been little disturbed by the plough save in the north-east of Ness and at Lairg and Kinbrace, and in its lower levels along the coast. But Loch Fleet no longer reaches to Pittentrail, and the crooked bay at Crakaig has been drained and the Water of Loth sent straight to the sea.

The only buildings or structures existing in Cat in Pictish and early Norse times were a few vitrified forts, some underground erde-houses, hut-circles innumerable, and perhaps a hundred and fifty brochs, or Pictish towers as they are popularly called, which had been erected at various dates from the first century onwards, long before the advent of the Norse Vikings is on record, as defences against wolves and raiders both by land and sea, and especially by sea. Notwithstanding agricultural operations, foundations of 145 brochs can still be traced in Ness and 67 in Strathnavern and Sudrland, but they were not all in use at the same time, and they are mostly on sites taken over later on by the Norse, because they were already cultivated and agriculturally the best.

If one may venture to hazard a conjecture as to their date, they probably came into general use in these parts of Caledonia as nearly as possible contemporaneously with the date of the Roman occupation of South Britain, which they outlasted for many centuries. But their erection was not due to the fear of attack by the armies of Rome. For their remains are found where the Romans never came, and where the Romans came almost none are found. Their construction is more probably to be ascribed to very early unrecorded maritime raids of pirates of unknown race both on regions far north of the eastern coast protected later by the Count of the Saxon shore, and on the northern and western islands and coasts, where also many ruins of them survive.

In Cat dwelt the Pecht or Pict, the Brugaidh or farmer in his dun or broch, erected always on or near well selected fertile land on the seaboard, on the sides of straths, or on the shores of lochs, or less frequently on islands near their shores and then approached by causeways; and the rest of the people lived in huts whose circular foundations still remain, and are found in large numbers at much higher elevations than the sites of any brochs. The brochs near the sea-coast were often so placed as to communicate with each other for long distances up the valleys, by signal by day, and beacon fire at night, and so far as they are traceable, the positions of most of them in Sutherland and Caithness are indicated on the map by circles.

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